#gandalv

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Anti-Trump poster seen in Washington, DC.

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Gandalv :: @Microinteracti1

Here’s what nobody tells you about being the most powerful man on earth. At some point, you stop being powerful. And then, rather inconveniently, everything you did while you were powerful becomes somebody else’s problem to sort out.

Donald Trump is currently in year two of his second term. He has renamed a cultural institution after himself, closed it, unleashed what can generously be described as a paramilitary immigration force on his own cities, and apparently authorised military strikes where survivors were finished off in the water. He did all of this with the serene confidence of a man who has never once faced a consequence.

And here’s the thing. Domestically, he may be right. His own Supreme Court essentially invented a new legal principle specifically for him, which is a level of judicial favouritism that would make even a dodgy FIFA referee blush. But the International Criminal Court did not get that memo. Neither did Germany. Neither did the Netherlands. And critically, neither did Scotland, where Trump owns a golf course he may never visit again without a very awkward phone call from The Hague. Rodrigo Duterte thought he was untouchable too. He is currently attending his war crimes trial via video link from a detention cell in the Netherlands. Which is, one has to admit, not how most people picture retirement.

His cabinet will spend the next several decades buried in lawsuits, disbarment proceedings and foreign legal complications. There will be no quiet farm. No memoirs tour in London. No honorary degrees. Just paperwork. Eternal, relentless, internationally sourced paperwork.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Stay connected, Follow Gandalv

@Microinteracti1

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Dennis Goris | Cartoons :: @DennisGoris :: Worth a repost (from the archives)

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Gandalv

Nobody in the Trump administration planned for Iran to shut the Strait of Hormuz. Nobody planned for sustained missile strikes on American bases across the Gulf. Nobody planned for an energy crisis. Nobody planned for Europe to look at Washington, shrug, and walk the other way. Nobody, it turns out, planned for very much at all. Read the accounts of how this war was decided and you are left with one deeply uncomfortable realisation: the people who launched it appear to have been genuinely surprised by almost everything that followed. The Iranians shot back. The allies didn’t show up. The oil price went vertical. All of it, apparently, news to them. Which leaves two questions so obvious they’re almost embarrassing to ask. What exactly did they think was going to happen? And did anyone, in any room, at any point, think further ahead than the applause?

@Microinteracti1

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Ella Baron ::: @EBaronCartoons

Saturday's Guardian cartoon

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A French general just looked at Trump’s plan to build a runway inside Iran to fly out uranium under active bombing. His response: “American officials should stop snorting cocaine between meetings.” This is the same man who called joining Trump’s war “buying cheap tickets for the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.” The French are not holding back.

Gandalv /@Microinteracti1

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Morten Morland :: @mortenmorland @thetimes – political cartoon gallery in London http://original-political-cartoon.com

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JD Vance has returned from Pakistan. With him came two estate agents. This is not the opening line of a joke, although I wish it were, because the punchline is catastrophic. They flew home with their tails between their legs after what the State Department will presumably describe as “productive preliminary discussions” and what the rest of the planet will recognise as being thrown out on your ear.

Iran wanted, apparently, to watch a vice president and two men who normally sell semi-detached houses in Virginia try to look dignified while boarding a plane back to nowhere. And we all know what this means. The Strait of Hormuz will stay closed. Twenty percent of the world’s oil supply passes through a waterway roughly the width of a slightly ambitious motorway.

Every time someone in Washington has a bad week, that waterway gets a bit narrower. Right now it is approximately the width of a letter box, and oil prices are doing what oil prices always do when adults are not in charge, which is going completely and utterly insane.

Now.

The estate agents. This is the detail that keeps me awake. Why does a peace delegation to one of the most strategically sensitive negotiations on earth require property professionals? I have been racking my brain. The only explanation that holds together, if you squint and tilt your head, is that someone was attempting to acquire a stake in some sort of Hormuz-adjacent enterprise. A port authority, perhaps. A logistics company. Something with the word “international” in the name and a chairman who wears a lot of gold. Trump getting into the ownership structure of the very chokepoint his military is supposedly fighting over would be, in any previous administration, the kind of thing that ended careers. In this one it is Tuesday.

