Trump Surrenders To Iran On Virtually Every Point
from the total-capitulation dept
If there’s one thing that Donald Trump has shown over the years, it’s that he will get his most sycophantic MAGA loyalists to insist there are perfectly obvious reasons why whatever he’s about to do is absolutely necessary… and then Trump will do the opposite, and all those hangers-on will magically change their story within minutes.
- Next: eliminate their nuclear program entirely.
- There was also some talk of “regime change.”
Now that Trump has signed the surrender agreement at Versailles (the traditional place to sign a total surrender agreement), the scorecard looks like this: no eliminated missile program, no eliminated nuclear program, no regime change. Also: no actual deal.
What Trump signed is a one-page memorandum of understanding with a 60-day time limit. After that, another deal needs to happen — one that may or may not actually get signed. The thing being called a historic peace agreement is, in legal terms, a note on the back of a napkin that expires in two months.
With that established: here’s what he gave away to get it.
So with this deal we only get partially back to where things were before the war, but with
- a huge draw down of US military stock,
- over a dozen dead US soldiers, and
- tons of unnecessary Iranian casualties, including a school full of young girls.
And after months of screaming about how Iran could not retain any nuclear capabilities at all, Trump is now talking about how important it is for them to retain their nuclear capabilities.
Also, remember how the Trump world insisted that Obama’s JCPOA was one of the worst deals of all time?
That’s Donald Trump tweeting in 2015 about the JCPOA:
The deal with Iran will go down as one of the most incompetent ever made. The U.S. lost on virtually every point. We just don’t win anymore!
The “deal” Trump just made is a complete capitulation, a loss on every point, and way, way, way worse than what was in the JCPOA, which, in retrospect, was a genuinely good deal — carefully negotiated by actual experts — and briefly a real win for peace in the Middle East before Trump tore it up.
And remember how MAGA spent years misleadingly talking up all the money that the US supposedly “gave” Iran with the JCPOA? Or the deal Biden did to extend a Trump-era policy to unfreeze some of Iran’s frozen assets, which even Donald Trump Jr. falsely claimed was Biden “giving” Iran money?
There is now widespread reporting that this deal will unlock some $300 billion in investment for Tehran. To be precise: this isn’t the US writing a check — the deal creates the conditions for private capital to pour into the country. Trump has been pretty candid about his view on that:
“We don’t have to give them anything. But some people may want to invest. Like, what are you going to do to say ‘you can never ever invest in a country,’ I mean, it’s pretty tough.”
So: MAGA spent years insisting that financial flows to Iran — even unfreezing Iran’s own assets — would fund its military and get soldiers killed. Trump just opened Iran to hundreds of billions in new investment while leaving both the missiles and the nuclear program intact. The threat, apparently, only counts when a Democrat is president.
Obviously, ending this war is a good thing. But it never should have happened in the first place. Trump launched it without congressional authorization, in clear violation of the War Powers Act — and once it started, Congress should have stopped it cold.
- Trump tore up the JC
POA, which he called “one of the most incompetent deals ever made.” - He started an illegal war.
- He drew down US military stockpiles, lost over a dozen American soldiers, and killed Iranian civilians — including a school full of young girls.
- And he came away with a memorandum of understanding that expires in 60 days, leaving Iran with everything it had before the war started, plus full knowledge of exactly how hard Trump will push before he folds.
Trump’s own verdict on the JCPOA was: “The U.S. lost on virtually every point.” He was describing this deal.
Filed Under: donald trump, iran, iran deal, jcpoa
- Trump Starts Arresting People Because His Reflecting Pool Makeover Is Just Algae And Peeling Paint
- Trump Still Wants His MAGA Slush Fund... And His Cabinet Refuses To Sign Declarations That It's Gone
- You Have Less Than A Week To Tell The FCC That Carr's Censorial Attack On ABC Is Nonsense
- FISA 702 Surveillance Authority Expires Because Donald Trump Tried To Tie It To A Voting Bill He Couldn't Pass
- CNN Resident Fact Checker Disappeared From Air As Company Waited For Trump Merger Approval
Trump DOJ Trying To Protect Musk From Lawsuit Over Memphis AI Data Center Pollution
from the whoops-we-killed-grandma dept
For a long time organizations like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk’s xAI data center in Memphis disproportionately pollutes the air in minority neighborhoods. A joint lawsuit by SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn’t even bother to get the necessary permits to run the turbines at its xAI’s Colossus 2 data center.
The lawsuit also notes how these 27 turbines (which has ballooned to 57 turbines since the lawsuit was filed) belch all manner of contaminants, including formaldehyde, into minority neighborhoods already seeing some of the highest asthma rates in the country, violating the Clean Air Act.
But this being Elon Musk, he apparently has been able to leverage the presidency he helped purchase to get those pesky Memphis minorities off of his back. In a filing this week obtained by Wired, the DOJ is trying to claim the lawsuit can’t proceed because xAI and Grok are highly tethered to the country’s national security efforts:
“In a filing, the agency sided with Elon Musk’s company, saying attempts to stop xAI from running the natural gas turbines “threatens American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations.”
Musk and his friends at the DOJ are asking the courts to dismiss the lawsuit. In May, the NAACP filed a request for a preliminary injunction, stating that the climbing rates of environmental pollution “increases risks of asthma attacks and heart disease” in communities that already face significant pollution thanks to regulatory capture and systemic racism.
Over on Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website, Marc Andreessen pretended to not understand why a civil rights group might be upset that unregulated data centers are pumping pollution into minority Memphis neighborhoods:
It’s worth noting that when Musk built the Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, he promised that the facility would largely re-use water via a next-generation water-recycling plant as to not strain the area water supply. But curiously, construction of that part of the project has stalled out completely. Musk says the company needs to focus on finishing their other data center in the region, then will finish construction. But, well, it’s Musk. The guy always saying we’re *this close* to settling Mars.
