Iran War: Mixed Signals on US Resuming Kinetic Action as Iran Moves to Offensive Stance; Flight from Israel Accelerating

Please forgive me for providing an Iran war update that is a bit more telegraphic than usual. But many of the new sightings are in the res ipsa loquitur category. Aside from Iran continuing to attack UAE vessels, the action in the Strait of Hormuz arena have been limited. We’ll turn soon to Ansar Allah and the Saudis, which now is a hotter front. However, the US and Iran are still making noises that they will escalate, and at least with Iran, there is reason to pay heed. On the US front, the press is carrying conflicting stories, Most mainstream outlets are amplifying the idea that the US will keep the blockade on and bring Iran to its knees through economic strangulation. For instance, the lead headline at Aljazeera: This comes off as black humor in light of the fact that the navy is already cracking under the strain of its blockade thus far. Nevertheless, from the live feed: - US Vice President JD Vance has outlined Washington’s key objectives in the Iran conflict as keeping energy prices stable for Americans, preventing Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons and securing a stronger US position. - US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth says that the US can sustain its blockade against Iran “indefinitely”. Is there yet a prediction market opportunity to bet on how much longer Hegseth remains his post? Hindustan Times provides on-stop shopping on the contrary reports that CENTCOM chief Brad Cooper was just in Israel, pushing for escalation. This segment is unduly reliant on the questionable-because-anti-Iran bias Twitter account Iran International, but both YouTube and other Twitter accounts have reported on the underlying Israel Channel 13 story. A bit of backstory: Brad Cooper has long been known to be a hawk. Per Robert Barnes, who has advantaged access to court gossip, Dan Caine, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been as forceful as one can be given the bubble in which Trump operates in pointing out the limits of viable US operations and the downsides of hawk fever dreams like a ground operation. But Barnes has also suggested that Caine was being marginalized. Whether the scandal over the terrible conditions on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and (once the press and Congresscritters got on the case) its overdue rotation out of theater sufficiently damages Hegseth so as to put the other escalation advocates on the back foot remains to be seen. In the meantime, Iran is continuing its change in posture so as to be driving events rather than reacting to the US. From PressTV’s landing page: From Leader’s aide: Iran’s shift to offensive will alter global power equations: An adviser and aide to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Khamenei says the Leader’s strategy for Iran to shift the war to an offensive phase if its conditions are not met will “undoubtedly change the equations of power in the world.”… “The definite strategy of the Leader to make the war offensive if Iran’s conditions are not fulfilled will undoubtedly change the equations of power in the world,” {Mohammad] Mokhber wrote. PressTV also has a very fresh account that Iran downed yet another MQ-9 Reaper drone over Hormozgan in Southern Iran. The story adds: This came a day after the Washington Post reported that the United States has lost 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones since launching its war of aggression against Iran, with Iranian air defenses bringing down roughly a quarter of the US fleet and exposing the vulnerability of one of Washington’s key surveillance and strike platforms. According to the report, the losses could cost US taxpayers more than $1.3 billion, with each Reaper estimated to be worth between $30 million and $50 million, depending on its configuration. When the war began on February 28, the US had approximately 185 Reapers, including 165 operated by the Air Force and 20 by the Marine Corps. Mind you, the US is inflicting real damage on southern Iran…..on civilian activities. From DropSite in U.S. Infrastructure Strikes Have Left Iranians in the South Without Livelihoods: When U.S. strikes resumed in early July following a two-month pause, the attacks focused heavily on southern Iran. Interviews with residents in hard-hit southern provinces like Khuzestan, Hormozgan, Sistan, and Baluchestan describe strikes not only on military facilities, but also on critical civilian infrastructure, including fishing ports, bridges, telecommunications networks, power plants, hospitals, and transportation corridors. Dozens of communications towers have been knocked offline in repeated attacks, disrupting internet and telephone services. One attack on a transmission tower near Tappeh Aluakbar in Bandar Abbas killed five people, including a woman who died shielding her son with her body, local residents told Drop Site. Transportation infrastructure has sustained similar