Michael-In-Norfolk - Coming Out in Mid-Life

More Wednesday Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:43:42 +0000

Putin and The Felon: Both Trapped in Losing Battles Against Reality

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:42:07 +0000

The Felon is a huge admirer of Vladimir Putin - perhaps in part due to Kompromat Putin has on him - but also because in many ways the two man are narcissistic megalomaniacs cut from the same cloth who view themselves as smarter and more able than those around them. Both also seem to embrace a toxic view of masculinity as they malign and denigrate - or, in Putin's case, murder - those who oppose them The Felon's temper tantrum on Meet the Press where he walked off when Kristin Welker refused to accept his lies demonstrates both the fact that he is not as strong as he pretends and that he lives in his own false reality. These shared personality traits, delusions and refusals to accept objective reality are on display in the wars of choice both launched against Ukraine in the case of Putin and Iran in the case of the Felon. This inability to accept objective reality and the fact based advise of counselors and others have put both men in situations where their wars that they boasted would result in quick victories are dragging on with no victorious end game in sight. A piece at The Guardian looks at the traps of their own creation and their inability to find a "win" to save face. Here are excerpts:

The strongman president, self-styled redeemer of national glory, is trapped in a conflict he can’t win but doesn’t know how to end without looking like a loser. A cult of infallibility prevents the leader admitting a strategic blunder even to himself. It could be Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin; Iran or Ukraine.

The conflicts and the regimes involved are also dissimilar in important ways. Russia’s campaign to eradicate a neighbouring democracy is nastier in conception and bloodier in execution than the bungled US effort to dislodge a dictatorship in Tehran. It has also gone on much longer. The first world war was shorter than a “special military operation” that was supposed to capture Kyiv within weeks. The Soviet Red Army repelled Nazi invasion and marched on Berlin in less time than it has taken Putin’s forces to occupy a tranche of eastern Ukraine, and they are not making any significant advances. The war has burned trillions of rubles and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives for no discernible dividend in national greatness.
The failure is too big for the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery to hide. Civilians hundreds of miles from the frontline see the plumes of black smoke from the oil refineries struck by long-range Ukrainian drones. They feel the depletion of their wages by inflation. They noticed how last month’s Victory Day parade, the high holy day of Russian militarism, was strangely modest.
Official opinion polls have shown a drop in support for Putin, albeit from impossible heights to improbable ones. Since the data-collecting agencies are under state control, the blip is best interpreted as a symptom of factional jostling for influence within the regime. Pragmatists in the civilian administration might have flashed a glimpse of presidential vulnerability as a warning to hardliners in the security apparatus that their approach isn’t working.
Any internal Russian lobby for ending the war runs into the problem that Putin sees the conflict as an existential struggle to avenge national honour against the perfidious west. He casts himself as the incarnation of national destiny, reaffirming Russian civilisational supremacy over borderlands to which it is historically entitled. Such a man doesn’t easily accept the prospect of dealing with Volodymyr Zelenskyy on equal terms as legitimate president of an independent country.

Trump’s worldview is less cluttered with antique mythology, more pumped with celebrity narcissism, but the effect is the same. He shares Putin’s concept of alpha powers whose interests override any sovereignty claims of lesser nations in their neighbourhoods. He was easily persuaded that Ukraine’s cause was hopeless and that Putin held all “the cards” because it would have offended his own sense of majesty to believe that someone in Zelenskyy’s geopolitical class could be a winner.
If the US president had been interested in the reality of Ukraine’s defensive campaign he might have observed the levelling effect of drones, allowing a smaller force to thwart an apparently overwhelming onslaught. He might even have considered the relevance of that asymmetry when judging whether Iran could be bombed into unconditional surrender. He might then have taken advice from people in the state department and CIA who had war-gamed an all-out campaign against the Islamic Republic under previous administrations. They concluded that regime change couldn’t be achieved from the air and that closure of the strait of Hormuz was a viable Iranian countermeasure with devastating economic consequences.

That would have required a capacity for strategic analysis that recognised practical constraints on what the US can achieve. Since Trump sees no boundary between himself and his country’s power, and treats every interaction in zero-sum terms, factoring Iranian advantages into the military equation would be like admitting limits to his personal potency. Intolerable.
Like Putin, Trump is marooned on an island of autocratic delusion, surrounded by advisers and ministers who are too cowardly or too blinded by ideology to survey the distant shore of reality and suggest a way back. For the Russian president there might be some compensation in seeing the US humbled in the Middle East, but the gains are fewer than they appeared at the start of the war. The revenue boost from higher oil prices has been largely cancelled out by the costs and logistical impediment of Ukrainian drones landing on industrial infrastructure.

