Trump’s war posture is now entirely physical: assets move, bases clear, smelly repairs bite, protests flare, and Iran has put retaliation on record. Right, so Donald Trump is continuing his game of chicken with Iran, and the part that’s turned ugly here – well there’s a few of them - isn’t so much the shouting, it’s the receipts, because the United States is trying to project “readiness” while the practical reality being reported is strain, friction, and timetable, and the small detail that he can’t pep-talk a massively faulty sewage system into working. The USS Gerald R. Ford, can be smelt before it is seen it seems as it has been reported as having ongoing, massive sewage system failures, because despite the price tag of the vessel sitting at $13Bn, they ballsed up the toilets. Despite there being 600 toilets to serve the needs of more than 4500 crew members, narrow pipes, frequent clogs, toilets going down have been reported hundreds of times. In one instance whilst on deployment in Venezuela, over 200 toilet tantrums got reported in the space of a single day and with deployment having been extended again so the vessel could be deployed straight to the Eastern Mediterranean, the issue appears to only have gotten worse. Sailors queueing for in excess of 45 minutes, engineers dragged into long shifts to keep a basic sanitation system going on a ship carrying thousands of people. That’s a war platform supposedly advertised as the flagship of US military dominance and effortless control, and then you hear the human detail from on board that says the crew are living in a rotating set of “this works, this doesn’t” constraints. It is the perfect metaphor for Donald Trump’s position against Iran in my minds, because it, like him, is full of sh**.