damage. Alireza, a resident of Hormozgan who studies screenwriting and is carefully tracking recent events in the hopes of making a documentary about the war, described strikes on Tappeh Aluakbar overlooking Bandar Abbas, bridges linking Bandar Abbas to Khamir and Rudan, railway infrastructure, and key transportation routes connecting the province. At one destroyed crossing, road crews carved a temporary dirt route through a dry riverbed within hours simply to keep vehicles moving. The damage extends to the sea as well: Alireza estimates that roughly 300 civilian fishing boats have been destroyed across Bandar Abbas, Bandar Lengeh, Sirik, and Jask, affecting the livelihoods of thousands of people. Two maritime search-and-rescue vessels operating near Bandar Abbas, Qeshm, and Hormuz Island were also put out of service. Kharg Island, Iran’s principal oil export terminal, has long featured in discussions among U.S. officials and defense analysts as a strategically significant site and was bombed in March during the U.S.-Israeli aerial campaign. According to an Iranian military analyst who spoke to Drop Site on condition of anonymity for security reasons, if the U.S. ever sent ground troops to take over the island, Iran’s ability to reinforce Kharg would depend heavily on the transportation networks running through Hormozgan. “They’re not simply destroying roads,” the analyst said. “They’re reducing Iran’s ability to move personnel, equipment, and supplies before any future operation ever begins.”… Even at military sites, the targets appeared designed to maximize casualties rather than just weaken military capabilities. Perhaps I am missing something, but I do not understand why Iran would need to move personnel or assets to Kharg if the US were to do Iran the huge favor of attempting a ground invasion. Iran can deny the US logistical support with missiles, drones, sea drone, and fast boats. It can also pound soldiers and supplies on the island (which has no bunkers) again with missiles and drones. Even though southern Iran is taking a serious economic hit, it is also looking as if the too-eagerly-anticipated oil crunch is coming over the horizon. From OilPrice yesterday in Hormuz Stalemate Raises Risk of $120 Oil: - Oil markets remain torn between hopes for a U.S.-Iran deal and worsening physical supply constraints, with Hormuz traffic at two-month lows and inventories steadily declining. - Refined products are facing the biggest squeeze, as diesel, gasoil and jet fuel supplies tighten amid Middle Eastern and Russian refinery disruptions, pushing refining margins to record highs. - A market tipping point could arrive by late September or early Q4 if Hormuz flows remain restricted, potentially sending crude prices toward $120–140 per barrel as inventories run down. More on the state of transits: 🚢 HORMUZ — A third vessel hit in days; "minor damage" is doing heavy lifting here. 📌 LOOK CLOSER: After ADNOC tankers were struck August 13, this outbound hit widens the targeting pattern — now both inbound and outbound transits are in play. With daily transits already at… pic.twitter.com/LYb5mG5zDx — perceptiondaily (@perceptiondaily) August 14, 2026 And in keeping today, Fallout Spreads Across the Middle East as the Iran War Grinds On: Yemen’s Houthis said they targeted Saudi Aramco’s Jazan refinery with two drones on Thursday, the second claimed attack on the Red Sea facility in less than a week and the third since July 25. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Aramco has confirmed the attack as of the time of writing. Bloomberg cited a person familiar with the incident as saying a storage tank sustained negligible damage. Last month, the Houthis threatened to blockade Saudi oil flows and have also attacked Saudi targets and shipping in the Bab al-Mandeb, while military activity is increasing along Yemen’s internal front lines. The US-Iran war is threatening to return Yemen to a state of active civil war after a 2022 truce that saw an end to large-scale fighting between the Houthis and Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces. Iran attacked two vessels linked to the UAE’s state-owned ADNOC as they transited Hormuz on Thursday, with no injuries reported and apparently limited damage. The UAE condemned what it called a “hostile Iranian attack,” while ADNOC said the situation had been brought under control. And a continuing theme: Hormuz Tanker Traffic Slumps as U.S.