Meanwhile, a Trump administration bogged down in negotiations with Tehran has no bandwidth for Ukraine. That shifts the odds against Putin in his bet that Zelenskyy can be bullied by the White House into conceding territory that Russian soldiers haven’t been able to seize on the ground. It also creates a space for more proactive involvement of Ukraine’s European allies. They feel the need to check Kremlin aggression more urgently than anyone in Washington.

That agenda has become easier to pursue since Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungarian elections earlier this year. The removal of Putin’s favourite spanner from the European works led to a prompt unblocking of aid to Kyiv. There are signs of momentum behind a Europe-led peace initiative. At a recent meeting of EU foreign ministers there was discussion of candidates to lead negotiations with Moscow. This week, Keir Starmer hosted Zelenskyy, along with Germany’s Friedrich Merz and France’s Emmanuel Macron for a summit in Downing Street.
It still isn’t clear what a “coalition of the willing” would really be willing to do to keep the peace in Ukraine without the US. But Putin’s confidence that the decadent west would not stay the course when confronted with Russia’s inexhaustible supply of manly valour has also not been vindicated.

This is something else he has in common with Trump, or that Russian ultranationalism shares with Maga mania. Both movements view Europe as a decrepit civilisation in the death throes of cultural suicide by overdose of immigration and liberal degeneracy. It is a diagnosis repeated by many nationalists and mainstream conservatives across Europe, assisted on their ideological journey by campaigns of overt and covert online influence originating in Russia and the US.

It is also an underestimation of liberal democracy’s defining strength, which is the resilience afforded by pluralism and institutional acceptance of legitimate opposition. The authoritarian strongman, seeing no difference between his will and the nation’s destiny, treats dissent as an assault on his authority, tending towards treason. He sits atop an edifice of power that promotes loyalty at the expense of truth, until reality itself is banished from his court.

In the US that process can still be corrected by constitutional checks and balances, fair elections, a free press and independent courts. Not in Russia. That is why European democracies must prove that their system of government is not only better in principle, but stronger in practice. And the way they do it is by embracing Ukraine’s struggle as their own.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:13:26 +0000

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:30:43 +0000

Monday Morning Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 05:01:55 +0000

More Sunday Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 07:05:53 +0000

The Supreme Court Has Invented a Right to Discriminate

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 07:04:27 +0000

The overarching agenda of Project 2025, the Felon's regime, and the extremist majority on the United States Supreme Court ("SCOTUS") is to restore white supremacy and the primacy of right wing Christianity. This past week's ruling by SCOTUS in favor of Alabama's redrawn congressional voting districts that erased a majority black district (in a state where 26% of the population is black) has in effect created a right to racial discrimination as longs a fig leaf of partisan purpose can be fabricated. Meanwhile, the "Department of War" announced the reduction in the number of religious affiliation categories for service members from over 200 down to 31. While the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a/k/a Mormon church, is included as a religious category on the updated list, it is not included in the list of faiths labeled “Christian.” The take away is that the goal of evangelical "Christians", many of whom are blatantly racist, to have the right to discriminate against anyone they choose, be they black, gay, non-Christians, and even women is well on the way to fruition. The situation ought to terrify thinking Americans because once the rights of others can be erased or marginalized, the rights of many are put at risk. One need to look at Nazi Germany to see how this can progress. A piece in The Atlantic looks at SCOTUS's frightening ruling. Here are excerpts:

