Stop the Stupid! Iran Wars and Immigration Wars Show Signs of Catastrophic Stupidity
Some of the apparent stupidity may just be to obscure war plans, which MAY be smart, but some of it is clearly already quite stupid and self-harming.
While I lost one paying subscriber who told me how stupid I am about the Israel-Iran war (and certainly gained none for my views), the news headlines today about that war and about the immigration “war” are coming in exactly as I forecast for both wars, so I have nothing to apologize for, unless getting it right is a flaw when it was not what someone wanted to believe. However, there is stupidity to be found.
I cannot help if I am unable to claim this war is the start of World War III as many seem to want to believe and are already claiming—so quick are they to the next conspiracy theory or tale of apocalyptic doom or readiness to hate Israel or hate Jews. Whatever each one’s individual reasons, they know what they want to believe.
I am only interested in saying how things will actually play out. I don’t go by what I WANT to believe or by what my readers want to believe or by what juices up my storylines. Not ever if I can help it! If that costs me success, so be it. With respect to the war in Iran and the war in Ukraine, both are going exactly as I said would be most likely. So, nothing to apologize for, except someone not liking the truth. Their problem. Actual truth is often not popular. My problem. It is what it is.
While I am always more than ready to forecast apocalyptic doom where I actually see it coming, I have no willingness to make it up for the sake of click-bait headlines or for the sake of bone-chilling stories. I go where I believe rational judgement shows our irrational times are likely to go … if that makes any rational sense. Maybe it does not, but that’s me.
So, let me give you the for-instances in the present Iran War and in the Immigration War because the whole point is to be accurate in what I indicate, not sensational or popular, though popularity would be nice if things worked out that way; but if they don’t (and they often do not because people know what they WANT to hear), oh well. It is what it is….
So, here are the war stories that dominated the headlines today, and they all square with what I said we could anticipate along with the caveats that I laid out where things can always spin out of control if people are dumb enough to go there (which, SO FAR, they are not (yet) in the war in Iran but ARE in the war on migrants):
The China syndrome
The first story tells how President Xi of China is showing absolutely no willingness to get involved in helping Iran in its fight against Israel. It explains why that one particular member of Iran’s axis of evil is disengaged, and that fits exactly what I said we’d see from China: Here it is in a nutshell:
China was quick to condemn Israel after its assault against Iran. Yet President Xi Jinping has shown no sign of rushing to provide weapons and other support that would help Tehran face its most critical military test in decades….
China has yet to offer any material support to Iran beyond continuing its normal trading relationship, an approach it also took with Russia….
“China may be offering economic relief and rhetorical support to Iran, but actual military intervention is not anywhere near the table yet,” said Wen-Ti Sung, nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. “China does not want to risk getting entrapped by Iran’s war with an Israel that has the Trump administration behind it.”
While the US has a history of becoming embroiled in protracted wars far from home, China’s reluctance to get entangled in foreign conflicts is a hallmark of Xi’s foreign policy.
Exactly! Expect China to continue to stay out of it. That has long been Xi’s modus operandi. He’s not looking for wars he doesn’t need that bring no profit to China. So, his involvement will be a diplomatic war of words. One major member of the Iran’s axis, OUT.
The broken axis of evil
The next two articles tell about how and why all the other members of Iran’s axis are OUT. Here is the gist from the first of those two articles:
“For decades, Iran’s leaders built up a network of allied militias in the Middle East that shared a hatred of Israel and America to gain regional influence and protect the regime. But as the theocracy is now fighting for its own survival, its allies are missing in action,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Lebanon’s Hezbollah, once seen as the most powerful in Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, hasn’t fired a single missile since Israel attacked Iran. Its military capabilities and leadership have been decimated by Israeli forces over the past year. Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, is a shadow of itself after 20 months of war with Israel that has seen its leaders killed and Gaza destroyed.”
“In Iraq, Iranian-backed Shiite militias haven’t targeted U.S. military bases, as they have in the past. And Yemen’s Houthi militia fired several missiles at Israel on Sunday, but have remained silent since.”
The same word I used—“decimated”—and the exact situations I laid out for each player. All four normal axis participants are adding nothing to the Israel-Iran war equation. They have been so badly damaged they really are not able to deliver any more harm than what they were currently already trying to do. So, getting them angry makes absolutely no difference because they are already as angry as they can be and are already very limited in how much they can do.