-Iran Standoff Drags On: Tankers moving along the Strait of Hormuz dwindled further this week, with only five crossings on Wednesday and nine crossings on Thursday, down from a monthly average of 12 crossings, according to data from Kpler, as cited by Reuters. Five tankers went into the waterway yesterday, according to the data, and four exited it, most of them moving along the Iranian corridor. Traffic via the Bab el-Mandeb strait in the Red Sea was in the double digits, with Kpler reporting 19 commodity carriers passing the waterway on Thursday. The data only covers vessels with their transponders switched on, Reuters noted in its report. Saudi Aramco piled on in its presentation to investors on second quarter earnings. Key messages included that an average of 11 million barrels a day have left the market, that the ability to draw on inventories to fill the gap is coming to an end, and that inventories will need to be rebuilt if and when things ever normalize. This does not mean SPR refilling, which could be pushed off for a bit. A big issue is all the inventories at sea (as in on tankers) as well as private inventories (oil storage). Walter Bloomberg, on his site, points out that diesel crack spreads have reached a new high: But the US, not knowing what else to do, is doubling down on failure. From Bloomberg’s landing page: The US will soon announce unprecedented economic measures against Iran, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, intensifying the Trump administration’s effort to force Tehran’s capitulation after almost six months of war. “Watch this space for more announcements coming next week because we are going to apply measures like have never been seen in the history of economic isolation on a country,” Bessent said in an interview with Newsmax on Thursday. The move will be part of a “one-two punch” that includes the continued blockade of Iran’s ports, he added. It was Bessent who just made the ludicrous claim that the Strait of Hormuz would be irrelevant because pipeline. He is looking more and more like an Trump Mini-Me, except for his height: another arrogant random bad idea generator. To Ansar Allah and the Saudis: Ansar Allah has mode some new attacks, as reported by Aljazeera: Houthis launch drone strike on Aramco refinery in Saudi city of Jizan Yemen’s Houthi group has targeted an Aramco refinery in Saudi Arabia’s Jizan region with two drones, a military source was quoted as saying by the Saba news agency. The attack came in response to the kingdom’s “violation of Yemeni airspace and sovereignty in the Sa’dah and Hajjah governorates”, it said. More moves: Update: @AJArabic Yemen editor @alshalfia also appears to confirm what I reported last night regarding Houthi movements along Yemen’s western coast. Field sources report to al-Shalfi that Houthi ground forces are moving from Dhamar and Ibb toward areas along the Red Sea coast in… https://t.co/AnfupxOCSk — Basha باشا (@BashaReport) August 14, 2026 Plus confirmation of the extent of damage of a recent attack: 🛰🇾🇪 Additional damage is visible at Mocha Port in western Yemen following recent Houthi missile and drone attacks. At least one hangar/warehouse at the Yemeni government base appears completely destroyed, while a separate burn scar is also visible at the commercial port. https://t.co/pIf2jjOwJQ pic.twitter.com/sISd7oj0LO — Egypt's Intel Observer (@EGYOSINT) August 13, 2026 Briefly to the US speedy volte-face on the status of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln after disgusting on-board conditions and crew psychological fraying due to an unheard-of time at sea. The US is speeding another carrier, the George Washington, to the scene as the Abraham Lincoln can be rotated out. Of course Pete Hegseth loudly denies that this move became necessary as ugly fact came out. From The Hill in Hegseth calls dire conditions aboard USS Abraham Lincoln ‘completely misrepresented’: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday claimed that conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier have been “completely misrepresented” following reports that sailors, struggling with low morale during a grueling deployment, have attempted to jump overboard. Speaking with Newsmax, Hegseth did not directly address reports of supply shortages, water contamination and deteriorating mental health on the Abraham Lincoln, nor did he say when the vessel would return stateside after leaving San Diego in November. Larry Johnson describes how the military is being strained to the breaking point in The Butcher’s Bill Comes Due: A Military Run Past Its Limits, and the Leaders Who Keep Saying Everything Is Fine: When the Secretary of the Army orders every officer and sergeant in the force to personally check on every soldier, every single day, that is not a routine holiday gesture. It is an alarm. And in the ten months since Dan Driscoll issued that order, the alarm has kept ringing — from a carrier in the Arabian Sea, from a secretive command at Fort Meade, from the families of sailors who can no longer get a straight answer about why their children are hungry. The stories arrive from different branches and different missions, but they add up to a single indictment: the American military is being run past the limits of the people inside it, and too many of its leaders have responded not by fixing the problem but by denying it exists…. It would be dishonest to collapse four situations into one conspiracy, and equally dishonest to pretend they are unrelated coincidences that happened to land in the same year across the same military. The truth is structural, and it has an address. The