This week, the Roberts Court made clear that when it comes to drawing congressional districts, Black voters have no rights that anyone is bound to respect.
For years, Alabama, where a quarter of the population is Black, had defied federal court orders, including one reaffirmed by the Supreme Court itself in 2023, to create a second majority- or plurality-Black congressional district. Alabama’s reasoning for not doing so was simple: Its Republican legislators didn’t want to, and they didn’t believe that the Roberts Court would make them. “The Supreme Court ruling was 5–4,” State House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said about the 2023 decision. “So there’s just one judge that needed to see something different.”
The state was making a gamble that the Roberts Court was more partisan than sincere. And it paid off: On Tuesday, the Court allowed Alabama to proceed with a map that diminishes Black voting power to the advantage of Republicans. For all the Court’s pretenses—all of its insistence on the rule of law, precedent, and good faith—many critics and supporters of the Roberts Court see the institution as an appendage of the Republican Party.
“Alabama willfully drew a map that flouted the District Court’s preliminary injunction and hoped that this Court would eventually see things its way,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “After today, it is hard to call Alabama’s cynical gambit anything other than a success, and the Court’s rewarding of Alabama’s behavior anything other than a blow to the rule of law.”
The majority opinion was unsigned. In it, the judges argued that the lower court had “failed to follow our instruction” in ordering the creation of the new district. This was a reference to the April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, in which Justice Samuel Alito announced that “race and politics are so intertwined” that there are almost no circumstances under which the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting actually applies.
Now here was an example of exactly what Alito was talking about. “States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests,” the justices wrote this week. If a Republican legislature decides that a redistricting plan to suppress the power of Black voters is “in their best interests,” they may proceed.
The implications of this case go far beyond one congressional district in one state. In Callais, Alito issued a classic Alito disclaimer: insisting he was not doing the thing he was about to do. The Court, he wrote, was not effectively nullifying Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when it determined that Louisiana drawing a second majority-Black district (out of six total, in a state that is one-third Black) was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” This week’s ruling on Alabama makes explicit what was merely implied in Callais. The Court’s logic may apply only to districting for now—but there is no obvious reason to limit its application to that. The Roberts Court has replaced the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination in voting with a right to engage in racial discrimination in voting.
Theoretically, Callais was a statutory case about the Voting Rights Act’s ban on voting provisions that have the purpose or effect of discriminating against Black voters. That test, adopted by Congress in the 1980s (and opposed by Chief Justice John Roberts when he was an attorney for the Reagan Justice Department), was meant to prevent discrimination by actors careful enough to hide their intent. In Callais, the Court ruled that discrimination was fine because Louisiana argued that its purpose was partisan and not racist.
But in the Alabama case, the federal-district-court panel, which included two Trump appointees, had already determined that lawmakers had intentionally discriminated against Black voters. . . . Alabama’s plan was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” the district court found, and the legislature was attempting to “rob Black Alabamians of an equal opportunity under the law to elect candidates of their choice.”
Fortunately for those legislators, the justices were waiting to drive the getaway car. . . . This week’s decision is important because intentional discrimination is banned, not just by the Voting Rights Act, but by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. When the Roberts Court says that the lower court’s ruling “failed to follow our instruction,” it is referencing Alito’s argument that partisanship cannot be separated from race. Even if a court finds evidence of intentional discrimination, therefore, the Supreme Court may simply ignore it on the grounds that the discrimination in question is merely partisan and therefore acceptable. This turns Callais into something much broader than it purported to be: a finding that the Constitution permits not only unintentional racial discrimination but intentional racial discrimination, as long as there is also a partisan pretext for engaging in that discrimination.
The Court’s ruling amounts to a total inversion of the Civil War amendments, which make no such exceptions for racial discrimination in the name of partisanship. . . . . Race and partisanship were even more intertwined then than they are today, given that the Democrats were then the party of the defeated Confederates. If the Fifteenth Amendment did not bar partisan-motivated disenfranchisement, the amendment would not have changed anything at all. Indeed, the entire purpose of the amendments was to ensure that Black people could use the ballot as a means of self-defense against politicians who would deny them their basic, fundamental constitutional rights if they did not have to answer to them as a political constituency. The Roberts Court has thus rewritten the Civil War amendments to include a constitutional right to discriminate against Black people.
The Court has invented a right to discriminate—as long as you provide a political pretext—that not only does not exist in the Constitution, but is explicitly prohibited by the Constitution. . . . This logic would not have barred any of the Jim Crow voting devices that the Roberts Court frequently congratulates itself and the nation for overcoming. In the aftermath of Reconstruction, white-supremacist Democrats imposed superficially race-neutral requirements such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. The approach taken by Alito and the Roberts Court would have found all of these measures constitutional.
[T]he Constitution has few defenses against a majority of justices willing to ignore it or twist it to its exact opposite purpose.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 05:52:46 +0000

More Saturday Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 05:01:39 +0000

The Felon Has Failed As Commander-in-Chief

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:57:22 +0000

When not scheming about ways to rip off American taxpayers, using insider information for thousands of unprecedented stock trades to garner ever more money, and insulting the majority of one time loyal American citizens and foreign allies, and operating much like a Mafia boss, the Felon has been obsessed with his "legacy" - think the ballroom, the arch, his name and/or face on U.S. currency, the list goes on and on. Nowhere does the good of America and Americans factor in and true strategic national security factor in. Indeed, if the Felon has a legacy, it will be that he will be remembered as the most corrupt, unthinking, venal and narcissistic occupant of the White House in America's history. America's once crucial alliances are in tatters and former allies have zero trust in America and are taking steps to lessen their reliance on the United States - e.g., Canada making deals with Chinese automakers, Mexico, Canada and others making joint economic alliances, and European nations moving away from reliance on American weaponry. Again, the list of the Felon's failures goes on and on and none of them make the United States safer or stronger. A column in the New York Times looks at the Felon's many failures and ethical bankruptcy. Here are highlights:

