Tag: perpetual war

US wants to use hypersonic missile on Iran. Problem is, it may not work.

The U.S. is mulling using its first hypersonic missile against Iran — even though it may not yet be ready for battlefield use.

CENTCOM says it needs to deploy the “Dark Eagle” missile against Iran because it has been forced to move its launchers out of range for Washington’s Precision Strike Missile, which the U.S. is now running low on, according to a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Although it completed some successful tests in 2024, the Dark Eagle repeatedly failed to launch during other tests because of launcher and production quality issues. An unnamed defense official told Fox News that the weapon has reached “initial operational capability,” but the Pentagon testing office says it won’t have enough data to evaluate Dark Eagle’s combat effectiveness until early 2027.

The request comes amid a deadlock in U.S.-Iran talks that could spark a return to all-out war. President Donald Trump has pledged to maintain a blockade of Iranian shipping in the Persian Gulf, but Iran says it will only come to the table if the U.S. lifts the siege.

As Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, told RS, the possible Dark Eagle deployment “suggests that the Pentagon has lost all perspective.”

“Iran is not an existential threat, and the United States should not be expending its highest-end missiles there no matter what,” Kavanagh said. “The unit cost per missile is $41 million or so. Are any targets in Iran worth this much?”

Another expert observed that a deployment soon might help the Dark Eagle get more funding for next year’s defense budget.

“How do you know it is defense budget season in Washington? An unnecessary push to deploy a not-yet-fully-operational hypersonic missile against Iran,” Kelly Grieco, Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center, wrote on X. “Nothing says ‘fund me’ like first use, I guess.”

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Iran War Cost $25 Billion in First 2 Months, Pentagon Says

Combat operations against Iran have cost the U.S. military about $25 billion in two months, a top Pentagon accounting official told House Armed Services Committee members on April 29.

The Wednesday hearing marked the first time Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine have testified publicly to Congress since U.S. and Israeli forces commenced attacks on Iran on Feb. 28. U.S. and Iranian forces exchanged fire for about five and a half weeks before the parties entered into a ceasefire agreement on April 8.

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the ranking member on the committee, asked the Pentagon to account for the costs of U.S. munitions expended as well as for equipment destroyed in the course of the fighting.

Jules Hurst, the acting War Department comptroller, estimated those costs at about $25 billion.

Hurst said munitions accounted for most of it, but said he also factored in operations and maintenance and equipment replacement costs. Hurst joined Hegseth and Caine at the hearing, as Congress weighs military funding requests for fiscal year 2027.

The Trump administration has been working on submitting a supplemental funding request to Congress to cover the war’s costs, but has yet to finalize it or settle on an exact figure.

“We will formulate a supplemental through the White House that will come to Congress once we have a full assessment of the cost of the conflict,” Hurst said.

The Pentagon is already seeking a $1.5 trillion military and defense spending budget for fiscal year 2027. The request amounts to a 42 percent increase over fiscal year 2026 military spending, which totaled approximately $1.03 trillion.

Among other items, the Trump administration’s 2027 military budget request seeks $52.9 billion to boost procurement for 12 weapons systems that the Pentagon has classified as critical munitions.

In March, President Donald Trump announced he had met with the CEOs of BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon parent RTX Corp., Boeing, Honeywell, and L3Harris Technologies to discuss boosting their munitions production levels. Weapons produced by the companies—including the Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile defense systems and offensive weapons like the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile—have featured heavily in the Iran war.

Beyond the immediate material costs to replace weapons and equipment, the Iran war has also disrupted global oil and gas flows out of the Middle East, leading to rising prices for consumers.

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Corn Belt Politicians Are Using High Gas Prices To Push Even More Carveouts for Ethanol

With the average price of gasoline in the U.S. reaching its highest level since the start of the Iran war, lawmakers are thinking about giving energy producers special treatment to supposedly cut costs at the pump.

As part of the negotiations over the Farm Bill, which is expected to be voted on by the House of Representatives this week, a bipartisan group of Corn Belt lawmakers is proposing a measure to authorize the sale of E15—gasoline with an ethanol content up to 15 percent—year-round. This fuel is typically not allowed to be sold in the summer months because it evaporates easily, which contributes to air pollution and smog. (The Trump administration waived requirements last month to allow for E15 to be sold this summer, citing high gas prices.)

