Post #2010756

2026-03-26 03:37 UTC

I once sat on a plane from Stockholm to New York with two guys from Connecticut who were returning home from making deals to buy super-high-quality steel that was made in Sweden. They told me that their buying trip had been a big success, because they had spent the previous six months looking into the life and background of every man who ran the companies they were buying from. About one man, for example, they had discovered he was into S&M and liked being on the receiving end. With another guy, they discovered he had a gambling problem and was in debt. Badly. Neither guy knew what these two men from the U.S. knew about them. I hardly need tell you how well their negotiations for super-hard steel went.

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@orrickle@sfba.social 2026-03-26 03:38

What do you think Witkoff and Kushner know about the new leader of Iran? Oh, I’m sure the CIA and Israel’s Mossad have been gathering stuff on the late Ayatollah’s son for years. They certainly knew where the Ayatollah and his top people would be on February 28. But they don’t appear to know where the son is now. The Israelis have killed a couple of Iran’s military leaders over the last weeks, but we already knew that Iran does everything in depth, as the military likes to say. They had layers of leadership, political and military, ready to go if the original guys were knocked off. So how deep did our research go on the new guys? Trump’s geniuses have at least located a couple of guys through the good offices of Pakistan whom they appear to be attempting to negotiate with. And so we must ask now what kind of negotiating are they doing?

Open ##2010758