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Despite UN Diplomacy, the US and Iran Are Still Headed Toward More War

Just a few thoughts on the three-hour indirect meeting yesterday at the UN between US and Iranian officials, facilitated by the indefatigable Qataris.

It is undoubtedly a good thing that the two sides have resumed contact again, even though we are now back to Qatari mediators shuttling messages between them rather than the two sides talking directly to each other.

But it is also true that the two sides remain very far from each other. The positive manner in which Trump, in particular, described the meeting, as a result, leaves the impression that this was more performative than substantive. That is, yet another effort to calm the markets and reduce further negative impact on the upcoming elections. Why else would Trump insist that a deal will be reached after the midterms? That specificity gives the game away.

Indeed, part of the calculation on the American side is to make moves now to reduce the likelihood of an Iranian escalation before the midterms. As I have written before, Round 3 of the war is very likely, and from the US standpoint, the preferred timing is after the midterms. But the Iranians are no longer in a reactive mode; if war is coming, they may take preemptive action to deprive Trump of the luxury of choosing the timing of the next round. The most optimal moment to preempt a US attack would be a week or two before the midterms, which is why some limited diplomacy now with the partial aim of reducing the likelihood of such a preemption is deemed useful. And why its achievement is overstated.

To go beyond this, real concessions from both sides are needed. But right now, the key blockage is Trump’s refusal to lift the naval blockade on Iran, even if Tehran agrees to open the Strait of Hormuz. The US side fears that lifting the blockade would enable Iran to refill its coffers and provide it with much more time. Tehran would use this reprieve not to strike a deal with Washington, but to prolong the conflict for teh purpose of destroying Trump’s presidency.

Tehran, in turn, is unlikely to give any concessions of significance unless Trump lifts the blockade. Trump’s refusal to do so is interpreted by the Iranians as a reflection of his desire to overthrow the Islamic Republic or force it to surrender.

To break such a deadlock, small steps like the meeting in New York may prove useful, if not necessary. But thus far, while the resumption of (indirect) talks is a breakthrough of sorts, it is not course correction: The US and Iran are unfortunately still headed toward another round of war.

I am also linking to my conversation with Glenn Diesen from earlier this week. It quickly went to very dark places. But the situation in the Middle East/US/Iran is unravelling, and measures and scenarios that were unthinkable just a few months ago are increasingly being discussed at the government level. So we had to have an honest conversation about these previously unthinkable scenarios.

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Seattle’s Mayor Would Rather Hire Private Security to Prevent Crime Than Help Her Police Force

Once again, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson just doesn’t “get it” when it comes to giving law enforcement the traditional funding it needs – and deserves, for that matter.

She’s still seeing a lot of fallout from the controversial dismissal of Police Chief Shon Barnes, and no doubt she’s getting pressure from all sides with the increase in criminal activity within the city itself. But she announced a recent decision that has me questioning her actions even more – such as why she doesn’t feel the need to support her local police.

According to Fox News, Wilson has introduced a new initiative for local grocery stores, using taxpayer money to fund security officers to help prevent criminal activity, including thefts and break-ins. The $1.7 million initiative has been penciled in as part of the city’s 2026 budget.

With her decision, Wilson explained, “Keeping our neighborhood grocery stores safe and supported is essential to making every Seattleite has a reliable, affordable grocery store near them.”

While I can get behind the idea of supporting businesses and making sure there’s security, I’m not a fan of the path she’s taken when it comes to funding.

When you look at the finer details, do you have any idea what good a $1.7 million boost would do for a police department? They could fund more necessary gear to keep officers safe. Not to mention putting funding into mental health, a very crucial ingredient to the success of police officers. After all, if they don’t get the support they require for mental stability, there’s a very good chance they could leave their job due to duress and stress.

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Russia Guts Ukraine’s Drone Industry Overnight — And NATO Scrambles – What They Won’t Tell You

Russian precision strikes on Ukrainian drone manufacturing facilities were carried out in a massive overnight operation to destroy a significant part of Ukraine’s drone production capacity, while NATO fighter jets were scrambled in Poland and Romania.

The Russian Ministry of Defense reported that its armed forces delivered a massive strike using ground and air precision weapons against Ukraine’s military-industrial complex, telecommunications centers, logistics hubs in Kyiv and the Odessa region, and naval vessels supporting Ukrainian forces.