The second article also summarizes how the axis has come undone and adds the same statements I made earlier about what we could expect to see from the other major player in the axis—Russia—and mentions Syria, giving the same perspective that I said we could expect to see:
During the earlier clashes with Western foes, Iran always projected power across the Middle East using a network of close allies giving a formidable response for any strike.
However, Israel’s Operation Rising Lion over the past three days shows that the network — Axis of Resistance – has now come undone….
Israel has controlled Tehran’s closest ally Hezbollah while rebels ousted its main regional partner, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad….
When Hamas attacked Israeli communities on October 7, 2023, it triggered massive military retaliation that has killed much of the group’s top leadership including political chief Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Tehran last summer. Hamas is still fighting in Gaza and retains a significant presence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, but it does not presently boast a military force capable of posing a realistic threat to Israel.
The war quickly spread as Iran’s most important regional ally Hezbollah fired on Israel from Lebanon in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, leading to months of cross-border fire between the group and Israel. That conflict suddenly escalated in September 2024 when Israel detonated thousands of booby-trapped pagers used by Hezbollah operatives, killing and maiming hundreds of them. Over the following weeks a string of Israeli airstrikes killed Hezbollah’s top leadership including overall chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, dealing the group a stunning blow and revealing how far it had been infiltrated. Hezbollah accepted a ceasefire with Israel in November and remains far from the powerful organisation that once threatened Israeli security.
… ally Russia bogged down with war in Ukraine …
There are simply no surprises there, and that is why this is not automatically going to be WWIII, as most of us, at one time, believed any war between Israel and Iran would be because all of Israel’s enemies would jump in. They were already in, and have already been largely and systematically taken out before this war began.
But stupid is a stupid does
That said, it doesn’t mean stupidity cannot escalate things to the point of becoming WWIII, as it is clearly always possible for stupidity or arrogance to go that far. Without saying Trump is going to do anything stupid by directly attacking Iran, he’s clearly trying to imply he might. That might be good policy to keep Iran off balance and leverage our own threats to keep them from dragging us in by bombing our bases. So long as that is all it is.
If we were to get directly involved in attacking Iran beyond just providing weapons to Israel, I think that would become a foolish quagmire that needlessly damages the US. We need to keep the situation clear-cut and solely about entirely dismantling Iran’s nuclear facilities. Since the risk of those facilities is almost entirely directed at Israel, this is their war to fight. We can and should support by offering the defensive measures we are offering because more nations with nuclear bombs doesn’t help anyone. So, let Israel fight the battle if it wants to.
We should remain out of the attacking and leave that as Israel’s war. Whether we will or not, Trump doesn’t want us to know. He takes pride in the fact that he appears off balance … like a bomb that could blow at any moment. So, I don’t know what he will do because he doesn’t want anyone to be able to guess what he will do, and he’s always shown his modus operandi on everything is to flip-flop all over the place.
(Wall still not built and NOT EVEN CLOSE, as another story in the headlines below points out today. Mexico not paying for it. Never did, never will. Obamacare never rescinded or replaced. No great alternative health plan ever proposed. TACO-king tariffs off and on all over the place on a daily changing basis so no one in business knows what to plan for. ICE raids on with military force, suddenly called off, slammed back on the next day! Trump is as erratic as a fish on a hot sidewalk—the King of Chaos—because that is what he likes to be. He loves to create chaos and conflict and stir the pot. He thrives on that energy like a guy who loves to watch an intense boxing match just for fun; but the world should not be his boxing arena.)
If Trump decides to make the Israel-Iran War about regime change, as his predecessors in US government have always intended to do, then it becomes a huge mess and a quagmire where all hell breaks loose to the fullest extent the Ayatollah can pull off, and those kinds of wars we’ve always found are not the simple 100-day war that our tyrannical leaders promise they will be where we are heralded as the “great liberators” at the end of the day by the surviving families of the quarter-million-or-so people we slaughtered in order to take the regime down. Turns out they all loved their now-dead families more than they craved the removal of some deranged despot. So, they don’t wind up feeling thankful to the US. Who would’ve guessed?
