Rantburg's backup server, rkka.org, goes dark today as I switch over to FreeBSD 15.0 operating system.
Rkka.org has been in near continuous operation for about 22 years, continuing operation once this switch over is complete. I am told by the hosting company that I will have approximately 72 hours to complete the changeover. I hope to have it done in 18 hours, so we shall see.
Much of the preparatory work was done weeks ago; I’ve simply been waiting for this day.
Rkka.org was last updated in 2021 with FreeBSD 13.1, and is in dire need of the newly developed, primarily security tools that I have and use on Rantburg proper.
As had been mentioned in previous posts about this changeover, the backup element of the server and the O Club chat will be completed and tested first. I must have more than 100 scripts written for the various other websites that rkka.org hosts, some of which have been changed over from using a perl background to PHP. All those may well need to be rewritten.
A Technical Note will appear when those parts of the backup server are live.
Breathtaking-holding Thanks for all you do to keep us operational.
[DAVEMANUEL] ORIGINALLY
16th Amendment - Allowed Permanent Income Tax
Gave Congress explicit power to tax income without apportionment among states. It was ratified by 42 of 48 states.
The original Federal Revenue Act of 1913 allowed:
1% tax on incomes over $3,000, rising to 7% on incomes over $500,000. Which only affected the top 3% of US households.
Adjusted for inflation, $3,000 in 1914 is equal to $97,216 in 2026.
So if you made less than $97,000 you paid NO Income Tax.
What was 1% for $97K is now:
10% for as little as $1.00 to $11,925,
12% for income from $11,926 to $48,475,
22% for income from $48,476 to $103,350,
What you do with the $$$$$ if the 1913 Tax brackets applied to you?
#1
It was sold as a tax on the rich to replace the liquor tax so prohibition could happen since the liquor tax was most of the federal income at that time along with tariffs.
Fast forward and liquor taxes are not going to the federal coffers, the tax now fucks everyone and we are deeper in debt.
#3
Speaking of. Today is the day that the major thought-leaders, bankers and influencers of their day who opposed income tax, today is the day they all died on the Titanic. I do not think it is a coincidence that tax day is the day the opposition to it were all killed.
#IncomeTaxSerfs
Playing politics when the situation is existential. Would he be happier if America had continued to do nothing until a small boat sailed Iran’s final nuclear bomb up to a Washington, DC dock on the Potomac River after nuking Jerusalem and Mecca? His position is utterly sophomoric, because the point is not about imminence, it is about finally finishing something that has been going on for 47 years. Not that the honourable Senator matters, actually — had President Trump not enthusiastically joined in, Israel would have done it alone, leaving us to join so much of the rest of the world in wallowing in cowardice.
[Breitbart] Tuesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said the evidence that Iran was an imminent threat to the United States was not there.
Co-host Joe Kernen said, “You have such a tough job. I asked Senator Scott, and he said, I love Senator Paul because you never waver, but everybody wavers. I was going to ask you about war powers, and the Constitution is messy, and to stick with it as you do in the real world, it’s hard. I don’t know why you even have this job. It must be so difficult at this point for you, right? It’s a pain.”
Paul said, “If not me, who will do it? Somebody needs to do it. And people say, ‘Oh, be on the team.’ There’s enough people on the team. There needs to be somebody not on the team on occasion who says, ”You know what, we have to vote on the initiation of war, it’s our obligation. And that’s what our founders put in there, because they didn’t want all the power in one person.”
Kernen said, “Right, but you look at how many times, you know, the War Powers Act was essentially violated, you wonder why people say, well, it was, you know, Libya, Kosovo, all these other things. It just seems like, de facto, it’s not relevant anymore or something.”
Paul said, “The interesting thing about the War Powers Act is it’s misreported all the time. It’s misreported it as a reporting, requirement that after 60 days, the president needs to report. Well, people don’t read the whole War Powers Act. War Powers Act only says there’s three instances when a president can go to war, a declaration by Congress, use of authorization of force by Congress or an imminent threat.”
He added, “So really, the debate now should be is a 47-year-old conflict and imminent threat. Were there changes in their nuclear program that made this an imminent threat? And I don’t think the evidence is there that there was an imminent threat that would allow the president to go to war on his own.”
Posted by: Whiskey Mike ||
04/15/2026 1:51 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Iran has been at war with the USA since 1979 when it seized the US Embassy and took US embassy personnel hostage. Such an act has been a commonly understood act of war going back many centuries. The IRI has been killing US citizens numbering at least in the 100s since then. Iran's war on the USA has been going for a bit over 46 years.
[AmericanGreatness] America’s leverage in the Strait exposes Iran’s weakness—turning its greatest asset into a liability and reshaping the balance of power without a ground war.
The prognosis of the Iran War is now so couched in politics and so warped by the American Left that the public has grown tired and wants it all to go away. But in truth, the situation is so fluid that any accurate prediction is impossible. Yet there is good reason to believe in an eventual outcome quite favorable to the U.S. and one far better than the status quo ante bellum.
THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ
Prior to President Trump’s most recent announcement that the United States would first blockade and then reopen and control traffic through the Strait, only a few ships were going through, mostly those aligned with Iran, opposed to the United States, or neutral.
Thus, the Strait was disrupted to a far greater degree than during Iran’s earlier efforts at closure during the “Tanker War” phase of the Iran–Iraq War, as well as its chronic harassment of shipping in 2018–19. And now?