With each passing month of his presidency, [the Felon] ~~Donald Trump~~ behaves more like America’s commander in thief than its commander in chief.
How so? Let me count the ways. We are a nation at war today, with tens of thousands of troops deployed near Iran. Generally, when our nation has been at war, the commander in chief’s top domestic priority is to keep the country united. Because there is nothing more demoralizing for U.S. troops fighting abroad than to look back and see our country ripping itself apart at home. And there is nothing that encourages an enemy to hold out for better terms for ending a war with America than seeing America at war with itself.
And how has Trump risen to that commander-in-chief unifying duty? He has not lifted a finger to bring Democrats behind the war. Instead, he’s prioritized acting like a commander in thief. At the same moment Trump was asking our men and women in uniform to make the ultimate sacrifice, he engaged in a brazen, in-your-face attempted heist of the U.S. Treasury to benefit himself, his family and his political allies, which could include those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump conspired with his own Justice Department, headed by his former personal lawyer, to use taxpayer money to create a $1.776 billion political slush fund, supposedly to compensate those Trump supporters who “suffered weaponization and lawfare” at the hands of his predecessor. In fact, as this paper’s editorial board noted, it would “reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf of the president.”
Fortunately, a federal judge put a temporary hold on the scheme that no one described better than the Republican former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell: “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick.” In the face of all that opposition, Trump’s acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said on Tuesday he was withdrawing this terrible plan.
If Trump had an ounce of integrity, instead of scheming to set aside $1.776 billion to potentially pay off these phony defenders of freedom’s frontier — loyalists who ransacked the halls of Congress — he would direct Congress to spend that exact amount to support today’s real defenders of freedom’s frontier: the Ukrainian Army. It is both resisting Vladimir Putin’s attempt to crush Ukraine’s democracy and sapping Russia’s ability to threaten the other free countries of Europe. God bless Ukraine’s fighters.
Alas, though, Trump apparently wants money only for people who tried to overthrow our Constitution at home, not for those who want to emulate our constitutional democracy abroad.
In addition, the Trump-directed Justice Department quietly inserted, as a supplement to that slush fund deal, a one-page document signed by Blanche stating that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against Trump, his family members or his businesses. That measure remains in force, Blanche said on Tuesday.
[The Felon] ~~President Trump~~ has another moniker suggesting his ethical challenges: “trader in chief,” as The Associated Press recently proposed. Why? Because “recent presidents have stayed away from trading stocks in companies whose fortunes they could lift or scuttle with the stroke of a pen, but Donald Trump smashed that precedent in the first quarter of this year with more than 3,600 buy and sell orders,” The A.P. wrote, “many of them involving companies whose profits have been directly impacted by his decisions as head of the government.”
Not only has Trump choked off virtually all U.S. financial aid to Ukraine, but he is also reducing U.S. troops on the ground in NATO countries right when Putin, sensing he is losing the war, is increasingly threatening them.
Just as Americans are starting to realize that Trump is becoming a predator on our system — trying to manipulate the justice system to generate cash available to his Jan. 6 pirates and immunity from ongoing inquiries into taxes for himself and his family — our allies are concluding that Trump’s America is becoming a dangerous predator on them.
Indeed, something is happening with America’s traditional allies that I never thought I would see in this lifetime or the next. In the post-World War II era, we and our allies together embraced the doctrine of “deterrence” against the Soviet Union, and later Russia, to prevent any attempt by the Kremlin to forcibly expand its influence into the free world or put neighbors under its thumb.
Not any longer. Our allies have watched Trump threaten to make Canada the 51st state and to seize Greenland from Denmark. They have watched him start a war with Iran without consulting NATO and then demand that NATO help rescue us from what has turned into a mess. They have watched him slash U.S. financial assistance to Ukraine, put the Russian aggressor on the same moral footing as that country and then top it all off with reckless, ill-conceived tariffs on all our allies.
As a result of all that, something unprecedented is happening: “Deterring Trump’s America is now becoming a strategic priority of our allies as much as deterring Russia was,” Nader Mousavizadeh, the chief executive of Macro Advisory Partners, a geopolitical consulting firm, and a former senior adviser to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, told me.
And how could it not? When you look at how Trump has hammered Canada with tariffs, it is hard not to conclude that the worst position for a country to be in during the second Trump administration “is to be America’s closest ally and have integrated your economy, energy systems and military with that of the United States,” Mousavizadeh said.
Let’s not forget that early on Trump forced Ukraine to give the United States access to critical minerals in return for U.S. help against a Russian Army trying to overrun it. This is the real “Trump Doctrine”: Oppose America, and I will tariff you; depend on America, and I will extort you.
I have been in Portugal this week and I have been shocked by the degree to which European business executives speak of having lost faith in American institutions and in America as the guarantor of global legal norms — something they have always taken for granted. It is literally disorienting for them, like hikers who have lost their compass.
In short, having a president who behaves like a commander in thief — not a commander in chief — is costing us dearly at home and abroad. This perversion of the American presidency is undermining the very alliance structure that won two world wars and the Cold War and generated one of history’s longest ages of peace and prosperity. Every day we tolerate such behavior we endanger our children’s future.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:23:57 +0000

