Not Necessarily Stoned, But Beautiful

Overnight, Ukraine launched its biggest attack on Moscow, the capital of Russia, since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Ukraine’s waves of drone strikes on a major Moscow oil refinery have shrouded the city in flames and black smoke. Last week, Russia struck one of Ukraine’s most important religious and cultural landmarks, the thousand-year-old Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. The ancient monastery, with its churches and bell towers, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, described by the United Nations agency as a “masterpiece of Ukrainian art.”

Russia denied responsibility for the strike. After the Moscow strikes, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky released a video saying: “If Ukraine burns, your Moscow will burn too.”

In the U.S., President Donald J. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance are trying hard to sell the administration’s memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Iran, which Trump signed yesterday at the Palace of Versailles in a scene that recalled Germany’s surrender after World War I.

It looks as if Trump’s war on Iran has cost the U.S. the lives of thirteen service members, injuries to 400 more, and at least $132 billion so far in immediate costs, lost income, and higher consumer costs, only to leave the U.S. in a significantly worse place with regard to Iran than before Trump started bombing.

The costs to the world have been significantly higher in terms both of lives—beginning with more than 175 Iranian schoolchildren and their teachers—and of economies.

Journalist David Shuster reported that the Iranian government is declaring “total victory.”

Former secretary of state Antony Blinken posted: “By President Trump’s own terms, the war is a failure. The Iranian regime is intact and its military wing more empowered, while the Iranian people are more impoverished, repressed and desperate…. The only ‘achievement’ of the ceasefire is the likely re-opening [of] the Strait of Hormuz—which was open before the war started. And we will apparently pay Iran to do so…. Don’t expect a return to normal any time soon, if at all,” he warned.

After setting Vance up to take the fall for the deal, tonight at a dinner with French president Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles, Trump signed the MOU himself. It was a moment when a knowledge of history would have been useful. As MeidasTouch noted, it was at Versailles after World War I that the Allied powers forced Germany to sign the Treaty of Versailles, “one of the most famous surrender documents in modern history.”

Earlier in the day, asked by a MeidasTouch reporter about Trump’s cognitive decline at the G7, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said: “The president has been humiliated on the world stage, and many Americans are increasingly concerned about his stability and his capacity in the office. It’s deeply distressing to Americans across the political spectrum to see a president so incompetent and so incapable attempting and failing to represent the nation internationally.”

One sure way to get more pills is to go to a physician.