If Trump quickly clears and secures control of the Strait, and if allowable traffic reaches, say, 60–70 percent of prewar levels and if the U.S. avoids a full-scale war, instead responding disproportionately to any renewed Iranian attempts to close it—then, within one to two months, oil prices will begin to taper off.
The American challenge with the war is not military but political. This time, the U.S. is not sending Marines to fight house to house in Fallujah or to scour villages on the ground in Helmand Province—losing hundreds in casualties and fighting in circumstances favorable to jihadists and terrorists.
Instead, the administration is restrained in its use of force only by concerns about the war’s effects on the U.S. economy, global oil prices, domestic gas prices, the midterm elections, and the political fortunes of vulnerable Republican members of Congress.
Militarily, the U.S. has choices. The Navy can continue demining the Strait, rotate patrols of U.S. and allied warships through it, allow allied and neutral shipping to pass while blocking Iranian-bound ships, and periodically strike Iran whenever it attempts to disrupt shipping—including clearing its coasts of missiles and drones. In other words, Trump can flip the Iranian strategy of selective entrance to the Strait, with the key difference that he has the wherewithal to carry out such a calibrated blockade, and Iran does not. World opinion will be with him, for economic reasons and, should Iran seek to stop him, for its breaking the ceasefire and thus justifying the rain of retaliatory bombs that will descend upon it.
Or if Iran restarts missile and drone attacks on U.S. military and allies in the region, the administration can warn Iran that it will lose its oil facilities on Kharg Island as well as dual-use generation plants—until it relents.
But in the long term, no one will forget Iran’s third—and most egregious—effort to hijack the Strait, despite its failure to do so completely and for any sustained period.
The Gulf exporters will double down on their Red Sea and Gulf of Oman pipelines, which bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia and others will explore more routes, perhaps even through Jordan to Israel and Haifa on the Mediterranean.
In the end, Iran will be left with an inert asset—if not a liability—since the United States can ensure that no oil flows from Kharg Island through the patrolled Strait, which the West may ultimately render irrelevant anyway. Importers will quietly begin shifting toward increased output from Venezuela, the United States, and perhaps a soon-to-be unsanctioned Russia. Iran’s attacks on 11 Muslim nations in the Middle East will not be lost on the people of the region. Many of the sheikdoms will continue to press Israel and the U.S. to ensure Iran does not rearm. A sane Gulf would not give any more money to Hamas, given its hostile and hated lunatic patron.
REGIME CHANGE
Iran lost most of its 47-year-old, multibillion-dollar investment in weapons as well as its military-industrial complex.
To rearm will cost the regime dearly—and that vast expense will be unpopular with a restive populace short of food and fuel.
It will be hard for whoever is running the country to reestablish its military arsenals and multibillion-dollar subsidies to Arab terrorists. Indeed, Iran’s subsidized proxies—Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis—may be left orphaned, despised by the Iranian people, and perhaps even more hated by some of their former Gulf co-sponsors. The odd myth of Iranian military invulnerability is shattered. And that loss of face, too, will have consequences soon at home and abroad. The Iranian people will further grow angry that the one nationalist argument made by the Iranian mullahs—that at least its half-century, half-trillion-dollar military buildup sent shivers throughout the Middle East, terrified the West, and gave global cred to Iran—has now also imploded.
It is one thing for the people to be ruled by globally feared autocrats armed to the teeth, but quite another to be governed by humiliated, now-impotent incompetents and buffoons.
Once the Berlin Wall fell, it took weeks and sometimes months for Eastern Europeans to overthrow their communist oppressors. And it required more than two years after the wall went down for its full effects to ripple out and dissolve the Soviet Union. On that basis, then, no one should expect regime change merely days after the cessation of the war.
The West has little real idea who is currently running Iran or who or even what they represent.
All that is known is that second- or third-tier theocrats, military officers, politicos, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps thugs are vying for power. Each cadre has likely become terrified that it will either be seen as too accommodating and attacked by the hard-liners—or that rivals will defect and cut a deal with the Iranian people to serve as transitional figures, thereby avoiding the noose. The worst of the worst know that if they are not killed by drones or missiles in any renewed hostilities, they may instead be killed by the Iranian people if and when the regime collapses.
WINNERS AND LOSERS
The eventual beneficiaries and casualties of the war will become clear over the next three or four weeks, hinging on whether the U.S. concludes that those in charge are worthless negotiators who, if Iran persists in attacks, will have to be persuaded by further force.
But on the larger map, the once anti-Western bloc—Russia’s Assad regime in Syria, China’s Iran satellite, and Iran’s own proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis—is either gone, tottering, humiliated, or increasingly isolated.
Russia’s brief advantage from higher oil prices will end soon. It will remain stuck in a Somme-like quagmire in Ukraine, and its weapons corridor to and from Iran will be hard to restore to prewar levels. If Putin were smart, he would cut a deal with Ukraine, seek relief from sanctions on Russian oil, and then pump like crazy.
China has lost its exclusive oil concessions with Venezuela and may have forfeited a similar sweetheart deal with Iran, now or in the near future. If the regime falls, Beijing will likely be hated by any subsequent transitional government. It may instead seek to come to some arrangement with the U.S. to send its tankers through the Strait—if Iran does not provoke the U.S. and lose Kharg Island.
Posted by: NoMoreBS ||
04/15/2026 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[1792 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Iran
#3
Yes, Besoeker, good comments. Have you participated?
Posted by: Bobby ||
04/15/2026 9:00 Comments ||
Top||
#4
Anything other than complete regime change is a fatal move. "It's better to have a dead enemy behind you than a live fool who might have learned something."__ Anon
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