More Friday Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 07:27:40 +0000

The Felon Dreads an Iran Deal Worse Than Obama’s

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 07:24:07 +0000

The Felon's Iran war was supposed to be quick and over in a few days - similar to Vladimir Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine. Like Putin's misadventure that has dragged on for going on four years, the Felon's misadventure shows no sign of an ending quickly and the Felon now finds himself in a mess of his own hubris filled creation. In addition, the Felon has an added difficulty in that whatever exit strategy he may ultimately be able to cobble together, it may not be enough to satisfy Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu (the Felon reportedly read Benjamin Netanyahu the riot act earlier this week for wanting to launch strikes on Beirut, which could collapse the Felon's negotiations with Iran). Perhaps more disturbing to the egomaniac Felon, any deal he is able to put together could well make the deal Barack Obama structured look like a far better deal than the Felon's, perhaps the ultimate humiliation for narcissistic Felon. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the tensions with Israel:

A U.S. official told Axios that on Monday that Donald Trump read Benjamin Netanyahu the riot act for wanting to launch strikes on Beirut, which could collapse American negotiations with Iran. The message, the official said, was “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”
The spectacular bust-up, which Trump confirmed today, reveals a deeper problem. With a nuclear deal with Iran out of reach, Trump seems content to defer the problems he faces instead of squaring up to them. There may be an end to violence, but any peace will be temporary and inherently unstable. The war will likely resume at intervals over the next few years, with grave consequences for all concerned.
The U.S. and Iran are too far apart for the distance to be bridged with a lasting settlement. Instead, they are moving toward a narrow deal: the U.S. lifting its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran allowing ships to transit in exchange for economic compensation. The nuclear issue—including what to do with Iran’s highly enriched uranium—would be deferred to later negotiations, which few expect to succeed.

Having placed himself - and the nation - in an impossible position which previous American presidents were smart enough to avoid, the specter of any deal the Felon does achieve looking like a loss compared to Obama's agreement that the Felon canceled is only increasing. Another piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's growing dread of looking like a loser compared to Obama. Here are article excerpts:

[The Felon] ~~President Trump~~ was on a conference call late last month from the Situation Room with leaders from across the Middle East and South Asia to pitch a deal that he believed was within reach to end the conflict in Iran. Trump asked for their support in a roll call, going one by one through Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, and Pakistan. All answered in the affirmative. Trump’s tone, according to officials briefed on the conversation, suggested that he believed each country should be in his debt for taking on Iran.
But then Trump reached for something bigger: He proposed linking the Iran negotiations to a major expansion of the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered agreements normalizing relations between Israel and some of its neighbors that Trump regards as a signature foreign-policy achievement. He suggested that those countries that hadn’t yet joined the Abraham Accords get on board—but received a less than lukewarm response. . . . Several times during the 90-minute call, Trump had to interject: “Hello? Hello? Anyone there?”
The awkwardness of the conversation, the details of which have not been previously reported, encapsulates what has gone awry in the roughly eight weeks since the United States and Iran entered a tentative cease-fire designed to allow negotiations for a longer-term deal. That agreement has remained out of reach . . .
Critics of Trump’s decision to go to war contend that his impulse to go big masks the weakness of his negotiating position despite the U.S. military’s dominance. . . . Tehran has succeeded simply by surviving the onslaught and has gained leverage by taking control of the Strait of Hormuz. As a result, Trump has been unable to convert tactical success on the battlefield into any lasting diplomatic or political achievement. None of his original war goals has been met, and the pressure to get a deal done is arguably now greater for Trump than it is for Iran, given the war’s broad unpopularity in the United States and the approaching midterm elections.
Every attempt to seal a deal has expanded the list of issues or created new wrinkles that prevent progress. What began as a narrow negotiation to end the conflict has become a grab bag of objectives: constrain Iran’s nuclear program and destroy its highly enriched uranium, reopen shipping through the strait, achieve a durable cease-fire in Lebanon, reassure Persian Gulf monarchies that they can count on U.S. protection, and, if possible, reshape the political map of the Middle East through new alliances with Israel.
The likely result is not another “forever war” of the sort that Trump has repeatedly condemned, but a “forever limbo,” where all sides involved have sufficient incentive to stay at the table but not enough to make binding commitments.
Inside the White House, Trump oscillated between impatience and theatrical self-confidence. He told advisers repeatedly that he wanted a deal bigger than President Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement and broader than the initial round of Abraham Accords. He also made clear that he did not want to own the failure of negotiations. The longer the process dragged on, the more the competing impulses pulled him in different directions.
He wanted the conflict over. But he had become irritated by comparisons between the emerging framework and the Obama-era agreement, which set restrictions and time limits on Iran’s nuclear-development program. Administration officials said Trump repeatedly complained that critics were calling his team’s draft agreement a weaker version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which he had spent years attacking and tore up in his first term.
At the same time, Trump grew wary of Iran’s calls for relief from international sanctions that could generate a financial windfall for Tehran. Trump has long complained about the “pallets of cash,” according to advisers, a reference to the $1.7 billion that flowed to Iran after the 2015 pact. Rubio told the Senate committee yesterday that Iran had to get rid of the enriched uranium and that the move would not lead to sanctions relief for Iran or any other financial incentives.
But the bottom line, Rubio said, was the need to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. That, like everything else involved in the talks, is harder than it might sound. To restore sufficient security and trust for shipping to return to prewar levels—about 135 ships a day—would require a major effort by the U.S. Navy, perhaps along with other nations, to clear mines laid by Iran. Shippers also need to feel confident that Iranian drones, missiles, and fast boats won’t threaten them. Only if those things happen, and the U.S. Navy lifts its blockade, would insurance companies reduce their rates for transit.
Yet Trump remains determined to secure a settlement he can portray as a legacy-making win. . . . As Trump heads into the summer, with events planned for America’s 250th birthday and the World Cup, it is hard to see him dedicating more time than he is now to extricating the United States from the war he started at the end of February. He may be content to simply wait rather than do a deal that invites unflattering comparisons to one that already existed—and which didn’t come at the cost of 13 U.S. service members and at least 1,700 Iranian civilians, tens of billions of dollars, the depletion of U.S. munitions stockpiles, and a global energy crisis.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 05:30:50 +0000