The proposed amendment would also limit blending exemptions for small refineries under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS)—the federal law that requires refiners and fuel importers to ensure that a certain percentage of the transportation fuel sold in the U.S. comes from renewable fuels, the most common of which is ethanol. Compliance with the RFS is estimated to cost refineries about $70 million in both 2026 and 2027, according to the energy consulting firm Turner, Mason & Company.  

“At a time when consumers are acutely sensitive to energy prices, this amendment represents a pragmatic solution that balances energy affordability, rural economic strength, and regulatory certainty,” said a coalition of agricultural and energy groups in a support letter for the measure. Additionally, its reforms to RFS exemptions “will help restore transparency and predictability for all parties subject” to that law. 

It doesn’t seem like “all parties” are on board. 

Last week, the National Corn Growers Association published a press release calling out a group of “oil corporations” for attempting to “derail legislation that lowers fuel prices.” 

“There is a tiny minority of major energy corporations – like Delek U.S. Inc., Cenovus Energy, CVR Energy, HF Sinclair, Parr Pacific Holdings and Suncor Energy Inc. – that are masquerading as small refineries to get Renewable Fuel Standard exemptions they don’t need,” said the association’s president, Jed Bower. “Their greedy actions are holding up legislation that would help farmers who are struggling during tough economic times.”

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The Global Crisis Scam and the Battle to Stay Human

A Brief Synopsis of Our Global Predicament

On the global stage it appears, with a few exceptions, that every nation is defining itself as an enemy of another nation, and an increasing number backing this with the build up of a force of arms. War is big business, and fear is the great repressor of human resilience and resistance. So long as these two states dominate world affairs, the globalist elite that provokes and finances them retains complete control.

This ‘elite’ has built its empire on an unprecedented appropriation and centralisation of global wealth, which now includes the expansion and domination of artificial intelligence and related advanced technologies.

This vast financial wealth is gained by controlling the money (debt) owed to banking and investment institutions that are the creditors of the neo-liberal global economy *

By maintaining a level of crisis as a permanent feature of world economic and social affairs, this elite (also known as shadow government) undermines the normal workings of national and international economic activity, forcing millions of businesses (big and small) into increased hardship and bankruptcy.

The assets of these enterprises are then stolen by the creditors in lieu of non-payment of their debts.

The founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, stated quite categorically in 2020 that by 2030, “You will own nothing and you will be happy”. This is the demonic reality of the world we find ourselves in 2026. 

According to the shadow government’s agenda, by 2030, globalist creditors will have appropriated the world’s wealth while driving large sections of the population into impoverishment.

All high-level institutions of the world, whether secular, religious, military, social, technological, educational, pharmaceutical, agricultural, and many more of the same, play their part in maintaining this ultra repressive top down control. 

It forms a cult of power and control that finances and stages international conflicts, such as those we see today in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Iran, Venezuela, with the promise of Cuba, Greenland and even Canada to join the current hit list.

The European Union, NATO, the United Nations, the World Health Organisation (WHO), the World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are all in there, along with all main banking institutions, including Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, and additionally global investment institutions such as Black Rock, Vanguard and State Street. While the military industrial complex stands at the head of the war profiteering agenda.

There can be no ‘peaceful resolution’ to world conflicts as long as this situation prevails. Its protagonists are presently set on the mass roll-out of IT; ‘Smart’ 24/7 surveillance technologies (including your mobile phone); central bank digital currencies; ‘transhuman’ brain-chipped humans; advanced social engineering of human behaviour and totalitarian government.  

There is a lot to deal with. Not least the fact that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have combined to head the current enforced regime of chaos, destruction and death. Only a few years ago, ironically, many were seeing America as a great ‘ally’ of Europe against the supposed threat of the Soviet regime.