Some loose lips in Israel’s government are already saying this needs to become about regime change. That is where arrogance leads, and if Israel is dumb enough to do anything that looks like regime change, who knows how much they could escalate the chaos, bringing calamity down on everyone?
So, the potential is always there for this to go badly sideways, but if they keep it strictly about the nuclear program and don’t start tit-for-tat retaliation against Iranian civilians because Iran flew a missile into a hospital with nothing military in the neighborhood to justify such a “miss,” as Iran is calling it, then the axis is too weak or too preoccupied or too disinterested to do anything just for the sake of helping Iran fulfill its mission of becoming a nuclear-armed player on the global scene.
This is not inherently WWIII, as it once would have been, but stupidity and/or arrogant overreach could take it there. Let’s hope rational minds somehow prevail and stay with a strictly defined mission. That would be a rarity for the US, but it would keep Trump, at least, at the edge of being the kind of guy he said he would be when it came to foreign wars.
The casualties of all wars will hit the US, too
The usual impacts of any hot war are, of course, playing out in the predictable ways I mentioned. They were NOT hard for anyone to predict, so I mostly made those predictions as a way of being clear that I was not saying there will be no bad repercussions for the US from all of this. We already see the repercussions I talked about coming in, which is more the inevitability part than any great prediction, which I brought up just to say we WILL face these costs.
Shipping costs for oil are rising as traffic is backing up through the Straight of Hormuz out of concern that merchant-marine ships may continue to be damaged, as happened a couple of days ago. Shell Oil points out that the jamming of GPS is slowing traffic way down in order to avoid catastrophes, and the CEO points out that, Iran easily could shut down all traffic through the straight if it chose to do so and that doing so would hugely inflate the price of oil. Already, shipping insurance costs are skyrocketing.
Those are all pretty much no-brainers, so not offered as any insightful prediction, but just a clear warning of the high risks to expect, which will add to the inflationary pressures that will be coming from tariffs as products hit the shelves. (Tariff inflation should also be a no-brainer, but it is stunning how many people can’t even be argued into believing it will come this summer. It will to whatever extent the tariffs actually happen and hold!)
These costs are also worth mentioning because, if the war becomes about regime change, then the Iranian government has nothing left to lose; so it will shut down the straight because that isn’t hard to do. Just start floating mines around and lobbing rockets at unarmed tankers. It only takes a few hits to sink one or two merchant ships to get all shipping to stop because no one wants to risk losing a supertanker. It’s easy to move to a scorched-earth policy and create an ecological disaster if you have no reason to care any longer how much damage you do because you know you’re going to be slaughtered anyway as part of the plan. So, better keep that outa the plan!
So, one reason for laying out these risks, is to show why it would be stupid to make this war about regime change. The more people who see that, maybe the more there is some prospect that Trump and Israel don’t go that far. Maybe. So long as Iran’s leaders have hope of surviving, they may decide not to take out the earth around them. Keep it about ending the nuclear threat for good, and go no further. Have a clear objective. Get in and get out as quickly as possible, and leave the getting in and getting out entirely to Israel as their war to fight.
The migrant war
Finally, we see confirmation of exactly the things I warned about in the immigration war (fair to call it that, I suppose, since Trump has called out the military for assistance). I’m all for curtailing immigration (always have been). I am, however, for doing it thoughtfully and methodically, but only if we are demonstrably serious about actually doing that. I see no reason for shooting ourselves in the foot or slaughtering our farmers by how we go about it.
Today’s news shows how we ARE shooting ourselves in the foot in exactly the ways I warned would simply be stupid and self-harming. There are smarter ways, as I lined out on Tuesday.
ICE raids and their uncertainty scare off workers and baffle businesses
Farmers, cattle ranchers and hotel and restaurant managers breathed a sigh of relief last week when President Donald Trump ordered a pause to immigration raids that were disrupting those industries and scaring foreign-born workers off the job.
“There was finally a sense of calm,’’ said Rebecca Shi, CEO of the American Business Immigration Coalition.
That respite didn’t last long.
On Wednesday, Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin declared, “There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine (immigration enforcement) efforts. Worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to safeguard public safety, national security and economic stability.’’
