J.R. Dobbs

Pithy phrase.
Worthy sentiment.
'Memorable quote.'

[J.R. Dobbs @Neutron_Frog]

@adgirlMM Ohh.... Close, but not quite "Kokomo."

[The Shallow State @OurShallowState]

The energy that Trump 2.0 and MAGA-World influencers and grifters put into convincing the base that Trump is healthy, hard-working, competent, honest, truthful, and a regular guy fighting for them, is enormous. It's also fascinating. Honest!? Truthful?!?!
I made a post yesterday about the E. Jean Carroll investigation, and so many MAGAs felt compelled to twist themselves into a pretzel saying that Trump wasn't found guilty of a crime and therefore it's all fake. Their ignorance about how things work, is a testament - not to their stupidity, but to their emotionality and desperation. The fact they chimed in, is reflective of their growing cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is SO important to understand. Because it's everywhere now with MAGA. They see that their leader is flawed and there's so much conflict between what they believed and what they see (that's the "dissonance"). HUGELY important.
But this conflict and confusion is everywhere they look - Trump being unable to end wars, Trump falling asleep at meetings, Trump looking terrible, Trump preoccupied with wanting his face on everything, Trump and his stupid ballroom, Trump saying he doesn't care about them, artists cancelling from the 250th year gig, allies speaking out against him, former MAGA like MTG and others speaking out, gas prices, food prices, N Korea-style cabinet meetings ...
It's a daunting task for MAGA to accept that they made a mistake and that their world view is FALSE. That happens slowly. It's already started. And when it starts to pick up steam - it can happen more ...FAST.
Remember - the cult of MAGA is Malignant Normality - they see the world through Trump as if they're him. The moment they no longer want to BE him is the moment they no longer automatically think like him is the moment they consider they've been lied to by him and even betrayed by him. It CAN snowball.
Trump 2.0 and MAGA-World influencers always knew that if they fail to steadily lace their audience's days with optimism and dopamine rushes, hot air will exit the collective balloon - they'll get dejected, and the populism propping it up will deflate.
And now, he's overreached. Things are f*cked up abroad and f*cked up at home. Polling shows MASSIVE unhappiness with him, and they need much more than a Band-Aid to fix it, because there's real Cognitive Dissonance now. It's in the air. I feel it.
MAGA rubs their eyes and sees Trump is NOT healthy, NOT hard-working, NOT competent and was NEVER one of them. Some begin to see that every aspect of Trumpism relies on False Narratives. Lies are their oxygen. Lies feed the emotion. Lies fill the neediness. Lies fuel the rage. They're getting tired of being told to blame others, tired of lies, tired of rage.
Dems and Independent media need to focus on LIES, CORRUPTION, AND DIVISIVENESS. In every story - whether it's ICE, the economy, tariffs, global politics, money grabs and grift, whatever - point out the lies.
Focus on the LIES. The lies are everywhere, propping up the rest. Without the lies, Trump 2.0 will suffocate.
Focus on the CORRUPTION - it's brazen, and without corruption, Trump himself will narcissistically deflate.
And if we focus enough on LIES and CORRUPTION, the Cognitive Dissonance will ratchet higher and more MAGA will see that DIVISIVENESS is bad, it's fueled by Trump, and it isn't good for anyone besides Trump and his oligarchs, which means ... and this is the ULTIMATE realization that will move them - Trump IS now the Deep State and maybe, he always was.

[Jesus Freakin Congress @TheJFreakinC]

🚨BREAKING: A manager at a local diner asked ICE agents for a warrant before they searched a private areas of the business… and their response… slamming him to the ground, and putting a knee in his back, leaving him injured.

Because apparently exercising your constitutional rights is now being treated like obstruction.

According to witnesses, ICE agents were chasing someone who ran into the restaurant after a traffic stop. The manager reportedly told them they could not just storm through the kitchen without judicial authorization.

Because the Fourth Amendment is still a thing… even though ICE agents keep pretending it isn’t.

Law enforcement cannot just search private areas of a business because they feel like it. A kitchen, in a restaurant, is not a public space.

When agents do not have consent, exigent circumstances, or a valid warrant signed by a judge… then managers have every right to question that search.

That is literally how constitutional protections work.

And the fact that the manager was injured, after asserting those rights, should outrage everyone.

Rights either apply to everyone… or they are not rights at all.

[RobertFella 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 @Bonkavision5]

Too on point not to share. This is great, but too bad the Orange Felon’s enablers won’t let him see it.
This Australian's reply to #Trump's rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect.
"Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your f----- mouth."
- Tony Locke

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🇺🇸NEWS: FBI Director Kash Patel used a government Gulfstream V to fly his country singer girlfriend to a George Strait concert.
He watched the show from a luxury suite reported at $35,000 to $50,000.