common accelerant is a war with Iran now in its sixth month, layered on top of years of high operational tempo — and operational tempo is not an act of God. It is a policy choice about how many missions to run, how long to keep carriers forward-deployed, and how hard to push a cyber force that never appears on a casualty list. Someone chooses that pace. The recurring second thread is the response to evidence: an Army secretary who at least named the failure in writing, set against a Defense Secretary who called firsthand reporting “fake news” and a fleet that answered allegations of a broken crew with assurances about mission capability. A military that cannot admit its people are breaking cannot protect them, because the first step in every prevention program ever written is to acknowledge the problem out loud. It is not surprising to find that the Abraham Lincoln is not an isolated case: 🚨EXCLUSIVE: Military families and service members are now describing horrific conditions across MULTIPLE ships: human waste flooding bathrooms, virtually no food, water or soap, months without port calls, exhausted crews, and no end in sight. This crisis appears to be far… — MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) August 14, 2026 As readers described long-form in comments yesterday, the US can’t fix these conditions. The bases that Iran has largely destroyed were important to keeping the ship supplied. The US does not have enough vessels to ferry in needed goods over suddenly longer distances. And the much greater time also produces the widely-cited problem of food going bad Now to growing stress in Israel, which Larry Wilkerson in particular has been discussing for quite a while. The Financial Times confirms some of his assessment in, The exodus from Israel, that Israelis increasingly would not see good reason to remain if safety risks rose and day-to-day living became difficult: Jonathan didn’t want to leave Israel… Then one evening, as he returned to his apartment in Tel Aviv, he ran into the child of one of his neighbours. They spoke, and the boy, aged five or six, said he would see Jonathan that night in the building’s shelter, where residents would go to take refuge from missiles launched by Israel’s foes. “That was one of the big breaking points for me . . . [I thought:] that’s the future of the country and this is what he knows,” Jonathan recalls…. By international standards the share of Israelis who have left over this period is not huge. But for Israel the outflow is highly unusual — and has already had an outsized impact. Combined with a drop in immigration, the exodus turned Israel’s net migration negative in both 2023 and 2024 — something that happened only three times in the preceding century. Analysts expect overall figures for last year, which are not yet available, will also be negative. With studies — including one last week from Israel’s tax authority — suggesting rising numbers of those leaving are high earners, it has also awakened fears of a brain drain that could, if sustained, do serious damage to Israel’s tech-heavy economy, its public finances and even its military…. Migration is driven by multiple factors. But few who study it doubt that Israel’s polarised political climate and three years of unrelenting warfare — during which Israeli forces have laid waste to Gaza and southern Lebanon, and Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran have fired thousands of missiles at Israel — have played an important role in the current wave of emigration…. For some Israelis, the idea of emigrating is inconceivable… But among secular and more liberal Israelis, who have watched on as the country has lurched to the right under successive Netanyahu governments, concerns about the direction of the country are visceral. Many in this camp regard October’s election, which will pit Netanyahu’s coalition with extremist and ultrareligious parties against a more politically heterodox but largely secular opposition, as a make-or-break moment for Israel…. Emigration in the first half of 2025 was 20 per cent lower than the same period a year earlier. But net outflows are still expected for the year overall. Economists warn that if these persist, they will exacerbate the looming demographic strains on an economy in which male members of the fastest-growing population group — ultra-Orthodox Jews — have traditionally not entered the workforce or taken part in Israel’s obligatory military service. This month’s study by Israel’s tax authority found the rate of departure of affluent Israelis, including high-tech and healthcare workers, was almost twice as high in 2023 and 2024 as in 2019. If repeated, the annual loss in tax receipts could swell to $3.5bn in five years, it added. The findings echoed another study this year by researchers from Tel Aviv University, which found an increasing net outflow of Israelis who worked as doctors and engineers, or had a high-tech education or one focusing on science, engineering and maths. We’ll end with this confirmation that