The flipflop baffled businesses trying to figure out the government’s actual policy, and Shi says now “there’s fear and worry once more….”
“That’s not a way to run business when your employees are at this level of stress and trauma,” she said.
While I think we should round up illegal immigrants from most businesses and deport them with all the due processing of simply checking their paperwork for proper visas and kicking them back across the border if they don’t have the paperwork they need, I think it is dumb to throw away good food and cripple farmers because terrified immigrants don’t show up for work, so crops rot and cows get mastitis and other problems from not being milked. That’s just stupid. Therefore, a phased approach that allows farmers to work toward no increases in immigration—a plan THAT THEY CAN PLAN ON—would help a lot!
Instead, we have this:
The crackdown intensified a few weeks ago when Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, gave the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement a quota of 3,000 arrests a day, up from 650 a day in the first five months of Trump’s second term.
Suddenly, ICE seemed to be everywhere. “We saw ICE agents on farms, pointing assault rifles at cows, and removing half the workforce,’’ said Shi, whose coalition represents 1,700 employers and supports increased legal immigration.
One ICE raid left a New Mexico dairy with just 20 workers, down from 55. “You can’t turn off cows,’’ said Beverly Idsinga, the executive director of the Dairy Producers of New Mexico. “They need to be milked twice a day, fed twice a day.’’
This is even inhumane to the animals. It is not natural for a cow to suddenly stop getting milked. In nature, a calf nurses less as it grows and starts eating grass, and its mother weens it off milk. That way the cow’s utter slowly shuts down and goes dry. If you just stop milking, you can injure the cows that have no way of expressing their own milk because they are not kept with their calves and are bred to produce more milk than their calves can ever consume (for our sakes), so their utters become engorged and inflamed with spoiling milk. All if fine SO LONG AS THEY GET MILKED TWICE A DAY! When you have operations with thousands of cows per farm, the farmer cannot go out there and relieve them all without a lot of help to do it, even with automatic milkers. And the loss of milk is a waste of good food (and ultimately good cows because they may die from infection). So, it is DUMB! Can I say that loud enough—ABSOLUTELY DUMB!
And, the thing of it is, the problem is instant. It exists as soon as you scare those migrant workers away, and there is nothing you can do about it once you’ve created the scare because there is no other sudden influx of workers with the right skills or willingness to do the job. Basic as those skills are, you still have KNOW how to milk a cow and be willing to do the work. So, you’ve just shot yourself and all your farmers in the foot. It is an instant problem because crops and animals don’t wait!
It even comes right down to the specifics I warned about on Tuesday, which I made not based on any news report but based on simple facts about farming schedules and reasonable conclusions about how migrant workers would respond to what is happening:
In some places, the problem isn’t ICE but rumors of ICE. At cherry-harvesting time in Washington state, many foreign-born workers are staying away from the orchards after hearing reports of impending immigration raids. One operation that usually employs 150 pickers is down to 20. Never mind that there hasn’t actually been any sign of ICE in the orchards.
The cherries are just going to rot on the trees, starting right away. You cannot find alternative crews fast enough to save a crop that is already starting to come in. This is the time when cherries start to ripen. Farmers have lined up immigrant workers for decades that they know they can count on to show up when harvest arrises. Every year, the crews arrive to the farms they are accustomed to working for. NOT SO NOW! And there is no time to adjust for that.
So, the government needs to instantly make it abundantly clear that we will NOT be arresting immigrant laborers who are not criminals this year! Certainly, not on farms or at food-processing plants. It is dumb to starve ourselves and waste food.
If we don’t do that this week, food will start to rot everywhere. Animals will start to starve for lack of food or become ill for lack of milking on schedule. That doesn’t even wait ONE DAY. The problem starts the day the workers don’t show up. So, the Trump administration needs to immediately stop its internal feud about this and get farm smart, or we’ll have a farming catastrophe on our hands that starts materializing TODAY.
Migrants need to know they and their families absolutely will not be harmed for working the farms (even the illegal ones so long as they are not criminals) now that we’ve created this depedent situation; then a clear and PREDICTABLE path needs to be laid out for how we move forward with minimizing immigration in the years ahead so crops don’t rot and cows don’t die in great pain.
