DCCyclone (now mostly at dccyclone.bsky.social)

Joe Biden out here happy and thriving and CNN will soon be needing a wheelchair.

NEW: Pope Leo XIV just called for the permanent abolition of aerial bombing — a first for any pope. “Airplanes should always be vehicles of peace, never war. No one should have to fear that threats of death and destruction might come from the sky.” The demand came as Trump’s war against Iran entered week four. thelettersfromleo.com/p/pope-leo-xiv…

WOW. There is a HUGE Special Operations Deployment arriving in the Mid East. The seizure of Kharg and Hormuz Island is almost 100% going ahead. We don’t deploy this for nothing. Army Ch-47 Helicopters 160th SOAR MH-60 helicopters Units fm: Both 1st & 2nd Batt 75th Rangers 5th SF Group US Army Delta Force SEAL TEAM-6 Centcom task force USAF 621st “Devil Raiders” contingency response team (runway repair) 82nd Airborne already likely deployed. Ovda Airbase in Israel is near the Elat on the Red Sea and is empty & full of hard shelters. King Faisal in Al-Jafr Jordan is a huge base used by USSOF before. It’s close to KATSOC training facility for work ups. With Tripoli MEU inchopping the Gulf of Oman on Friday this is a huge force for multiple Islands & locations, not just Kharg. They intend to take and repair one runway (Kharg). This force is not leverage. This is a commitment to take action.

Yeah @never_oppressed misses this. The "antiwar movement" is just plain everybody. We're not the opposition.

#DEI on steroids

These are the people now responsible for keeping you safe: -A drunk former fox news host -A 22-year-old former gardener and grocery store clerk -A plumber -A frat boy MAGA children's book author

D'oh!

@KFILE is annoyed by this because he makes his living by finding skeletons (which I love). None for @SenOssoff

As war drags on, Trump Administration takes extraordinary steps to avoid accountability

A straight up lie. Obama’s JCPOA halted Iran's nuclear weapons program, making America and the world safer. We argued then, correctly, that the likeliest alternative to the deal was war. President Trump tore up that deal anyway, failed to negotiate a new diplomatic agreement, and then decided to wage a reckless war that continues to have devastating consequences for the American people.

Absolutely insane. If a mail ballot is not delivered in time, that is the fault of our mail system, not the voter. Late ballots that were postmarked by election day should be accepted.

Martin Heinrich's defense for supporting Mullin's nomination is the same argument Dems had for supporting Rubio and look how that turned out. Rubio has abandoned every belief he had. Hoping that he might find the courage to tell Trump the truth didn't quite pan out.

Republicans are a criminal syndicate.

🚨BREAKING: ICE agents are at airports stationed INSIDE terminals, while wearing masks. Journalist Nick Valencia filmed his own experience traveling through Atlanta this morning… spending nearly an hour getting through TSA… Only to walk into the terminal and see ICE agents already inside. Not screening passengers, or reducing wait times… Just standing there. Masked. This isn’t about fixing delays. It’s about putting Trump’s secret police inside everyday civilian spaces.

And his son Doug made Greg's career that much bigger a dream-come-true. Fred Hoiberg is living a similar dream with Sam.

George Lucas traded $350,000 in directing salary for something Fox executives thought was worthless: the right to sell Star Wars toys. It was 1976. Over 40 studios had already passed on his script, including Disney. Fox only greenlit the project because they wanted Lucas for other films. Nobody at the studio expected to make money on a space opera with no stars, so when Lucas offered to cut his directing fee from $500,000 to $150,000 in exchange for merchandising and sequel rights, Fox said yes on the spot. Movie merchandise was a dead business. Fox had lost money on Doctor Dolittle lunchboxes a decade earlier. They thought they were getting the better deal. Lucas couldn’t even find a toy company that wanted in. Kenner, a division of cereal company General Foods, finally bought the licensing for a flat $100,000. Then Star Wars opened. Between 1977 and 1978, Kenner sold $100 million worth of toys off that $100,000 investment. They couldn’t make enough for Christmas ’77, so they sold empty boxes with IOUs inside, promising to mail the action figures later. Parents paid real money for cardboard and a promise. Nobody around the production saw any of this coming. Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan, privately called the script “fairy-tale rubbish.” But he was shrewd enough to negotiate 2.25% of royalties instead of a flat fee. About 20 minutes of total screen time earned his estate somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. Lucas himself was so convinced the film would flop that he offered Spielberg a bet while visiting the Close Encounters set: swap 2.5% of each other’s profits. Spielberg took it. That handshake has paid him around $40 million. And then the money started compounding. Lucas poured his Star Wars profits into ILM, the effects house he’d built for the film. When its computer graphics division got too expensive to maintain, he sold it to Steve Jobs in 1986 for $10 million. Jobs renamed it Pixar. Disney bought Pixar twenty years later for $7.4 billion. Then in 2012, Disney came back for the rest, buying Lucasfilm itself for $4.05 billion. Total franchise revenue today sits around $46.7 billion, over $20 billion from merchandise alone. The filmmaker 40 studios passed on is now worth $5.3 billion according to Forbes. Fifty years ago today, cameras rolled on a desert in Tunisia. The $350,000 pay cut that made it all possible might be the best trade in business history.

