WHY did I win my wager against @ProfessorPape? I have great respect for him and my respect for him has grown recently. But what did he get wrong? He believed, correctly, that US security principals faced a strong incentive to do whatever it takes to prevail. He expected them to get sucked into higher and higher levels of escalation to get their way, in a process he calls The Escalation Trap. I told you from the start that, while this was a good model of an important dynamic at play, it suffered from a grave problem: there was nothing is the model that could ever account for deescalation—it could only explain higher and higher commitments. So his model was theoretically incomplete in a very important way, and it was not pretty to watch him impose his theoretical priors on a dynamic reality that refused to obey the model. I tried to think harder about the incentive structures for the two sides. I did eventually formally model the interaction as a bargaining game under asymmetric information. But the underlying logic was already clear intuitively beforehand. The fundamental theoretical issue is that, with complete information, you get a deal immediately or not at all. There is no possibility of a costly process of armed bargaining. The thing that generates such a process is private information. It is bc one side is not certain about the other’s true preferences that you need costly signaling. I intuitively knew and later showed formally how, under plausible assumptions about the distribution of Trump’s type, a deal was a certainty in any separating equilibrium. But all this may be too technical for people with little training in game theory. The basic point is easy enough to grasp: never, ever forget the gap between your model of reality and the messy reality out their. It is not the job of reality to conform to your model. It is your job as an analyst to revise your model if you discover that you’re missing a key piece of the puzzle. Pape got trapped by his own model. And he is hardly alone. Pape was the only one who got even within shouting distance of me throughout this whole affair.

Yesterday I warned Trump was getting fleeced by Iran with a $30B deal to temporarily open the Strait of Hormuz Today Vance confirmed it’s actually $300 BILLION if they comply with all terms It is far worse than we thought Catastrophic strategic defeat

It's physically painful to watch society get less and less intelligent, more evıł, weird, and devoid of empathy every single day.

More evidence Francis Collins and Fauci actively but secretly participated in producing the early consensus that they had nothing to do with creating Covid and that anybody who suggested otherwise wasn't "trusting the science."

Congressional candidate files a complaint with the local AG, accusing Israel of interfering in his election

⚡️During his 2010–2012 overhaul of the National Mall, President Obama completely modernized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Instead of wasting millions of gallons of potable city water, the project switched the pool's source to the nearby Potomac River Tidal Basin. To keep it clean, they installed a massive ozone water filtration and circulation system—essentially transforming how the iconic landmark handles water quality and sustainability. It's obvious Trump removed the filtration system Obama had installed, thus creating a dangerous, toxic pool of algae-ridden water that can make bystanders, pets, and wildlife very ill.

The French Marxist theorist, filmmaker, and professional troublemaker who led the Situationist International and wrote The Society of the Spectacle (1967) would see motorcycles flipping in front of the White House for what they are: not rebellion, but the spectacle flattering itself...a high-octane screensaver for a Herrenvolk democracy. The riders risk their necks so cameras can mine clips; the crowd risks nothing and calls it participation, mistaking adrenaline for agency. Power is so relaxed it stages "danger" at its own front door and sells it back as freedom, merch, and content. You walk away with a video instead of improved material conditions, convinced you've seen subversion when all you've really seen is how completely even your urge to rebel has been neutered. This is the movie they show on the Ship of Fools as you literally sail into your misery and destuction...Enjoy.

ATTENTION: THERE IS NO 'DEAL' TO BE SIGNED. Regarding Iran, on the table now is a mere Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) - not a final accord or treaty. Rather, it's only an acknowledgement of a future process to take place over the next 18 months. The real problem: the word "Deal" used in a diplomatic context is an invention of the Trump regime, it's intententionally devoid of diplomatic context or historical precedent. The Media need to really be slapped for continuing to use this silly & deceptive term. REALITY: Iran's & Trump's competing MOU terms are a literal minefield stretching into the future, that's to say nothing about Israel's numerous announcements about how they will sabotage any ceasefire (which they already have in Lebanon as we speak). The reason Trump keeps using "Deal" is because he is incapable of conducting any real negotiations or accepting any Iranian terms (Iran is the obvious winner & normally winner issues terms with loser, not 'even negotiation' as the clueless sophmoric VP JD Vance said yesterday 🤦), and is disingenuously trying to separate Israel from the wider equation - when we all know it is Israel who initiated this war to begin with. Trump's framing of these endless ephemeral "Deals" is by design - to fool the public and guarantee that any meaningful negotiations fail - which is why he has a string of perennial failures: unwilling/unable to resolve Russia-Ukraine, Gaza, and now Iran. In fact, he's made all of them worse at every stage. A total failure on every level. Trump is one of history's losers. Nothing can change that now because as the world can now see, he's too incompetent, as are the many idiot savants & grifters around him masquerading as a Cabinet.