Then he flew her home on the same FBI jet.
Same week: a “VIP snorkel” at the underwater tomb of 900 sailors and Marines at Pearl Harbor.

The pattern from the same NYT investigation is now public.

Four SWAT agents and two SUVs guarding his girlfriend in Nashville. The detail estimated at $1 million a year. SWAT escorts to a hair appointment.

An FBI official suggested a threat assessment to determine if any of it was justified. Patel berated him.

A New York Times reporter wrote about the SWAT detail. The FBI opened an investigation into the reporter. The DOJ shut it down and called it retaliation.

What is the FBI for when the FBI Director uses it as a personal concierge service and turns it on the people who notice?

[Tom Cruise Control™ @TomCruiseCon]

We’re not here for five minutes of light.

#SmokeFleet is here for the people tired of watching fraud get a podium, hate get a donation link, and cowards call it courage.

The world doesn’t need more influencers.

The world needs people who keep the backbone of society straight.
People who hold it together when everyone else is posing.
People who tighten the bolts while the cameras chase cowards.
People who still know the difference between courage and performance.

No spotlight. No stage.

We’re here to keep the whole damn thing standing.
#smokefléét #NAFO #smokeleet @theliamnissan @LeoDCabriolet @GreaseThunders @Gerald_FordF150 @thetomcelica

[Daniel Goldman @danielsgoldman]

Real story:

Judge was about to throw out the case bc Trump controls both parties.

Before it’s dismissed, Trump tells both parties to reach a “settlement.”

Settlement shields Trump from any future audit and creates a secret slush fund that can dole out money to anyone with no transparency.

Mind-boggling corruption.

@SpeakerJohnson - you may not know it, but your job is to conduct oversight of the admin. You can’t run away from this one.

[NoelCaslerComedy @caslernoel]

“Trump confidently boasts of ‘acing’ his three cognitive tests every chance he gets like a man who is the last to know old age has robbed him of both lucidity and vigor. (Truth be told he was never anything approaching healthy, and would ask for a golf cart to bring him from his SUV into the Museum of Natural History where we taped the last few ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ finales. A distance of about a hundred feet was more than he cared to travel on his own; part of this is sheer laziness and part of it was failing health even then).

POTUS has clearly not been told by his doctors the cognitive tests are given to detect dementia in elderly patients. DJT instead uses it as an opportunity to brag that he is the only president to take them, how difficult they are, and that Barack Obama, the former President of Harvard Law Review, U.S. Senator and first Black President of the United States would not do as well as the man who once lost a fight to an umbrella, and still uses his finger to read.

Is there any universe in which anyone thinks those two men are approaching anything close to equal in terms of intellect or physical stamina? I have watched Jared and Ivanka make fun of the fact that Donald does not read and has no interest in it. Trump is famous for driving his golf cart all the way on to the putting green, both to cheat by arriving ahead of his opponents, and to avoid even the slightest physical exertion.

POTUS thinks the term ‘asylum seekers’ means that migrants were released from a mental health facility, not fleeing political prosecution; a distinction he has failed to make now over the course of two presidencies. It says a lot about the caliber of the staff around him that nobody has sought to correct him of this false notion. Instead they prefer to let him stumble along in his stupidity. Donald is not merely slipping, he is lost, and his disinhibition and demented nature are making an already aberrant and violent personality all the more dangerous.

The press should call this out and not simply dance around the issue.

We are not talking here of some harmless geriatric slipping into mumbled remembrances of times gone by, but a violent man who sees himself on par with Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte - and wants to reshape the world around him into some sort of empire of idiocy.” https://t.co/NbxPp4Yd2m

[Human☮🇺🇸🇺🇦🇺🇸🌊 @4HumanUnity]

Russia’s economy is smaller than Texas, they shouldn’t be able to do much damage. But let's take a look:

– Tariffs hitting our economy and piling on trillions in debt, while easing tariffs on Russia.

- Their oil prices near doubling since the Iran war began, pumping billions in extra revenue into Moscow

– Constant attacks on the Fed, weakening the dollar.

– Massive defense spending while firing top generals and admirals.

– NATO pushed to the breaking point.

- Support for Ukraine cut.

You don’t need a big economy if you can nudge U.S. policy this far off track, all you need is a puppet.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

You must be wondering why Donald Trump, after all the tough talk, quietly stepped back and offered an indefinite pause on military escalation with Iran. No grand announcement. No victory speech. Just a sudden, unusual stillness.

Iran sent him a map.

Not a peace proposal. Not a diplomatic note. 𝐀 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐜 𝐦𝐚𝐩 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐱𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐚 𝐟𝐢𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐜𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐩𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐮𝐳.

That map said more than a thousand missiles ever could.