Meanwhile, you’ve got a lot of rich assholes (and the politicians who love them) increasingly trying to falsely claim that all of the bubbling over animosity at AI is an inauthentic Chinese “psy-op.” And you’ve got CEOs getting booed at their commencement speeches wondering why AI animosity is so white hot.
The youth movement has tethered AI to the country’s growing fascist, racist corruption and income inequality (and the tech sector that openly embraced it at almost every turn), and it’s going to take a lot more than sloppy CBS propaganda and new software updates to shift the perception. I’m not sure the tech sector truly groks what their enthusiastic support of Trumpism will ultimately reap them.
This is the future we’ve built in a country too corrupt to have functional regulatory oversight of obscenely rich men and corporate power. Without a meaningful ethical renaissance and profound political sea change, it only gets uglier and more violent from here.
Filed Under: ai, clean air act, data center, elon musk, environmental law, lawsuit, memphis, pollution
Companies: naacp, spacex, xai
RFK Jr. Insists Scientific Journal Explain Retraction Of Anti-Vaxx Article He Liked
from the too-much-free-time dept
We were just talking about how angry RFK Jr. was at a report that he’s been out to lunch on most of what HHS’ work entails, choosing instead to focus his time and attention on his own pet interests, like curtailing vaccine programs in America, chasing chemtrails, and a newfound love for snake-handling. Kennedy denied all of this of course, commenting that everyone was freaking out just because he missed “a couple” of meetings. He then suggested that real journalists would check his public calendar to see how busy he’s been, despite his calendar apparently not being in any way public.
The question that leaps to mind in all of this is where the rest of Kennedy’s time is going, if not spent on HHS’ core functions. The answer appears in part to be demanding that scientific journals explain their decisions to retract articles, so long as they were articles that fit Kennedy’s agenda.
In a letter dated June 11, Kennedy wrote to Toxicology Reports Editor-in-Chief Lawrence H. Lash concerning a 2021 study titled “Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990–2019 and review of the medical literature.”
The study in question was authored solely by Neil Z. Miller and was among those cited by Kennedy’s former personal lawyer Aaron Siri in a presentation he gave before a federal vaccine panel in support of altering the childhood immunization schedule. Those alterations to the vaccine schedule, and the panel that approved them, have since been blocked by a federal judge.
Miller, who identifies as a “medical research journalist” in his author biography, is a prominent vaccine skeptic, having published numerous books questioning the safety and efficacy of immunizations.
Now, a couple of things to note here. First, Toxicology Reports has a bit of a reputation problem that arose during the COVID era. It is considered a generally reputable outlet, to be clear, but it had several controversies that arose in 2020 and 2021. Lash is actually the founding editor of the journal, but he had stepped away during this controversial period, during which the journal published articles of a conspiratorial nature around COVID and 5G technology. Lash returned as Editor in Chief of the journal in late 2021.
Importantly, that happened after the article in question was published. Lash has apparently been attempting to reestablish the reputation of Toxicology Reports and has, on occasion, gone back and retracted articles that don’t meet his renewed standards. That’s, you know, the work an Editor-in-Chief does. Kennedy’s demands for an explanation why an article he liked was retracted is particularly odd, since the retraction came along with the journal’s justification.
The article was about research the author had done in correlating data in the VAERS database with vaccine injury and infant death. A large problem with such research is, as was detailed often during the height of the pandemic, that VAERS is largely a self-reporting system. Claims of vaccine injury that are reported are not verified. If you try to get at the data yourself, you will first see a disclaimer you have to acknowledge that includes the following text:
Key considerations and limitations of VAERS data:
- The number of reports alone cannot be interpreted as evidence of a causal association between a vaccine and an adverse event, or as evidence about the existence, severity, frequency, or rates of problems associated with vaccines.
- Reports may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, and unverified information.
- VAERS does not obtain follow up records on every report. If a report is classified as serious, VAERS requests additional information, such as health records, to further evaluate the report.
- VAERS data are limited to vaccine adverse event reports received between 1990 and the most recent date for which data are available.
- VAERS data do not represent all known safety information for a vaccine and should be interpreted in the context of other scientific information.
And the justification for the retraction follows along those lines.
In its removal notice, Elsevier, the publisher of Toxicology Reports, stated, “Given the inherent limitations of passive reporting systems, including the expected temporal clustering of events independent of causality, the conclusions presented in the article are not supported by the methodology employed.”
“In light of these concerns, and given the potential implications for medical practice, the Editor-in-Chief has decided that the article should be removed. The author disagrees with this decision and disputes the grounds for removal,” the publisher added.
That’s really all you need to know. The dataset the study was built on is unreliable when it comes to the conclusions the research attempted to draw. And that’s before we get into the inappropriate nature of the sitting Secretary of HHS reaching out to scientific journals to demand explanations on matters of medicine and science when he is neither a doctor nor a scientist. I’ll note that the editorial board for Toxicology Reports is chockablock full of PHDs and MDs.
If Kennedy finds the real work at HHS boring, then he should quit and go back to advocating for people to be less healthy from infectious diseases for which we have vaccines. Otherwise, there are about a half a dozen health crises going on right now that he could work on instead of harassing the editors of science journals about their independent editorial decisions.
Filed Under: aaron siri, anti-vaxxers, lawrence lash, rfk jr., science, toxicology reports, vaccines, vaers
Comments on “Trump Surrenders To Iran On Virtually Every Point”