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:11:18 +0000

European Travels - Thoughts From Paris

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:56:29 +0000

A number of readers have asked how American tourists are being received in Europe or more particularly at the moment by Parisians. Our experience - namely me, the husband and two friends - is that the French definitely distinguish between the U.S. government under the Felon and everyday American tourists. The former is viewed with contempt (a few Parisians have made specific remarks about the government under the Felon) while individual tourists are greeted with friendliness and courtesy. Of course, if one behaves as an entitled "ugly American" then all bets are off for obnoxious tourists. We make a point of setting the tone by being friendly and polite and that goes a long way. My perception is that the French are well aware that less than a third of all registered voters casts their votes for the Felon and his evil policies and that two thirds of registered voters either did not vote or cast their votes for Kamala Harris. One could argue that they see the Felon as quasi-legitimate and see him for the nasty, boorish, and demented individual that he is. We will see if this reaction to Americans continues when we enter the United Kingdom before embarking for New York City aboard the Queen Mary 2 which typically as many aboard who are not Americans.

Our scheduled activities tomorrow should allow me to get to some of my more normal political posts tomorrow.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:54:00 +0000

Reduced Posting - Europe Bound

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Sun, 31 May 2026 12:03:55 +0000

Posting frequency will likely be reduced over the next two weeks. Today the husband and I we head out for a new travel adventure: We fly to Paris with two friends where we have an apartment in the Marais area for a week. On June 8th we will travel to Le Havre and board the Queen Mary 2 for 9 nights, visiting Cherbourg and Southampton before heading transatlantic and arriving in New York City on the 17th. A shout out to our friend Jenny who will be staying at our home while we are gone.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Sun, 31 May 2026 10:24:46 +0000

More Saturday Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:19:14 +0000

The War Trump Can’t End

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:02:25 +0000

The price of oil remains elevated, although down at the moment from previous highs, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and the Felon is desperate to find an exit ramp from the war of choice he foolishly launched with no apparent long term strategy. Of course one reason oil prices are down at the moment is the Felon's latest claim (we have heard this storyline numerous times before) that some kind of "deal" with Iran is perhaps in the offing. If negotiations fall apart - which a piece in The Atlantic explains remains possible - oil prices will rise again and continue to drive inflation at home is America even as the Felon's approval rating is only at 34% - likely that high due to MAGA cultists who live in an alternate reality. As the cited piece in The Atlantic observes, the Felon in his delusions thought his war of choice would last mere days whereas Iran's regime has been planning for a war with America for 47 years. Adding to the mix are the Felons lousy negotiation skill and novice negotiators (which were examined in a prior post) up against Iran's "bazaar style" negotiating tactics that aim to wear down the opposing side through attrition. The final obstacle the Felon faces is that now Iran realizes that its ability to close the Strait has greatly strengthen its hand. Here are article excerpts:

