“Death is but a door; time is but a window,” Mojtaba Khamenei declared on Tuesday.

Wait. Sorry. That was Vigo the Carpathian. But the younger Khamenei did make a statement today, and it was every bit as comedically theatrical as something that might emanate from a Ghostbusters villain.

“The hands of time do not turn backward,” Khamenei mused, proclaiming the self-evident. “The nations and lands of the region will no longer serve as shields for American bases.”

Khamenei carried on and on (and on and on) in what, to non-observers anyway, felt like a farcically overwrought polemic that doubled as a Eid al-Adha devotional.

Hours earlier, the US launched what the Pentagon described as “self-defense” strikes against IRGC naval assets near Bandar Abbas, where the Guards were milling around missile launchers and preparing to lay sea mines, a CENTCOM spokesman alleged.

That aggravated the Guards. “Violations of the ceasefire will be met with a decisive reciprocal response,” they seethed, in a statement of their own. Later, they claimed to have downed an MQ-9 reaper. They also fired at an F-35.

In Lebanon, a dozen people were killed in Mashghara by the IDF, which ordered more evacuations amid a stepped-up bombing campaign. Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s “increasing the blows on Hezbollah.” (I know. I know.)

Through it all, negotiations aimed at settling on mutually-agreeable language for Donald Trump’s MOU continued, primarily in Qatar. Marco Rubio (who, I should note, isn’t in Doha, but rather in New Delhi) said there’s “a lot of talking back and forth about specific language in the initial document.” “It’ll take a few days,” he added.

Over on TruthSocial, buried under a series of absurdist memes including an AI image of a shotgun-wielding Trump riding a rhino, the leader of the free world again demanded Iran “destroy” its “nuclear dust.”

In what, for Trump, counted as conciliatory language, he offered a few suggestions for how Tehran might go about satisfying that deal stipulation.

“Preferably,” he said, the enriched uranium will be destroyed on the spot “in conjunction and coordination with the Islamic Republic of Iran.” He said the process should take place in the presence of on-the-ground witnesses from America’s Atomic Energy Commission.

I don’t know if anyone’s told Trump, but the AEC was dissolved 50 years ago.