the US is, like genocidal Israel, beyond redemption: The NYT confirms the Pentagon tested an experimental PRISM missile packed with 180,000 tungsten pellets on an Iranian sports hall. Washington used a girls volleyball team as test subjects, massacring 21 civilians. pic.twitter.com/yQVXJvW2Bt — 🇷🇺 STANISLAV KRAPIVNIK 🇷🇺 (@STANISKRAPIVNIK) August 13, 2026 I don’t know, I think Peter might hang on for a while. After all, he was one of the lucky few that got smuggled out with the drink cart. >he was one of the lucky few that got smuggled out with the drink cart That was just coincidence though. Pete was already in the drinks cart, draining 50ml whiskey bottles like a camel at an oasis. They didn’t have time to get him out, so he got a free pass on the safe plane. (Does this need a /sarc?) Who can tell what is sarcasm these days? With Trump, the dumbest explanation is usually the correct one. I expect Pete Hegseth will last longer on the job than the bottle of bourbon he opens when he gets home tonight will. Leavitt left intelligently, once she saw Trump leave everyone on AF1 to die while fleeing in a catering truck, she saw the writing on the wall and left without burning any bridges. That move by Trump will have consequences that will take a while to play out, every one on that plane knew intellectually that their lives meant nothing to Trump, now they know it in their guts. This at a time when Trump is already looking weaker by the day and his mental and physical deterioration accelerates visibly and the pushback on a number of fronts gains traction. Well played. Kegsbreath might be the only person at DoD who will still second POTUS’ unlock of the nukes. His job is secure. I am somewhat disappointed that the initial reports Trump was smuggled out in a taco truck did not turn out to be accurate, but the memes from the incident have still been pretty good. Well, a “market tipping point”, sending gasoline prices high, at the end of September, would be about perfect as far as the US mid-term elections….well played, Donald! Sadly, Trump’s “reverse Midas touch” re: the economy, is the best, indeed the only, thing we have going for us against his far more consequential construction of a pliant federal government, which is vastly further advanced than most people care to understand, in part because it is so sporadically, incompletely and thinly reported in the US. The irony about that PRISM missile packed with 180,000 tungsten pellets is that the Chinese have placed severe restrictions on the export of Tungsten so that material will be in short supply soon- https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/03/china-metals-national-security-defense-weapons-supply-tungsten.html Maybe the MIC “think tanks” can ask the Iranians to be a good sport and sort through the rubble, pick out the tungsten pellets, clean them, and return them to us? They could just use gold or platinum. Both are much heavier than tungsten and not dependent on the Chinese Gold and tungsten have about the same densities. 19.32g/cm^3 vs 19.25g/cm^3 Gold is 0.36% denser so about a third of a percent. Hardly qualifies as much.. I do believe that tungsten is also, quite essentially to a munition, harder than gold. Now if we were going back to Minie balls…. Yes, I use a lot of tungsten carbide metal cutting tools. Many micrometers have hard tungsten carbide measuring surfaces to avoid wear. Gold is very soft and can be pounded into gold leaf. Tungsten’s density (19.25 g/cm³) is remarkably close to that of gold (19.32 g/cm³), making it the ideal core for sophisticated counterfeits. I would not be surprised if our stable genius leadsership have been filling the more easily obtained and financially valuable gold bars with the more strategically valuable tungsten in the bars being shipped to China. “Currently, about 30% of the global tungsten supply comes from recycled sources” https://www.okonrecycling.com/industrial-scrap-metal-recycling/specialty-metals/tungsten-recycling-important/ I suppose we could demand the return of the pellets used in the school gym attack. Iranian hackers have not had much obvious success, yet. Considering how vulnerable so many critical American systems are this is likely to change. If they were successful, why should they brag? Better not to have US government bodies and key private sector entities tighten up their defenses. Yves, a successful hack on the pumps that send water through the Tehachapi’s to Southern California seems both feasible and something that it would not be possible to cover up. And good luck replacing those pumps, the lead time on that would be measured in years. Be careful: that might be a welcome development for some who live in northern California, many of whom feel that SoCal “steals” massive amounts of water from NorCal forn their swimming pools and gold courses in the desert. That might force SoCal to use water more wisely. We “feel” they are stealing our water? I say to you, sir, it’s a goddamned fact! I fully expect it will ultimately come to this. Yup, greedy