Among the confirmed targets: an industrial facility manufacturing long- and medium-range UAV components and ground robotic systems; the Pegasus Arms LLC workshop, which stored and produced fixed-wing drones; and the Element UA LLC facility producing Hornet strike drone components. A Kyiv transport and logistics center for distributing long-range UAVs was also struck, as were the Kievstar and Parkovy telecommunications centers providing communications and computing support to Ukrainian forces.

In Odessa, two military logistics centers and two Ukrainian naval vessels were hit.

Ukraine reported Russia launched 161 strikes overnight — 82 jet-powered drones and an unknown number of Banderol cruise missiles. Air defenses intercepted 119 drones and three cruise missiles, with impacts recorded across 18 locations.

Poland scrambled fighter jets after Russian strike drones operating in western Ukraine approached its airspace. The alert lasted approximately an hour; no violations were recorded. Romania scrambled two F-16s to respond to an aerial target maneuvering near its Ukrainian border — also with no incursions confirmed.

The NATO scrambles have become nearly a nightly occurrence. Russian drones have previously crossed into NATO member airspace and crashed on NATO territory.

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Where Is Ronald Morales? One Diligent Attorney Wants to Know

Where in the world is Ronald Morales?!

Please help attorney David Wilson find him. Ronald Morales is from Venezuela, and is a critical witness to testify at deposition and trial in the Eric Coomer v. Joe Oltmann case, 20-34319.

Attorneys for Joe Oltmann have looked high and low for Morales, also known as “Ronny Valles” and “Ronald Santiago Morales Valles.”

Dominion and Coomer have asserted for years that there is no remote access to the voting systems, and they have nothing to do with Venezuela.

However, Morales is on emails with Venezuela and Smartmatic/Sequoia in 2007 where the steps for the RAS, Remote Access Server, are shared.

Morales joined Smartmatic around 2004 and worked on Election Management System (EMS) quality assurance in Venezuela. After Smartmatic acquired Sequoia Voting Systems, he worked on integrating Smartmatic equipment with Sequoia’s EMS. He later became a senior systems manager at Dominion.

A set of August 2007 emails circulated on sites such as Election Crime Bureau shows Fernando Hernández of Smartmatic Labs in Venezuela writing to Ronald Morales (then at Sequoia) with the subject “RAS Server.” The message lists hardware and software needed to set up a Windows Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS) server. Follow-up emails discuss configuration and mention a RAS server and “HAAT Listener” intended for use in Wisconsin.

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This is Why CNN is Fake News – Appalling

CNN is absolutely no longer news, it is a propaganda organization for war. Not a single word has been fact-checked—not even by simply Googling the facts. This nonsense that Russia is trying to take all of Ukraine and that the Ukrainian people are fighting for their freedom is so outrageous that it amounts to plain propaganda, which only leads to war. There is no rational discussion here. There is no solution but war, because no matter what, Europe will simply NEVER accept peace with Russia, and people are too stupid to realize that this Finnish politician cannot possibly be this stupid and uninformed.

Since the AfD won two elections and the CDU was below 5%, so they did not even get a seat, Brussels and NATO are in a state of panic. They are pushing for all-out war because they fear that if the AfD takes Germany, they are anti-war and anti-Brussels. The only way to retain power is to start a war as soon as possible.

The Ukrainian people want an election. Zelensky lied and promised peace, and has been doing nothing but carrying out his personal hatred of Russians. Reliable sources from Ukraine report that (1) the factories are being run by women since men are sent to the front line, and (2) they are actually handcuffing men in transport to the front line to prevent them from fleeing. My discussions with members of Congress know that Zelensky is the problem and that Putin has agreed to peace.

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Five Years Later, Media Blame Afghans for US-Engineered Disaster 

Last month marked five years since the US withdrew its military forces from Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power. The US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and the resultant war, directly killed more than 176,000 Afghan people, including more than 46,000 civilians. Yet major US media outlets have covered the anniversary by muddying the US’s role in the country’s hardships—writing as though Afghanistan’s history began in August 2021.

A CNN article (8/15/26) by Kara Fox offered an egregious bit of historical revisionism:

In the five years since the chaotic US withdrawal from Kabul and the Taliban’s return to power, Afghanistan has become home to one of the world’s worst human rights and humanitarian emergencies.

Afghanistan hasn’t “become” a human rights and humanitarian emergency “since” the US troop withdrawal. It was a disaster during—and in no small part because of—the US war and occupation.