If you only have time to read one explainer for the current state of global political economy make sure this is the one. You won’t find a more succinct encapsulation for the fulcrum of economic and political forces shaping our contemporary condition in the 21st century.

Mark Zuckerberg has severe AI psychosis. He has fully bought in to the idea that humans are just a stepping stone to superintelligent AI and is in the process of destroying his company to try and extract intelligence from his own employees. This is genuinely sick. Meta is toast.

Israel’s genocide has been funded by many people who bought Israeli bonds underwritten by major global banks. Barclays and BNP have stopped that: good. Now waiting for @GoldmanSachs, @BankofAmerica, @Citi, @DeutscheBank and @jpmorgan to do the same. banktrack.org/news/seven_und…

Questions I’d love to hear @aipac answer*: If you truly believe you represent the majority of Democrats, why do you have to spend via innocuously named front groups? Why do none of your ads mention Israel? *(I actually know the answer)

Hasan Piker: “Elon Musk is a fucking failure and yet in spite of his failures, because he happened to be at the right place at the right time, he has failed upwards with his endless wealth. He’s a horrible person, an unbelievably insecure person, and yet he’s the richest person on the planet. We know he doesn’t fucking work hard because he Tweets all the goddamn time”

The Israel issue and the oligarchy issue are becoming increasingly intertwined. The U.S. is undergoing third world levels of media consolidation and it appears to be at least partly motivated by partisanship for a foreign country.

Israeli diplomatic figures are reportedly alarmed at the details of the MOU between Iran and the U.S. full details of which still remain ambiguous. Trump's statement about Netanyahu not running for office again also triggered concern in an environment where the wars have not durably resolved any Israeli security challenges and new ones are allegedly on the horizon. I would expect Israeli threats and subversion targeting the American political system to increase in this context to try and ensure continued favorable conditions: al-monitor.com/originals/202…

Iran got a hard kill on 14 radars, at least 4 aerial tankers and an E-3 on the first day or so with big salvos. It recently bagged more radars; at least one in Bahrain and another in Kuwait. It has fired more SRBMs and MRBMs than the Pentagon told Congress were in the Chinese arsenal. The CEPs of these missiles were closer to 5m than 20m, smaller than those assumed by Anderson and Press (2025) or @ka_grieco et al (2024) for China (20m). Iran is a great missile power and it showed.

Trump is getting fleeced by Iran The deal: • $24B cash oil sales • Just 60 days of open Hormuz Iran pockets $30B in two months Day 61, Iran can close Hormuz again, and repeat the extortion Massive loss for Trump—Huge win for Iran