monkeys don’t want to share, they want it all for themselves. Not to be cynical, but it all comes down to violence and greed. They got to have swimming pools and golf courses in the desert for the oligarchy and all… I was born in the Capital of the State of Jefferson, Yreka. My father ranched cattle outside of Yreka, Long Gulch before I was born. Water is for fighting, Whiskey is for drinking, It’s a resource I have been paying attention to since I was a child. And a good way to start learning about California’s historic Oligarchy. And this resource is becoming even more important than ever. I hear that SoCal is aiming to steal even more water from the Eel River by taking over the Potter Valley Project. So much for “democracy”, kleptocrat-oligarchy is more fitting. So you’re more or less from the same neck of the woods and a similar ecosystem as described by William Kittredge in Hole in the Sky. Those pumps use starter motors to get thing going before the main motors kick in. When I asked if the the pumps could start without the starter motors the engineer said yes but all the lights in Bakersfield would dim. The receiver pond is big. I don’t remember the acre feet but those pumps can fill it in just a few hours. There’s two outlet gates to send the water in various directions. I can’t remember the size but the operating thrust from the 8″ cylinders to open them is on the order of 84,000 pounds. The supposed Minnesota hack was almost certainly incompetent managers scapegoating. Please don’t amplify bogus narratives. Iranians do not believe in harming civilians, Any hacks would focus on military infrastructure and personnel. Perhaps the systems have been hacked but nothing done to them, yet. They await the signal to act and then…? Well, one could say that Shia jurisprudence emphasize that harming non-combatants violates core Islamic ethics, but it’s equally likely the US infrastructure is so degraded and crappy that Iranian hackers have a hard time to find targets that would have much of an effect. If those systems were designed and built correctly they should be nowhere near the internet. Especially for simple systems like pumps where there is absolutely no reason to allow remote operation. I will admit that the first “if” above is load-besring. Perhaps I am missing something, but I do not understand why Iran would need to move personnel or assets to Kharg if the US were to do Iran the huge favor of attempting a ground invasion. How do you say “Please don’t throw me in that briar patch, Br’er Fox!!!” in Farsi? Somebody has to feed, wash and do laundry for all those Marines before they can be taken POWs. I don’t think many of the Marines landed on Kharg Island would be coming back in one piece, alive or dead. I also doubt that any of the Iranian troops who did show up at the end would be in a forgiving mood. “Remember Minab” is an effective War cry, “For Bibi and Israel” is not. Don’t forget how many Months those Marines have been waiting in ships, much less comfortable ships than the Abraham Lincoln. They are not fit for duty and sending them into combat while they are in this shape physically would be stupid to the point of insanity. Which makes it more likely to happen than not. Marines landing on Kharg Island would be subjected to deadly siege warfare, imo. Imagine the conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and triple it or quadruple those conditions. Given the large scale support of genocide, war crimes, torture, rape, and worse-than-Apartheid treatment of surviving Palestinians, one wonders how or why anyone with a conscience or basic sense of morality would want to be part of such a society, if one can call it that. When a large majority of the population view The Other as subhuman, and that Israel has the “right” to exterminate them, it should raise red flags. Instead this sort of thing has been “normalized”. Israel is a sick society, based on a perverted ideology, and badly tarnishes the image of Judaism (although most Jews do not live in Israel). I don’t believe that Israel as we know it will exist in another decade, it is an artificial to begin with. We can thank the British empire (and now the US and vassals) for that. Emigration is also not as easy as the article makes it sound. You have to find a country that’s willing to take you. Skilled and educated workers in high end jobs can probably pull it off, or those with family ties elsewhere. Other people would probably find it easier said than done. There’s also the fact that Israel’s reputation is at a historic low in many countries right now – although you could possibly make that work in your favour if you quoted it as a reason for leaving. I’m curious what Iran shifting to an “offensive phase” will look like, and what time frame they have in mind for that. Odd to me theyve so far done nothing visible to stop the Lebanon invasion. And so many planes parked at Israeli airports, planes that bombed Iran in the past and might in the future, look to be attractive targets. Iran doesn’t need to do anything spectacular or come up with new capabilities, they just need to continue doing what they have been doing during the hot phase of the War – attrit the US military forward bases and logistics so as to render carrier ops and the naval blockade unsustainable. I imagine Iran would wait until oil breaches 120 to finally turn up the heat. 