Her own teammate exposed her as a liar who made the whole thing up as a way of turning a fifth place tie into a media career. She wasn't silenced she was paid to amplify propaganda

ICE is not at airports to help TSA and reduce lines. They are there (without identification) trying to arrest people, exactly as I predicted. ICE must be abolished.

any democratic senator reliably winning their blue state by double digits does not need to do this shit

BREAKING. Thirty-six hours ago President Donald Trump said “obliterate.” This morning he said “productive conversations.” The question every trader, diplomat, and general is asking: what broke between Saturday night and Monday morning? Six things broke simultaneously. Not one of them was Iranian. First. The bill arrived. The Pentagon requested over $200 billion in supplemental funding. The war cost $11.3 billion in six days, $16.5 billion in twelve. At $1.38 billion per day and accelerating, congressional resistance to the supplemental is real. The money that was supposed to fund “days not weeks” now needs a vote that may not pass. Second. The Fed killed the rate-cut thesis. On March 18, the Federal Reserve held rates at 3.5 to 3.75 percent and revised its 2026 PCE inflation forecast to 2.7 percent from 2.4, citing the Iran war energy shock. The dot plot shows one cut in all of 2026, down from two. Every basis point of delayed easing is pain for housing, credit, and the Magnificent Seven. The war that was supposed to demonstrate strength is demonstrating inflation. Third. The allies revolted politely. Twenty-two countries signed up to coordinate on Hormuz. Zero committed a warship during combat. Japan is releasing strategic reserves. South Korea’s Kospi has fallen 12 percent. Europe’s gas surged 35 percent after Qatar’s LNG was knocked offline & declared force majeure up to 5 years. Trump called NATO “cowards” and got a press release. The coalition of the willing is a coalition of the waiting. Fourth. TSMC sent the signal. Taiwan imports nearly 97 percent of its energy. Its LNG reserves cover 11 days. Qatar supplies a third of global helium, which TSMC needs for chip fabrication. The helium is bottled behind a closed strait. Every Nvidia GPU, every Apple chip, every AI cluster depends on a fab in Hsinchu counting its gas in single-digit days. The Magnificent Seven have shed hundreds of billions as energy rotation crushes tech. Fifth. Birol named the damage. The IEA chief told Australia this morning that 40 energy assets across nine countries are severely damaged, global oil supply has fallen 11 million barrels per day, the crisis exceeds both 1970s shocks combined, and no country is immune. He named fertilisers and helium as interrupted flows. The man who runs global energy security called the war Trump started the worst energy crisis in modern history. Sixth. The midterms. Gas prices are up 93 cents per gallon. Sixty-six percent of Americans call this a war of choice. Sixty percent disapprove. Fifty-seven percent say it is going badly. The numbers that matter in Washington are not barrels per day. They are approval ratings in swing states where voters fill their tanks every Tuesday. Six pressures. One post. President Trump did not discover diplomacy. He discovered arithmetic. The 48-hour ultimatum was a threat. The 5-day pause is a confession that the threat’s consequences were worse than its target. Destroying power plants would have sealed the strait permanently, triggered Ghalibaf’s promise to “irreversibly destroy” Gulf desalination and energy infrastructure, crashed TSMC’s supply chain, spiked inflation past 3 percent, and handed the midterms to the opposition on a platter of $7 gasoline. The pause is real. The relief is not. The strait is still closed. The 40 assets are still damaged. The fertiliser is still blocked. The planting window is still closing. The five-day clock is already ticking. The molecules do not negotiate. The molecules wait. Full deep dive analysis: open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…