BREAKING: Iranian state media, via Reuters, says the draft memorandum with Washington commits the United States to lifting sanctions and withdrawing its forces from the vicinity of Iran. The White House calls it a fabrication, then confirms most of the substance itself. Stay with me here, because the sequence of events deserves to be written down slowly. In 2018, Donald Trump tore up the Iran nuclear deal. The worst deal ever made, he said. Obama had shipped Iran's enriched uranium out of the country and put inspectors inside its facilities, and this, apparently, was weakness. In February 2026, Trump went further. The opening strike was pure Caracas swagger, a decapitation operation that actually killed Iran's supreme leader on day one. Regime change, he and Netanyahu announced, urging Iranians into the streets. The regime did not change. It promoted the dead man's son and kept shooting. Here is the detail historians will struggle with: according to Oman's foreign minister, who was mediating, Iran had already agreed to demands on dismantling its nuclear program before the bombs fell. There was a deal on the table. They bombed it. Then came three months in which the most expensive military on earth could neither win nor leave. Trump has declared peace at hand so many times the announcements have lost exchange value. A deal largely negotiated. A breakthrough within hours. Strikes described, in his own words, as a little friendly nudge. Meanwhile Kuwait accidentally shot down three American F-15s, an American missile destroyed a girls' school and killed at least 168 people, mostly children, which the president first blamed on Iran until the Pentagon's own investigation pointed home. Thirteen American soldiers came back in coffins. And while Washington flailed, your life got more expensive. The Hormuz closure is the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market. Inflation is climbing on every continent, rate cuts are dead, and the IMF is gaming out a global recession. The entire planet is paying interest on one man's temper. Now the ending. The deal taking shape gives Iran sanctions relief, frozen billions and an American withdrawal from the neighborhood, while the uranium stays in Iran, under a mountain, fate to be discussed later. Which means the United States fought a fifteen-week war, at biblical expense, to arrive at a worse version of the agreement its own president destroyed for being too weak. He did not lose to Iran. He lost to himself, eight years ago, and it took two thousand dead people to deliver the message. Keep an eye on the signing.

⭕️ The State Department has launched an investigation of Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), and could seek to deport him, according to U.S. officials and documents reviewed by The Free Press. Parsi, who holds a green card, is one of the most prominent U.S.-based critics of the war with Iran. He was born in Iran, grew up in Sweden, has lived in the United States for over 25 years. A Trump administration official said Secretary of State Marco Rubio was taking “a hard look” at anyone whose work “furthers” the agenda of U.S. adversaries, invoking a provision of federal immigration law allowing the secretary of state to personally determine that a noncitizen’s presence compromises a “compelling U.S. foreign policy interest”—the same authority Rubio used in the ongoing effort to deport Columbia University protest leader Mahmoud Khalil. Quincy’s CEO told staff and donors in April that the think tank was retaining an immigration lawyer and preparing a writ of habeas corpus “to have at the ready” if Parsi were suddenly detained. The outlet that broke this story, The Free Press, has repeatedly published articles that amplify official pressure on critics of Israel, U.S. wars, and aggressive foreign policy, contributing to a chilling effect intended to deter others from speaking out.

BIG: Veteran political insider in Tehran with knowledge of Iran-US negotiations alleges that a draft agreement has finally been prepared. Speaking with @amwajmedia late on June 10, the insider said, “The text is ready. It was finalized tonight,” explicitly giving credit to Qatar, which has been separately engaging with both Iran and the US to forge a deal. “If they can get the final approval by tomorrow, it will be initiated,” he added, seemingly referring to the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), which gathers Iran’s civilian and military leadership, and the White House. Spike in Iran-US violence comes amid mixed signaling that suggests possible disconnect between what the respective militaries are doing, and what political leaderships are discussing. Senior Iranian political source interpreted Trump’s decision to conduct strikes for a second night as reflecting anger with an apparent deadlock in negotiations. While describing Trump as “angry,” the senior source lamented that there appeared to be little cognizance in the White House of how real-world armed confrontations “are not a videogame.” While the Iranian leadership has authorized retaliatory strikes on US military facilities in Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait—casting doubt on the prospect of a nod to an imminent deal—there are indications that both sides ultimately want to avoid renewed all-out war. Late on June 10, Trump claimed to have ordered a halt to bombings after speaking directly with Iranian officials, alleging that he was asked to cease attacks. The US military on June 10 struck a number of military sites in southern Iran as well as near the capital, Tehran. Although Iranian media have denied the claims about any direct contact, Trump notably alluded to the coming 24 hours being decisive, saying that if an agreement on the table is not signed on June 11, “We’ll bomb the shit out of them.” Separately, Vice President J D Vance said the US is engaged with both moderate and hardline voices in Iran as part of the negotiations. Mindful of the tough rhetoric by military officials in both Tehran and Washington, it is difficult to decipher whether the exchanges of fire are about attempting to set the terms of a deal, or at this point mainly about the optics ahead of an announcement.