The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow waterway between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula. The world already knew it carries nearly 20% of global oil. What fewer people talk about is that the same narrow passage is threaded with undersea cables that carry the internet, banking data, and financial transactions for hundreds of millions of people across the Middle East, Asia, and beyond.

𝑻𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒌 𝒂𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒕 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒎𝒆𝒂𝒏𝒔 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒂 𝒎𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕.

Your salary transfer. Your business payment. Your hospital billing system. Your supply chain software. All of it travels as pulses of light through cables thinner than a human hair, resting silently on the ocean floor. If those cables are cut, the damage is not just technological. Businesses collapse overnight. Banking systems freeze. Economies bleed while the world waits weeks for underwater repair ships to even locate where the break occurred.

𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐧𝐨 𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐥𝐚𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩. 𝐀 𝐦𝐚𝐩 𝐝𝐢𝐝.

Because a map of chokepoints tells you something a weapon cannot. It tells you how much the other side is willing to lose, and more importantly, how much you are. The United States and its allies have built their entire economic architecture on this invisible underwater infrastructure. Disrupting it would not hurt Iran half as much as it would hurt global markets, Western banks, and the digital economy that the modern world depends on.

Iran did not threaten war. It reminded the world of its geography.

There is something deeply human in this moment, and also deeply sobering. We built a globalized civilization on thin wires buried under oceans, and we never really asked who sits above them. Now we know.

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒎𝒐𝒔𝒕 𝒑𝒐𝒘𝒆𝒓𝒇𝒖𝒍 𝒏𝒆𝒈𝒐𝒕𝒊𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒐𝒐𝒍 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒍𝒅 𝒊𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒂𝒍𝒘𝒂𝒚𝒔 𝒂 𝒃𝒐𝒎𝒃. 𝑺𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒆𝒔 𝒊𝒕 𝒊𝒔 𝒂 𝒎𝒂𝒑.

𝐒𝐮𝐤𝐡 𝐒𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐡𝐮
Director, CAQA | Editor-in-Chief | ISO Auditor | Poet and Writer
Forbes Business Council Member | United Nations Speaker
Top 100 Global Educator | RTO/AI/HE/ISO Expert
Global Advisory Board Member, Forttuna Education Council

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[💧Mary Kostakidis @MaryKostakidis]

The Surrender Summit: Trump Sends His Son-in-Law to Lose a War
‘Vance brought his wife.
Not a deputy secretary. Not a general. Not even a halfway competent mid-level State Department lifer who at least knows what the Strait of Hormuz is on a map. He brought Usha. His wife. To a war negotiation. The most consequential diplomatic moment since the end of the Cold War and JD thought, yeah, I’ll make a long weekend of it, bring the missus, see Pakistan.
Pakistan received the Iranians with their Foreign Minister, their Army Chief, their National Assembly Speaker, and their Interior Minister all standing on the tarmac in full ceremonial dress.
America sent the guy who wrote a book about how sad it is to be from Ohio.
And then there’s Jared Kushner. Jared fucking Kushner. A man whose entire qualification for any of this is that he married into the right family, which, by the way, is also his business model, his foreign policy experience, and apparently now his military strategy. Jared has the energy of a guy who’s never been told no in his life because everyone around him was either paid not to or too scared to. He walked into the Middle East peace process last time and achieved absolutely nothing except making himself several hundred million dollars richer. So naturally Donald called him again.
Jared Kushner at peace talks is like bringing your plumber to do brain surgery because he’s good with pipes and you trust him.’
https://t.co/QzFX9HPP2J

[MM  @adgirlMM]

Pam Bondi's DOJ gave the family of J6 traitor Ashli Babbitt $5 million in taxpayer dollars.

The DOJ just "settled" with disgraced conspiracy theorist, convicted felon and pardoned traitor Michael Flynn for $1.25 million of taxpayer dollars.

Now dozens of J6 convicted and pardoned thugs are lining up for their "legal" pay day, off our backs.

This is blatant corruption in plain sight. Criminals profiting off their crimes against America.

And where is Congress?
SILENT.

[Roman Sheremeta 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @rshereme]

July 1987, Moscow, USSR — Trump, 41 years old, flies to Moscow at the invitation of Soviet Ambassador to the U.S., Yuri Dubinin.

Upon returning from Moscow, the bankrupt Trump suddenly receives loans from 16 banks and, without negotiation.

1/n

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Trump says reopening the Strait of Hormuz is "a simple military maneuver. So easy for them to do, with so little risk."

Quick inventory of the simple maneuver: The Navy decommissioned the four purpose-built American minesweepers from Bahrain on January 9 — six weeks before this war launched — and sent them to Philadelphia for scrap. The LCS ships that replaced them are currently in Malaysia. The Washington Institute estimates clearing Hormuz could require 16 mine countermeasure vessels. We have seven. Iran has an estimated six thousand mines and still controls most of its minelaying fleet.