For nearly five decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been preparing for a war that Donald Trump expected would take days.
As virtually every American president since World War II has learned, a monopoly on focus can outlast a monopoly on power. America under Trump is the attention-deficit superpower, pinballing from isolationism to interventionism in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, having hollowed out the State Department. The Islamic Republic is an obsessive-compulsive revolutionary state—a regime with a half-century fixation on resisting America, rather than advancing the welfare of its own people. Fighting America is not the regime’s policy; it’s the regime’s identity.
The deadlock is both ideological and structural. To justify the immense costs of conflict to American taxpayers, Trump must demand far more from Tehran in any deal than he would have before the war began. Conversely, having lost hundreds of billions of dollars and its top leadership, Iran’s theocracy must demand far more—and concede far less—than it ever would have previously. Neither side can afford a deal that the other might accept. And in a zero-sum negotiation, Iran’s monomaniacal focus is a greater currency than American military power.
Trump may pause his war against Iran. But the Islamic Republic’s 47-year ideological war with “the Great Satan, America, and its trained beast, the Zionist regime”—in the recent words of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader—will continue in earnest. U.S.-Iran negotiations yield zero trust and zero closure. A win-win scenario does not exist. Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, regional proxies, and missile programs will menace the Middle East so long as the Islamic Republic is in power.
Tehran is transparent about its negotiating tactics. “The Iranian negotiation style is generally known in the world as the ‘bazaar style,’ which means continuous and tireless bargaining,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in his 2025 diplomatic memoir. “This method is a process of interaction that requires great patience and time,” and thus, “he who gets tired and bored quickly will lose.” Trump has twice grown bored with diplomacy and resorted to military action against Iran.
The first phase of any deal would require Tehran to de-mine the Strait of Hormuz and cease harassing vessels traversing it, and the United States to lift its blockade proportionally—restoring, in theory, the prewar reality of an unfettered international waterway. For Tehran, the strait has become its greatest source of leverage. Iran’s implicit control over it—and the global economy—is both a potential fixed-revenue stream and a deterrent against future attacks. “This time, papers and signatures are not guarantees,” Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, said. “The objective guarantee for preserving any agreement is the Strait of Hormuz.”
A coordinated reopening of the strait could be a prelude to successful nuclear negotiations, but it could also prove merely an intermission in fighting. The resumption of traffic through the strait would bring down oil prices—a crucial strategic objective in itself for the U.S., because it would make a return to war, if necessary, more sustainable, one senior official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters. Similarly for Tehran, the pause would provide much-needed cash and an opportunity to refortify its military.
Trump-administration officials believe that once the strait is reopened, Tehran will have a hard time closing it again: “It’s a card they can only play once,” the senior official said. Tehran appears confident taking opposite bets: that it has established a de facto Strait of Hormuz protection racket, and that the closer Trump gets to the U.S. midterms, the less appetite he will have to restart the war. For both sides, a tactical pause may relieve economic pressure and make reaching a broader diplomatic compromise feel less urgent, rather than more so.
The most difficult negotiation is the nuclear one. Trump will seek a commitment from Tehran to never pursue nuclear weapons, including a freeze on long-term enrichment, removal of its 400-kilogram stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and the establishment of an invasive inspections regime. But Tehran has drawn an obvious lesson from modern history: The regimes that gave up their weapons programs—in Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine—made themselves vulnerable to foreign intervention. North Korea, meanwhile, has survived behind a nuclear shield.
A former Iranian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid government scrutiny, told me that Tehran retains the knowledge and now has the will to build nuclear weapons in short order. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims to have as many as 30 underground “missile cities,” likely built with North Korean assistance, some reportedly buried deeper than the nuclear facilities already destroyed. Like Gaza, Iran is becoming a place where the authorities and their weaponry thrive underground while citizens languish aboveground.
The U.S. official told me that Washington expects to know “within a few weeks” whether this peace process has legs. The Trump administration plans to present Tehran with two possible paths. The first would require Iran to abandon its nuclear-weapons program, its regional proxies, and its foundational hostility toward America and Israel in exchange for hundreds of billions of dollars in Persian Gulf investment that could make Iran “one of the richest countries in the world.” The second path would be to preserve the status quo: Iran’s revolutionary ideology would remain intact, but at the cost of a continued naval blockade, crushing sanctions, and the potential renewal of war.
Over the past 47 years, Tehran has made major compromises only twice. The first was its 1988 decision to end the Iran-Iraq War—after eight years and an estimated 200,000 Iranian deaths—a concession that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini likened to drinking poison. The second was the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration. In both cases, when faced with overwhelming economic and diplomatic pressure, a viable diplomatic exit, and no demands to change its revolutionary identity, Tehran showed itself capable of tactical compromise.
“Iran never won a war,” Trump tweeted in January of 2020, “but never lost a negotiation!” This aphorism has become received wisdom, yet it misses a central fact: Any government willing to immiserate its own population rather than compromise can look like a tough negotiator.
“The main principle of bargaining is practice: repetition, repetition, and repetition,” Araghchi wrote, “so much that the other side of the deal, as they say, ‘gets numb’ and gives its consent.” Up until now, Tehran’s negotiating style has not numbed Trump into consent but agitated him into conflict. Yet conflict, like negotiation, has not resolved the fundamental problem that has confounded every American president since 1979: The United States needs a deal, but the Islamic Republic needs the United States as an adversary. America seeks resolution. Iran is committed to revolution.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:25:00 +0000

Friday Morning Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Fri, 29 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000

More Thursday Male Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Thu, 28 May 2026 11:41:41 +0000