For instance, in November 2019, towards the end of the US occupation, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimated that approximately 2.44 million Afghan were in an “emergency situation” in terms of food insecurity. The next year, Amnesty International noted that four million Afghans were internally displaced and facing widespread problems of “inadequate housing, food insecurity [and] insufficient access to sanitation.”

Both years, the International Rescue Committee put Afghanistan in its top 10 “crises the world should be watching.” Evidently such conditions don’t meet CNN’s threshold for a “humanitarian emergency.”

In terms of rights, a 2019 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report documented Afghan strike forces that were “recruited, trained, equipped and overseen by the CIA” committing

serious abuses between late 2017 and mid-2019. They are illustrative of a larger pattern of serious laws-of-war violations—some amounting to war crimes—that extends to all provinces in Afghanistan where these paramilitary forces operate with impunity.

In 2020, HRW would go on to criticize the US-installed Afghan government for “fail[ing] to prosecute senior officials responsible for sexual assault, torture and killing civilians.” One can debate what constitutes a human rights “emergency,” but it’s clear that rights violations were a defining feature of the US occupation.

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Whatever Happened to the 150,000 Tons of Radioactive Waste Stored Under the Atlantic Ocean? 

More than 200,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste were stored on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between 1949 and 1982, reports ScienceAlert.

Whatever happened to those barrels?Scientists have descended to the wreckage in a crewed submersible to investigate — and found many of the barrels corroded and degraded, their contents spilling across the seafloor. Surprisingly, this isn’t necessarily a subversion of the original plan… The International Atomic Energy Agency recommends that low-level waste be disposed of in robust containment in isolation for at least a few hundred years — but back in the mid-20th century, the recommendations were a little different. The contemporaneous guidelines recommended that containers needed to reach the seafloor intact and remain sealed only long enough for the short-lived radionuclides to decay. After that, the remaining waste was expected to slowly escape and disperse through the surrounding ocean. Not everything in the barrels would conveniently decay away, however. They contained a radioactive hodgepodge, including cesium-137, plutonium isotopes, and tritium, some of which can persist for thousands of years…

[A] few years ago, nuclear engineer Patrick Chardon and marine geologist Javier Escartín of the French National Center for Scientific Research started to wonder what had become of the dumped waste. That question eventually became NODSSUM — Nuclear Ocean Dump Site Survey Monitoring — an interdisciplinary project bringing together nuclear physics, geology, oceanography, biology, and marine chemistry to find the barrels and investigate what, if anything, they were doing to the surrounding environment…. [T]he barrels also appeared to function as tiny oases on the otherwise sparsely populated sandy seafloor. Anemones had attached themselves to the barrels. Sponges, sea cucumbers, fish, and crustaceans lived around them, with crabs apparently particularly fond of the artificial shelters…

Instruments aboard the ship detected significant signals of cobalt-60 and niobium-94, which the researchers could specifically link to the dumped waste… [Samples are now being analyzed] There is precedent, however, to suggest that even striking levels of radioactivity around a source don’t necessarily spread very far. A recent study of the sunken Soviet submarine Komsomolets found radionuclide levels hundreds of thousands of times above background immediately around the leaking reactor — but those levels dropped sharply within just a few meters as the material dispersed through the seawater. The NODSSUM team similarly found that, despite the significant radioactive signals around the barrels, activity levels weren’t high enough to pose major radiation-protection problems for the scientists handling the samples. [Their three-person submersible] Nautile and the instruments it carried showed no signs of contamination.
The real achievement was mapping the exact location of the barrels. “None of this means the waste is harmless,” the article concludes — but it also doesn’t mean we’re about to be overrun by radioactive crabs.”

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Drones Are Bringing The Surveillance State To Your Front Door

At the moment, the United States government has no official public count of how many drones law enforcement agencies own and fly in the U.S. There is no list from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Department of Justice (DOJ), or any state agency accessible to the public. Various industry estimates put police drone programs in the thousands — one recently cited as high as about 6,000. Congress should not have to take its numbers from corporate executives on quarterly earnings calls about how many drones are already circling overhead and surveilling the American people. The Department of Transportation, FAA, DOJ, and the Office of Justice Programs should put the fleets on the books and brief the House and Senate.