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Kiev’s attacks on Russian refinery cutting global oil supply – Kremlin

Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure on the Black Sea coast are worsening the global oil crunch caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran and disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

Multiple Ukrainian drone strikes have hit Tuapse, a key densely-populated port in Russia’s Krasnodar Region, have targeted its refinery and adjacent marine terminal. Regional governor Veniamin Kondratyev reported fires at the site, including a major blaze at the refinery, prompting evacuations of nearby residents and emergency response measures.

The attacks led to high-risk air pollution, with residents advised to use respirators, as an oil spill destroyed miles of the beach in the resort town. Kondratyev also released a video of the town filled with smoke, with a clean-up operation ongoing on the beach.

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Israel ‘weaponizing’ water in Gaza – medical charity

Israel has used access to water as a weapon and a form of “collective punishment” against Palestinians in Gaza, according to a report by international medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Israel has rejected the claims as baseless.

The organization said in a report released Tuesday that Israel has “engineered” water scarcity in the strip, creating “conditions incompatible with human dignity and survival.” Access to water, sanitation and hygiene has been “severely undermined” since the start of the Israeli offensive in Gaza in October 2023, it stated.

The report highlights a sharp rise in water-shortage-related diseases, including diarrhea, skin infections, lice, and infected wounds. Additionally, the lack of clean water and sanitation is also worsening malnutrition and severely affecting mental health.

Gaza has no natural freshwater sources, relying instead on groundwater and seawater, both of which require treatment. Much of the infrastructure, including desalination plants, boreholes, pipelines, and sewage systems, has been rendered inoperable or inaccessible, according to MSF.

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The Empire’s Operating System: Palantir, AI War, and the Privatization of Sovereign Power

Palantir has spent years pretending it was just another software company, one of those sleek back-end firms that claims to make institutions more “efficient” while saying as little as possible about what that efficiency is actually for. That mask is slipping.

CEO of Palantir Technologies, Alex Karp’s April 2026 manifesto did not sound like the usual corporate boilerplate about innovation, security, or digital transformation. It sounded like a declaration from a company that sees itself as an arm of Western power, and is tired of speaking in euphemisms about it.

Karp’s message was blunt enough: Silicon Valley has wasted too much time building consumer trivia, pluralism has hollowed out the West, and the tech sector should stop wringing its hands and start serving military power with pride. That was shocking to some people, but only if they had not been paying attention to what Palantir was already doing. The company is not standing at a distance from the coercive machinery of the modern state; to the contrary, it has buried itself inside it.

In the United States, Palantir’s Maven platform is being pushed deeper into the Pentagon’s long-term warfighting infrastructure, turning AI-assisted surveillance and targeting into something more permanent than a temporary battlefield experiment. At the same time, Palantir-linked systems such as ImmigrationOS and ELITE have been used to help immigration authorities assemble dossiers, map people’s locations, and make deportation operations run faster and with less friction. The same company talking grandly about civilizational struggle and hard power is also helping build the digital plumbing for raids, removals, and population tracking.

Britain is now getting a taste of the same politics. Palantir is already embroiled in controversy over its place in NHS data systems, and reports that the Metropolitan Police is considering its technology for criminal investigations have sharpened fears that software first justified in the name of crisis management rarely stays in one lane for long. Today, it is health logistics, counterterrorism, and border control. Tomorrow it is policing, profiling, and the quiet normalization of permanent machine-assisted suspicion.

What gives the manifesto real weight is not its style, but its candor. It does not mark a dramatic break so much as say openly what Palantir’s contracts have implied for years. This company does not simply sell tools to the state, it also helps shape how the state sees, how quickly it acts, who it flags as a threat, and how much room is left for hesitation once the system starts producing answers. Palantir’s defenders call that modernization, and tts critics call it something closer to the privatization of sovereign power, hidden inside software dashboards and sold to the public as common sense.

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Former Ukrainian Erotic Model Part of the Team of Divers That Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipeline: REPORT

From erotic model to diver involved in a terrorist attack.

The German paper BILD comes with a revealing story about the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, arguably the ‘most geopolitically explosive attack in recent history’.

The German outlet interviewed Wall Street Journal journalist Bojan Pancevski, who wrote the book ‘The Nord Stream Blast’ with Paul Ronzheimer.