Why Trump Keeps Getting Rolled By Iran

noreply@blogger.com (Michael-in-Norfolk) — Thu, 28 May 2026 11:40:00 +0000

Another day and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, oil prices are rising again, and no end to the Felon's war of choice appears in the offing as Iran and the USA trade strikes on each other despite the supposed cease fire. By all reports, the Felon is desperate to find an exit strategy as gas prices and inflation continue to be the largest concerns of many voters, including within the MAGA base. Unfortunately, as a piece in The Atlantic lays out, the Felon is actually a lousy negotiator who has surrounded himself with bootlickers who lack the experience, knowledge and competence to steer the Felon in the right direction, assuming he even listens to them. The Iranians seem to understand who they are up against and appear happy to keep the Strait closed and allow the Felon to twist on the rope of his own making. Meanwhile, Americans increasingly believe that the war will continue and seem less and less inclined to believe the Felon's lies about progress in negotiations. Here highlights from the article that underscore the Felon's poor negotiating position:

Donald Trump’s reputation and political career were built on his dealmaking prowess, yet the president keeps demonstrating that he is a terrible negotiator.
Repeatedly over the past nine years, Trump has gotten rolled by counterparts during high-stakes exchanges. North Korea, Russia, Russia again, China, and China again have gotten the better of the United States. Trump has had to slink back to Washington without much to show except empty talk about friendship with whatever dictator has just run circles around him.
He’s had some success in brokering agreements when acting as a third party (though not nearly as much as he pretends) but much less luck when his own government is a participant. The one glaring exception came when he was effectively negotiating with himself, getting his own administration to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund for his political allies.
The newest example of Trump’s artlessness is Iran. Let’s review the past few days: Trump posted on Saturday that he was close to striking a deal with Tehran that would end the war he started earlier this year and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. As the outlines of the agreement began to emerge, it looked both incomplete and bad: Trump had postponed discussing the hardest issues—matters, such as nuclear weapons, that led him to go to war—in exchange for opening the strait, which was open before Trump started the war. . . . . despite histrionic pushback from Trump aides, the president had begun backing off claims of an imminent agreement by Sunday.
Yesterday, in a sign that a deal might not be near at all, the U.S. military conducted what it called “self-defense strikes” against Iranian targets—directly contradicting the administration’s previous claims about having wiped out any threats to the United States in Iran.
The situation demonstrates a few reasons that Trump is such a bad negotiator. My colleagues Tom Nichols and Robert Kagan have all written illuminating articles on the specific failures inherent or likely in any deal with Iran. But the incident also shows the structural problems with the president’s approach.
First, Trump is unprepared. Some effective presidents (Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush) came to the White House with a history of deep engagement in public affairs and foreign relations, which made them ready to handle sensitive foreign negotiations. Others brought a formidable work ethic and a ruthless intellect (Barack Obama, Bill Clinton). Both types surround themselves with smart advisers whose input they take seriously. Trump is 0 for 3 on these conditions, which is one reason he wrote off the risk of Iran closing the strait in the first place: He both surrounds himself with less qualified aides than past presidents did and refuses to heed their counsel.
The same failure of preparation extends to the frontline negotiators. Even after many of its top officials were killed in the war, Iran has maintained a hard-nosed corps of diplomats who have long been involved in foreign policy. Trump, by contrast, has dispatched a real-estate pal and his nepo-baby son-in-law. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, perhaps the best informed of Trump’s aides, has been largely invisible.
Second, as the roller-coaster weekend demonstrates, Trump is mercurial. Keeping one’s bottom line ambiguous in a negotiation is canny, but Trump doesn’t appear to have any bottom line in his own mind. . . . Lacking a goal in the war means he also lacks a goal in the peace talks. Iran may be able to use that to its advantage, but even if its leaders are eager to make a deal, they will be understandably reluctant to agree to anything that requires a leap of faith, because Trump may change his mind at any moment, as appeared to happen amid Republican backlash in recent days.
Third, Trump is desperate for a deal, and everyone knows it. His misjudgments have led him to corporate bankruptcies and cheap sales in business, and he’s in a similar situation now. Every conflict between an autocracy and a democracy (however fragile this one may be) is asymmetric: Trump has to be concerned about public opinion, whereas Iran’s leaders have shown not only that they are indifferent to the suffering of their people; they are willing to massacre them by the thousands. But as the war drags on with no positive resolution in sight, and the U.S. economy looks shakier, Trump has become visibly more frantic to reach a peace agreement. . . . Iran, sensing Trump’s need for a deal, has maintained a hard line.
All of these factors combine to mean that Trump is ill-equipped to win any negotiation, much less one that is the result of his own blundering into war. Trump is likely to muddle through, as he has so many times in his career, and reach some sort of agreement with Iran. He will surely say that it’s a great triumph, but reality will be harder to ignore than it was when Trump’s failures merely hurt his own bank accounts.