Until recently, most drones sold to police departments were made in China, raising significant concerns about Chinese government access and influence — either directly from China or through American companies that marked them up and profited. Congress has spent years trying to stop the Chinese drone invasion of our police departments. Those efforts were necessary. They are not finished. Even if new sales slow, fleets of Chinese drones remain deployed across the nation. And there are still continued efforts to keep Chinese components, software, and supply chains in the fleet.

Not one piece of hardware or software from the People’s Republic of China belongs on a police or federal drone in the United States, or in any piece of related equipment for that matter.

Not the chip, camera, battery, flight controller, app, firmware, or cloud login.

Grant funding, FAA registration, and operational approval should not be granted to aircraft or ground systems that contain Chinese hardware or software. American first responders deserve American supply chains.

That is already the direction of federal law, and it ought to be enforced without loopholes. Section 848 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 barred the Department of Defense from operating or contracting for covered foreign unmanned aircraft systems and critical components. The American Security Drone Act of 2023 was enacted as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024. The order on funding Unmanned Aircraft Systems says no Office of Justice Programs funds may go to unmanned aircraft systems manufactured or assembled by a covered foreign entity, with only limited exceptions.

Members of Congress should not have to guess how many drones are flying overhead. Congress must investigate and coordinate with executive agencies to determine the facts: how many unmanned aircraft federal agencies and state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement agencies already fly; fleet size by agency; their missions and payloads; and under what rules, if any, they operate. That is the level of transparency we need for government-used drones. Existing fleets should be registered within 30 days of operational deployment so we can put the brakes on unfettered overhead surveillance.

Federal tax dollars should go to real emergencies — search and rescue, wrecks, officer safety, and a barricaded suspect — not ever-present aerial patrol above American homes.

Those dollars already flow through the Office of Justice Programs, the Community Oriented Policing Services Office, Byrne Justice Assistance Grants, among others. Unmanned aerial systems are an explicit priority for Fiscal Year 2026 Community Oriented Policing Services Community Policing Development. “Drone as first responder” is not a substitute for a warrant. Persistent neighborhood surveillance is a general warrant from the sky, and a microphone on a drone is an intercept. Listening should require the same legal process as a Title III wiretap under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510–2523, or the state equivalent — no fishing expeditions, audit logs, and short retention.

Weaponized drones bought with Department of Justice grant money are already banned. That ban should apply to all related funding streams unless Congress authorizes otherwise.

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Burnham Announces ‘Ministry of Truth’ to ‘Defend Democracy’ From ‘Russia-Amplified Far-Right Narratives’

The belief that the United Kingdom is experiencing decline, the view that there are negative elements to modern life, and the feeling of unrest after terror attacks are among “far-right narratives” pushed by Russian intelligence that bear “no resemblance to reality,” Prime Minister Andy Burnham declared as he announced plans for a new National Centre for Information Defence.

The UK has more experience than most Western countries in being attacked with information warfare and will establish a new government body to disrupt “hostile state information attacks”, Andy Burnham said during his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, while tipping that this model could be exported to other countries to protect them from unwelcome information as well.

Though the wide-ranging speech touched on a series of issues, the lion’s share of the new British Prime Minister’s speaking time was spent explaining how narratives contrary to his view of modern Britain not only bear “no resemblance to reality”, but are engineered by foreign powers to undermine national security.

The country’s deeper experience in this sort of warfare goes back ten years, Burnham said — not naming the defeat of progressive sentiment in the Brexit referendum ten years ago in 2016, but tacitly implying this was the first battle in this shadow war against information — stating British elections had also been targeted by Russia.

Because there is “no national security” without a cohesive society to build it on, Burnham said the level of threat he intended to fight justified extraordinary reach for this new information control body, stating:

The Kremlin spends about £1.3 billion each year on manipulating information. We’re talking about an insidious campaign that reaches into people’s homes and twists what they feel about their own country and community, creating a narrative of decline, stoking division, and sowing despair… we are going to help our people to strengthen their resilience, because faced with their information warfare, security starts in every home.

The variety of opinions being forced on unsuspecting Britons by Russia was, the Prime Minister said, considerable, and conveniently aligns reasonably neatly with practically everything his Labour Party stands against.

This “industrial-scale assault by hostile actors on the information environment in the UK” by “Russian agencies” includes spreading disinformation to prey on ordinary people’s fears, he said, and amplifying “far-right narratives” by stoking “tensions and unrest in the wake of horrific events”, terror attacks.

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