🔥 Not speculating but I’d suspect something to widen the conflict. Such as an invasion of Kuwait from Iraq, an idea that has been floated weeks back. Trump seems to think they want to drone him at his golf course, judging by the presence of that air defense module. Though at this point he seems afraid of his own shadow. Must be really bizarre living in that skull. Were I an Iranian considering cyber attacks on US infrastructure I would be tempted to use a grand son pf Stuxnet to attack appropriate targets. I often forget that Shia have well delineated Moral norms and a culture that values Honorable behavior, quite a difference from the good old USA. I’d probe a while and use some of those probes as distraction while compiling the largest list of targets I could in the time available. When the time was right I’d attack all the targets at the same time. Thankfully America’s Cyber Defense has reached new levels of effectiveness as a result of the efforts of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s little DOGIE’s. The changes are dramatic and the money saved is incredible, according to Musk. American Cyber Security has been rightsized and streamlined . And ….It’s GONE! Well, people forget that Stuxnet actually required a human to sneak a USB onto the site. Hacking a correctly-designed control system is way harder than somebody’s website. Years ago, before I retired, I was told carefully and discretely scattering USB sticks around inside a bank was method used in white hat testing of the bank’s security. I do not know if it would still work but years ago it worked well at getting a foot-in-door of bank security — usually through one of the tellers work stations or home systems. Once in the banking system an ethical attacker could selectively attack business accounts. I am sure people who know much more about such things than I do could think of ways Iranian hackers could attack business accounts and accounts of the wealthy to hit Merca at its heart, while leaving the Populace out of their attacks. Dropping USB sticks around as attack vectors is so old and known it shouldn’t work…but as well as staff are trained these days and as conscientiously as they do their interesting and exciting work…I would not be surprised if it worked as well as did years ago, before I retired. “Hacking a correctly-designed control system is way harder than somebody’s website.” This is obvious so why not go after the countless soft targets? How about attacks on Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax to throw a wrench into Mercan credit card transactions? Even a Shia attacker could feel comfortable and honorable executing such an attack. Pardon the length, but Jonathan Winer has an interesting piece in the Washington Spectator on 8/10/2026 “Trump’s Two Oil Mysteries: Freedom Fuel and Venezuelan Crude” Below are some highlights. https://washingtonspectator.org/trumps-two-oil-mysteries-freedom-fuel-and-venezuelan-crude/ Winer also does an interview on Legal AF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbm42592IHs Trump may, in fact, be working on the fuel crisis but only if he can make a ton of money for himself. At least it looks that way. Though Venezuelan oil is best suited for making diesel and jet fuel, it can be refine into auto gas, as well. And its million bl/d doesn’t end our problems, but it helps a lot. Welcome to Trump’s Freedom Gas. From Winer: “Gasoline prices are rising again.… Yet in the Philadelphia region, a new company, Freedom Fuel, is suddenly selling gasoline substantially below its competitors at more than two dozen stations. President Trump has personally promoted Freedom Fuel, and the White House has presented it as evidence that his energy policies are working. But where the fuel comes from, how the company can sell it so cheaply, and why the President became personally involved remain mysteries. Those questions lead to another: what has happened to the Venezuelan oil and the revenues the Trump Administration now controls?” “Over time, Trump’s account of the U.S. exploitation of Venezuelan oil has evolved. On January 9, Trump issued an executive order on “Safeguarding Venezuelan Oil Revenue for the Good of the American and Venezuelan People.” “But by late March, after Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that proceeds from Venezuelan oil sales were being held in a blocked U.S. Treasury account for Venezuelan public purposes, Trump interrupted: “We get a lot of it.” He repeated the point: “We have a deal. We get a lot of it.” He added, “We got some and they got some.” “By July, Trump was saying that Venezuelan oil was being sent to Houston and Louisiana for refining, stating “we’re taking