BILD reported (translated from the German):

“The Ukrainian military granted the reporter unprecedented access. He met the planners and assassins of the “largest sabotage in history” and spoke to the German investigators, who succeeded in painstakingly working and against all expectations to solve the attack on the pipelines that once brought Putin’s gas to Germany.”

The book alleges that the attack was master minded by former top General Valery Zaluzhny (currently ambassador to the UK), and that Kiev regime leader President Volodymyr Zelensky ‘knew about the sabotage attack that his officers were planning’.

While in Ukraine the attack is seen as a glorious combat operation, in Germany, BILD reports, no one defends the act of sabotage.

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Far Right Israeli Settler Movement Enters Syria in a Push for “Greater Israel”

yrian journalist Oudai Efnikher is deeply familiar with life under Israeli occupation. He was born in Kafer Hareb, a village in Syria’s Golan Heights, from which he and his family were expelled after Israel seized the territory during the 1967 Six-Day War.

Now he is once again facing down Israeli forces, as they “take our land, kill our crops, and abduct our fathers.”

“This is a slow occupation, but soon, we will lose what they have not yet taken,” Efnikher told Truthout.

After Bashar al-Assad was ousted by Syrian rebels in December 2024, Israeli forces wasted no time before launching a massive aerial bombardment campaign on the country, destroying almost 80 percent of the military capacity left behind by the Assad regime.

Israeli forces also entered the demilitarized buffer zone established by a UN Security Council resolution in 1974 between the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and the rest of Syria. They seized the territory and then established a “security buffer” beyond the last demarcation line administered by UN observer forces.

The area now under Israeli military control is off-limits to Syrian civilians and government forces. Farmers have been unable to tend to their land, and landowners have little hope they will ever be able to access it again

In total, Israel now occupies an additional 177 square miles of Syrian territory than it did before the fall of Assad.

“Maybe Israel will take it all. They already have a safe zone in southern Syria, so that could ultimately be the best option for Israel,” Syrian political analyst Issam Khoury told Truthout.

But what is most concerning for Efnikher is not the Israeli military’s presence in Syria, but what has become regular incursions by Israeli settlers.

On April 22, a group of roughly 40 settlers affiliated with the far right Halutzei HaBashan movement, or the Pioneers of Bashan — a reference to the name in the Torah for the fertile territory located northeast of the Sea of Galilee, which the Torah says was once ruled by the tyrant King Og before Moses defeated him — entered Syrian territory and asked the Israeli government to legalize settlement activity there.

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Trump warns Iran oil infrastructure could ‘explode’ as blockade halts exports

During an appearance on Fox News’ “The Sunday Briefing,” President Donald Trump asserted that Iran’s oil infrastructure is currently on the brink of a catastrophic failure that could materialize within the next three days.

He attributed this imminent collapse to a U.S. naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, which has effectively halted the nation’s ability to export its primary commodity.

Trump further explained that while Iranian facilities continue to produce oil, the lack of viable export routes has left the surplus with nowhere to go, creating immense physical and logistical pressure on the country’s internal storage and pipeline systems.

“When you have, you know, lines of vast amounts of oil pouring through your system, if for any reason that line is closed because you can’t continue to put it into containers or ships, which has happened to them — they have no ships because of the blockade — what happens is that line explodes from within, both mechanically and in the earth,” the president said.

Trump also warned that if these detrimental failures occur, the country will have to spend vast amounts of time and money rebuilding the impacted infrastructure, and other issues could still linger.

“It’s something that happens where it just explodes. And they say they only have about three days left before that happens. And when it explodes, you can never, regardless, you can never rebuild it the way it was,” Trump said.

Analysts believe that Iran could be forced to shut down its oil fields as early as April 29th due to the blockade, which could also impact the crude production long term.

“In other words, it will always be, if you rebuild it, it’s hard to rebuild it all, but it would only be about 50% of what it is right now,” Trump said, emphasizing that he believes Iran is ‘under pressure’ because of the situation.

Forced to divert its oil to onshore tanks, Tehran is quickly running out of storage, as the tanks are only able to hold so much, since its exports have been halted.

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