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REALITY 101 PART 1
SO MANY RECENT TRAGEDIES MIGHT HAVE BEEN AVOIDED with a course in Reality 101. Its syllabus would include basics of elementary history, economics, science, and medicine. In Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow, tidbits follow here gleaned from recent news sources.
The Trump/Netanyahu War vs History. Jeremy Bowen writes “Trump and Netanyahu Wanted to Reshape the Middle East—Now They Risk a Permacrisis,” BBC, June 9, 2026: “The Iranian regime has proved to be a much harder nut to crack than Trump and Netanyahu had assumed. Their judgement was wrong, and they have lost control of the consequences.”
History provides plenty of examples of this dating back to the British (“You have been to Afghanistan, I perceive,” Holmes says to Watson in 1881). And then there are the Russians 1979–1989.
And the U.S. Persian Gulf War (1990–1991), Operation Enduring Freedom (2001–2014), Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–2010), Operation New Dawn (2010–2011), and Operation Freedom’s Sentinel (2015–2021).
Is a pattern suggested in this? See “Gauging the Impact of Massive U.S.-Israeli Strikes on Iran,” Council on Foreign Affairs, February 28, 2026.
And “Trump Pledged No Forever Wars. Now He Risks Forever Talks with Iran,” The Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2026: “Tehran has well-worn playbook for putting off concessions that cross its redlines.”
Trump Crypto vs Investors. Rafael Nam reports “Trump Earned More Than $1 Billion From Crypto—But His Investors Didn’t Fare So Well,” NPR, July 2, 2026. Nam writes, “Essentially, Trump has gone back to the blueprint that has earned him so much money as a businessman—effectively, find ways to earn a lot of money but make sure to protect himself and his family from any downsides. And he does this mainly through two way—licensing his name, because he knows his name has a lot of value, especially to his supporters, and making his money up front.”
Trump’s Memes. “Meme coins,” Nam describes, “for those who haven’t heard the term, are essentially cryptocurrencies that are based on silly things like memes or even cartoons. That licensing deal made him over $600 million. That’s a substantial amount of money. But unfortunately for investors who bought into this meme coin, they ended up doing really badly because it crashed in value. It went from over $70 to just over $1, and that’s obviously a huge fall. But Trump benefited anyway. He has his royalty deal, so he can make money from each transaction.”
How Do The Marks Feel? Nam reports, “… one data firm called Chain Analysis (ph) estimates that there are more than 750,000 investment accounts that are holding these meme coins that are effectively almost now worthless.” Nam continues, “…you have to keep in mind that a lot of these investors who bought into the cryptocurrencies backed by the Trump family are generally big Trump supporters, and many are still standing by him even though, financially, they may be hurting.”
Gee, another batch of people needing Reality 101.
Tomorrow in Part 2, we get the weather report from no less than Thomas Jefferson, cancellations because of torrid heat, and, sadly, people still catching measles. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2026
Simanaitis Says 
The above is another cogent, concise, remarkable compilation from Dr. Simanaitis on how we got to our present maelstrom via a former TV game show host rendered loudmouth playboy with no other job experience thanks to daddy’s over-leveraged real estate.
How future K-12 history books will explain how our nation so readily devolved from strong semblance of democracy to plutocracy in a decade will be interesting, very.
The old saw about Republicans being “good for the economy” has of course been undone long ago, not the least when Bill Clinton left us with our biggest ever federal budget surplus, and Alfred E. Newman, aka Shrub W. Junior, our biggest ever federal budget deficit a mere eight years later.
President Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry hammered out as sound an agreement with a shaky Iran as possible, only to have all that work undone by the aforementioned loudmouth bubble boy, simply as he wanted another distraction from the Trumpstein Files.