Iran, to their considerable credit, apparently noticed. Meanwhile, back home, the administration is talking about conscription. Actual conscription. The mandatory enrollment of young Americans into military service, which is either a sign of profound strategic confidence or the most terrifying admission of overextension in modern American history. I leave it to you to decide which, though I note that the people making this decision have children of precisely the wrong age and security details of precisely the right size.

Seven billion people looked at Donald Trump and understood immediately what they were looking at. They had read the biography. They had watched the first term. They had seen a man attempt to remain in power by means that, in any country without America’s particular combination of luck and institutional stubbornness, would have succeeded. They filed this information away under “obvious.”

Seventy million people looked at the same evidence and saw a genius. This is the central mystery of our age and I do not have a satisfying answer to it.

What I do have is the image of a speeding car. It is travelling at a hundred and thirty kilometres per hour toward a cliff edge that is clearly visible from quite some distance. The people responsible for steering it are busy. They have calls to make, deals to structure, properties to value. The passengers are arguing about whether the driver is brilliant or misunderstood. Europe and Canada are standing at the side of the road watching Americans jog past with suitcases, looking for somewhere quieter to live. The cliff, for its part, is not moving.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Stay connected,

Gandalv

@Microinteracti1

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

roweafr :: @roweafr :: pope a dope :: @FinancialReview

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Gandalv ::@Microinteracti1

The President of the United States, a man who controls approximately 5,500 nuclear warheads, went on social media on a Sunday night to inform the world that the Pope is weak on foreign policy. The Pope. The man in the white robes who spends his days asking people to be kind to each other.

Trump’s complaint, delivered with the subtlety of a concrete mixer reversing into a garden party, was that he doesn’t want a pope “who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.”

One pauses here to consider the geography of this argument. Because from Lagos to Lahore, from Buenos Aires to Bangkok, there are rather a lot of people who have spent the last several decades looking at the United States, its history of regime changes, its aircraft carriers, its habit of deciding which civilizations get to continue existing, and thinking: you know what, we’re not entirely sure America is the right country to be hosting this particular conversation.

Trump then posted an AI-generated image of himself in biblical robes, healing the sick, with light pouring from his fingers, eagles overhead, and what appeared to be the entire American military establishment looking on in quiet reverence. Just in case anyone felt the evening had not yet reached peak theological peculiarity. The pope, for his part, had spent Saturday leading a prayer vigil in St. Peter’s Basilica, where he suggested that the kingdom of God operates without swords, drones, or vengeance. He named nobody. He threatened nobody. He asked for peace. This, apparently, is what passes for a provocation requiring a 500-word Truth Social rebuttal and a messianic selfie.

Never before has the relationship between Washington and the Vatican revolved around two Americans. Specifically, a 79-year-old politician from Queens and a 70-year-old pontiff from Chicago. It is, in its own catastrophic way, quite the achievement. There are roughly one billion Catholics in the world. Trump’s approval among American Catholics alone has already slipped from 52 to 48 percent since the Vatican tensions began. And that is just the Americans. The global ones have not yet been polled, but one suspects the numbers are not trending upward. The remarkable thing is not that a president and a pope disagree. That is fine. Healthy, even. The remarkable thing is that the president chose to resolve this disagreement by implying he personally installed the pope, casting himself as a divine healer, and then calling the leader of 1.4 billion Christians a radical leftist who is bad at his job.

There are, it turns out, some constituencies even Donald Trump cannot bully into submission. One of them answers to a higher authority. The other one has been around since 33 AD and has outlasted rather a lot of empires.

Gandalv /

@Microinteracti1

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ https://x.com/Acyn/status/2043498719270637656/video/1

[snorre-oakenshield]

gandalf must be the biggest party lion in the story of everythingverse

[mrtinglle]

makes me want to die. almost.