Meanwhile the allies Trump just called paper tigers and cowards have NATO air defense systems that intercepted Iranian ballistic missiles over Turkish territory twice during this operation. They are already in the fight.

You cannot scrap the right tools before starting the war, ask the allies you didn't consult before launching it to do the hard second phase, call them cowards when they hesitate, and describe the result as a simple maneuver. That sequence produced the problem. The insults do not solve it.

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

I asked a retired U.S. Marine familiar with amphibious operations about a MEU on Kharg Island. Granted, this person doesn't have "OSINT" in his Twitter bio, so what the hell would he know? But this is what he told me, contra Trump's claim this is a "simple military maneuver":

"Amphibious landings are by nature high risk and a lot can go wrong even in the best conditions. The Marine Corps has lost equipment during exercises, for example when an Abrams tank was sunk during an exercise on the coast of Spain in the 2010s.

"An amphibious landing on Kharg is within the capability of the United States to accomplish, but at what cost and to what end? Once the Marines fight their way ashore and take their objective, they will be on an island with limited cover, very close to hostile Iran. How long could the Marines hold this island, under bombardment, before they would need to be withdrawn?

"As for the danger, I think of amphibious assault as being akin to airborne assault. A lot of this depends on the tactical advantage of speed and surprise.

"What the Marines are working against here is that everyone knows they're coming. And there are only so many places that are suitable for a landing. Need a suitable approach, favorable tides, etc. the Iranians understand this and will plan for it.

"It is reasonable to expect that they will try to attack the transports en route, that they will attack while the ships unload, that they will attack the landing craft while they move from the ships to the beach, and that the troops will be attacked as they assault from the beach to their objectives.

"Once the Marines are at their objective, they'll be attacked there too because Iran, and any other interested party to the conflict, will know exactly where the Marines are.

"We're also 13 years removed from major combat operations in GWOT. There are still combat veterans at middle and upper echelons, but the majority of troops are not combat veterans. They're new guys."

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

I worked at Epic Games for two years. This is real, and the strategy behind it is smarter than most people realize.

Tim Sweeney has spent nearly two decades buying North Carolina forest land. 50,000+ acres across 15 counties. He’s now one of the largest private landowners in the state. The purchases started in 2008, right after the real estate collapse wiped out developers who had been planning golf resorts and luxury communities on biodiverse wilderness.

Sweeney paid $15 million for Box Creek Wilderness, a 7,000-acre stretch in the Blue Ridge foothills containing 130+ rare and threatened species. Developers had owned 5,000 of those acres before the crash. He bought them for conservation prices when nobody else was bidding.

He runs the acquisitions through an LLC called “130 of Chatham.” He buys the land, holds it for years, then either donates it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, sells it at a discount to state parks, or hands it to land trusts. In 2021, he donated 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. Largest private land donation in North Carolina history.

The part people miss: he told the News & Observer that since 2021, land got too expensive to keep buying. So he shifted focus to converting his existing 50,000 acres into permanent conservation status. He’s locking the land into legal structures that make development impossible regardless of who owns it in the future.

A billionaire worth roughly $6 billion is spending tens of millions acquiring wilderness specifically during economic downturns, then giving it away or placing it under permanent legal protection. The land will outlast him, Epic Games, and Fortnite.

That’s the part that separates Sweeney from billionaires who write checks to get their name on a building. The building depreciates. The forest compounds.

[Senator Chris Coons @ChrisCoons]

It's been 36 hours since President Trump plunged us into war with Iran. American servicemembers have been killed. And yet he's found time to throw a party at Mar-a-Lago, but no time for a live address to the American people about why we're at war half a world away, and what further costs he expects our troops to pay. Pre-recorded social media clips won't cut it.

[Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom]

He’s most likely a pedophile.

He initiated and is overseeing a massive government coverup to keep his name & the names of all the other Epstein class predators hidden.

He was handed the strongest post-Covid economy in the industrialized world and has singlehandedly fucked it up.

He’s put masked federal thugs on our streets who are lawlessly terrorizing immigrants & citizens.

He’s launching wars & pushing regime change all over the world.

And that’s just a start. He should be in jail. Not the White House.

[Boston Smalls @smalls2672]

Maga stands for absolutely nothing. NOTHING. these toilet fish will turn on a dime and go with whatever their pedo God king says every single time.

Low taxes? Fuck that, hit me with a tariff.

Cut benefits and bail out foreign countries? Absolutely here's my paycheck.

Small government? We should give the Pentagon 1.5 trillion and support secret masked police.

Pedophilia and sex trafficking? Take my daughter

War? Sign us up

Dems: I thought you guys were against that stuff?

Maga: shut up you retard.