You see, I will get apocalyptic where it is merited. We can go stupid with war just like we ARE clearly going stupid with farming.
Jennie Murray, CEO of the advocacy group National Immigration Forum, said some immigrant parents worry that their workplaces will be raided and they’ll be hauled off by ICE while their kids are in school. They ask themselves, she said: “Do I show up and then my second-grader gets off the school bus and doesn’t have a parent to raise them? Maybe I shouldn’t show up for work.’’
The Trump administration needs to immediately clear up that this will definitely NOT happen to agricultural laborers. For a second, Trump seemed to get that message and put on the brakes. A day later TACO King flipped because the base got mad:
The horror stories were conveyed to Trump, members of his administration and lawmakers in Congress by business advocacy and immigration reform groups like Shi’s coalition. Last Thursday, the president posted on his Truth Social platform that “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”
Of course. How could you not know that? However, with farming there is no margin of error. Living things won’t die if the hotels don’t get cleaned or the restaurant doesn’t have bottle washers. Businesses may die, but people and animals and crops will not. Living things WILL die and rapidly so if farm laborers do not show up. The animals, plants and food they produce are dependent on those workers.
Reality here is completely unforgiving and doesn’t budge for anyone. You either milk the cows today, or they start hurting badly tomorrow. Literally, tomorrow. You either pick the cherries as soon as they ripen, or they start rotting and falling on the ground, whether that fits your plans or not. (When you see a lighthouse shining through the fog in front of your ship, don’t radio the lighthouse and tell it to get out of your way! Change your course abruptly!)
It was another case of Trump’s political agenda slamming smack into economic reality. With U.S. unemployment low at 4.2%, many businesses are desperate for workers, and immigration provides them.
Team Trump needs to get out of the cities and onto the farms for some country education YESTERDAY.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, foreign-born workers made up less than 19% of employed workers in the United States in 2023. But they accounted for nearly 24% of jobs preparing and serving food and 38% of jobs in farming, fishing and forestry.
They probably account for more than that in farming. Most illegals don’t get counted. The fish will wait. More will make it through spawning if they are not caught, so there will be more of them next year. They will be happy not to be caught. The forests will wait. The trees will still be there. The farms will not wait, and you cannot immediately materialize a replacement labor force that large from your own citizens. There is no excuse for not seeing this coming—other than that our government may be city smart, but it is country DUMB. There is street smart, and there is field smart. They clearly lack the latter.
“It really is clear to me that the people pushing for these raids that target farms and feed yards and dairies HAVE NO IDEA how farms operate,” Matt Teagarden, CEO of the Kansas Livestock Association, said Tuesday during a virtual press conference.
Abundantly clear.
Now, I’m not saying that a phased approach wouldn’t also be smart for home construction and hotels and restaurants, which have become heavily dependent on migrant workers, too; but what I am saying is that for farming it is completely essential, or things die! not just businesses, and we all go hungrier. We are a big nation that NEEDS a big breadbasket. Let’s not be stupid for the sake of our ideology. We also help feed the world.
If we actually stuck to a phased approach in all of these industries, that would clearly be smarter for everyone, and Trump has four years to do that.
“We’re not sure from one month to the next what the rules are going to be or how they’ll be enforced. That uncertainty makes it really hard to operate a forward-looking business.”
Of course. That’s bad. The problem is we never do stick with a phased approach. We talk about it but never do it, so Trump wants to show we are really going to do it. Show we’re serious. Well, OK, but not with farming!
The animals are not going to wait for you to find new people to clean their stalls, feed them, milk them, etc. before they start suffering and getting ill and even dying. We clearly cannot afford to lose more chickens because no one shows up to feed them and clean the coops. (Sure, there is automation, but even the automated farms have a large number of migrants operating all the equipment. The farmer cannot do it all, nor find immediate replacements.) The food will not stop itself from rotting.
It is incredibly country-dumb for these city slickers to have not thought through things better than this from the start. It should be common sense even if you have no country sense.
“ICE had detained people who are here lawfully and so now lawful immigrants are afraid to go to work ... All of this goes against other economic objectives the administration might have. The immigration policy and the economic policy are not lining up at all.’’
Stop the stupid.
Know what you are killing before you kill it. It won’t come back to life if you smarten up a few days late.