tremendous amounts of oil” and that the U.S. was now “taking out many, many times the money that we spent on the war.” “By August, he was calling Venezuela’s oil the spoils of victory. This is an extraordinary description of a program the Administration originally described as the safeguarding by the U.S. of sovereign Venezuelan assets pending approved governmental expenditures.” “Over the seven months since the Trump Administration took over custody of the proceeds of Venezuelan oil, the Administration has provided remarkably little information documenting how its custodianship is working in practice. It has provided no public reconciliation showing oil sold, money received, money disbursed and money remaining, and no public accounting of where the billions of dollars are actually being held.” “According to Delaware corporate records, Freedom Fuel Network LLC was incorporated on June 23, 2026. Within days, the new company had launched a network of 25 gasoline stations across the Philadelphia region and southern New Jersey, offering gasoline at a promotional price of $3.47 a gallon, roughly 40 cents lower than the Philadelphia average.” “Six days later on June 29, President Trump publicly warned gasoline retailers to slash gasoline prices immediately or risk federal investigation. Two days later, and two days before Freedom Fuel announced its July 3 launch, Trump effectively introduced Freedom Fuel to the country. “I am pleased to announce,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “that a VERY smart Retailer” would begin lowering prices at “25 ‘FREEDOM FUEL’ Stations across the Greater Philadelphia Area.” On July 7, the White House released an official video promoting Freedom Fuel. Its accompanying message declared: “The FIRST Freedom Fuel Network gas station has LANDED,” said that “President Trump is leading the charge to lower gas prices,” and explained that the $3.47 price honored “our 47th President.” “Viewed chronologically, the sequence reads less like a President discovering a successful private business and more like a presidential rollout. It is difficult to identify another instance in modern American history in which a President has personally helped to launch a newly formed private company and then had the White House promote it as evidence of his Administration’s success.” For more: The Kleptocrat Nesting Dolls Behind Trump’s Potemkin Gas Stations American Prospect These people are tediously shameless. Interesting article on Press TV with vid, showing debris from over “140” US and US/Israeli drones/aircraft. They claimed that was done by “indigenous defense systems”. Also claims that defense system production is increasing and is even stronger now than before the war. This appears to confirm what Marandi, Johnson, Crooke, Davis and others have speculated. The officer also confirmed more recent delivery of new air defense equipment but it does not specify how this is new, or if any other country(ies) have assisted. https://www.presstv.co.uk/Detail/2026/08/14/774358/Iran-IRGC-downed-Drones-US-Israel-air-defense With regards to emigration from Israel. According to this (link to PDF) study there are about 300 000 jobs that are required to keep Israel functioning as a modern state. The people in those jobs tend to be highly trained specialists that can’t easily be replaced. It won’t be an immediate collapse but a slow spiral into third world status if to many of those jobs don’t get filled. The problem here is that the people in these jobs are a subset of the group that can easily emigrate (and this group has been doing so since Netanyahu essentially hijacked the Israeli government to stay out of jail in 2023). So the question now is what is the threshold at which point this emigration starts the downward spiral, if the answer ever comes it will be decades after it has been crossed. The other question is will Israel extends its liberal use of “Stay of Exit” orders (a court order that prevents someone from leaving Israel) to keep people in those critical jobs in Israel. While there are legitimate uses, think people accused of a crime and considered a flight risk, or to keep conscripts from deserting; Israel has been using them much looser then that and between half a million and million Israeli citizens, and hundreds if not thousands of foreign nationals, are under a variant of a “Stay of Exit” order as a means of ensuring a debt or other legal claim can be collected. From DD Geopolitics: I think that what DJT thinks is impossible to know. What he said at that moment was that the deployment was not long enough. What he will say in future moments is, I think, anyone’s guess. In recent conversations with Nima (yesterday, I think) and Andrew Napolitano (today), Larry Johnson has speculated that US may be discreetly bending in the direction of accommodating Iranian insistence that US comply with the original MoU provisions. He cited two hints — Israeli reduction of operational tempo in Lebanon and rumors that cash and gold are being flown to Iran from UAE.