Tag: perpetual war

Iran war throttles global fluoride supply, impacting US waterworks

Fluoride is becoming harder to source as the war in Iran places more strain on global supply chains, leading some local governments to reduce their own use of the widely used cavity-fighting agent. Two major water supply systems in Maryland, which serve the Baltimore and suburban D.C. areas, announced this month they would be temporarily reducing the concentration of fluoride, citing the conflict in the Middle East as the cause of a wider national shortage. A Pennsylvania town halted fluoridation for at least a few weeks, also citing the war.

According to chemical suppliers and trade groups, the shortage was brought on by a confluence of supply chain disruptions as well as higher transportation costs resulting from the conflict in the Middle East.

“Some of the suppliers around the nation have either taken their supply offline or severely shortened it, or it’s gone into other streams, like not to municipal streams. And there’s only a few fluoride manufacturers in the nation,” said Emily Horne, a spokesperson for Pencco, which has supplied the Baltimore-area waterworks.

Lowering the concentration from the federally recommended 0.7 mg/L to 0.4 mg/L, the city’s Department of Public Works said this decision was brought on by “broader national supply chain disruptions, driven in part by ongoing conflict in the Middle East.” The war in Iran and the associated standoff in the Strait of Hormuz have impacted U.S. fluoride levels, as Israel is one of the major global suppliers of the chemical used in water systems, fluorosilicic acid.

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IDF probes video showing soldiers destroying solar panels in Christian-Lebanese village

The IDF has launched an investigation into a video in which Israeli soldiers are seen destroying solar panels in a village in Lebanon, Israeli media reported on Saturday night.

The destruction took place in the village of Debel, the same village in which an IDF soldier was photographed smashing a statue of Jesus last week.

KAN also reported that the solar panels were civilian infrastructure, being used by hundreds of residents of the village who had not been evacuated from their homes, with the IDF’s permission.

“The actions seen in the video are not in line with the IDF‘s values and the conduct expected of its soldiers,” the IDF told KAN. “The incident is under investigation. Based on its findings, command measures will be taken accordingly.”

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Ruthless Taxation And The Hyperstate: How Germany Profits From Crisis

The Hormuz crisis offers us a profound insight into the real power structures in Germany. Nothing seems able to convince the Berlin monolith to partially shield its citizens from the consequences at gas stations through tax cuts.

It is now unavoidable that the Iran shock will translate into an inflation driver, working its way through economic value chains into consumer prices. These developments almost force a reduction of the tax burden on households and the middle class. It may sound strange to climate socialists, but wealth is created exclusively in the private sector, and certainly not in the state bureaucracy, which is currently profiting from the price surge at gas stations at the expense of citizens and enjoying a small special economic boost.

In March alone, the Finance Minister collected roughly half a billion euros more at gas stations. That makes him the winner of the crisis.

To dispel the impression of a secret profiteer, Klingbeil points to the generally precarious budget situation. In fact, his hands are essentially tied: the Merz-Klingbeil duo is driving the country’s public debt through the roof. Klingbeil is the skywalker among European debt makers. He has begun a catch-up race to place Germany in the top tier of debt states alongside neighboring France, Italy, and Spain. The German public debt ratio currently stands at 63 percent, but the debt spiral is accelerating. This figure will rise dramatically in the coming years.

Anybody should now be clear: The debt party of a state that burns its citizens’ capital in reckless fashion, whether in Ukraine or through the redistribution mechanism of the green transformation, must end. The state is an overfed glutton, extracting ever-higher tax revenues while sinking deeper into the debt spiral.

Yet the burden does not rest solely on debt. The state’s hyperactivity drains scarce resources from the private capital market, raises credit costs, and drives genuinely productive investments abroad. The damage has accumulated for years and is being made worse by the energy cost crisis.

One can only imagine the relief that the private sector needs to restart the prosperity engine and compensate for the ever-growing damage caused by the state bureaucracy. Germany’s plight urgently calls for reforms and an end to the failed eco-socialist transformation project.

In Germany, however, things are a little different. Economic rationality does not dominate. In the land of climate doomsayers and would-be world improvers, as former Economics Minister Robert Habeck once said, „all in“ — and all levers were set towards eco-socialism.

In fact: over 50 billion euros are pumped annually by the German state through the Climate and Transformation Fund (KTF) into the green wonder economy, which during the Hormuz crisis proved not to solve problems but rather to be their obvious cause.

The green wonder economy is leaving deep wounds in public budgets, whose deficits are spiraling out of control – in this year alone, another 180 to 190 billion euros of new debt will likely be recorded. https://www.tichyseinblick.de/daili-es-sentials/staatsverschuldung-rekord/

No one in Berlin is thinking about tax cuts anymore, regardless of how media artists around Chancellor Friedrich Merz try to pacify the public.

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Canada Joins US-Led Anti-China War Games

As the US blockades Iranian ships from sending oil to China, Canada’s military has sent a large force to join Washington’s effort to threaten that country. As Mark Carney calls US ties a “weakness”, Canada’s armed forces are quadrupling down on their US orientation.

Exercise BALIKATAN began Monday. Beijing views the massive US-led 19-day live-fire exercise across the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait as a threat. “Unilateralism and military bullying have already brought profound disasters to the world,” noted China’s foreign ministry spokesperson in response. Guo Jiakun added, “What the Asia-Pacific region most needs is peace and tranquillity. What it least needs is the introduction of external forces to create division and confrontation.”

This is the first time Canada has participated directly in the annual exercise. According to Canada’s ambassador in Manila, this country has dispatched the third largest deployment to the six-country exercise, which includes 10,000 US troops. According to the Canadian forces release, “Led by the United States and the Philippines, Exercise BALIKATAN will involve a broad range of CAF personnel and capabilities, including contributions from the Royal Canadian Navy, Canadian Army, Royal Canadian Air Force, the CAF Cyber Command, and the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command.”

HMCS Charlottetown is part of the exercise while 500 or more Canadian soldiers have traveled 10,000 kilometres to participate in this event.

As part of militaristic 2022 Indo-Pacific Strategy, Canada has deepened ‘defense’ ties with the Philippines. Six months ago, the two countries signed a Status of Visiting Forces Agreement. A year before that they established a Defence Cooperation Memorandum of Understanding and Canada gave the Philippines access to its Dark Vessel Detection System, which employs satellite technology to track ships in the South China Sea.

These efforts are designed to assist the US in its military buildup. The Bongbong Marcos led Philippines has taken a sharp turn back towards the US and against China. According to China Military Online, “Since the Marcos administration resumed defense cooperation with the US in 2022, the US military has been systematically shaping the Philippines into a forward operational hub. This includes the addition of four new military sites, the deployment of the Typhon mid-range missile system, the construction of large, prepositioned ammunition depots, and the frequent conduct of joint military exercises. Taken together, these developments indicate that the US is seeking to turn the Philippines into a forward stronghold for containing its strategic competitors.”

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The Bloody Awful Waste of War

Iran’s forensics chief said nearly 3,400 people had been killed in the country since U.S.-Israeli strikes began Feb. 28. Almost 2,500 people have been killed in Lebanon, 32 have been killed in Gulf states, and 23 have died in Israel. Thirteen U.S. service members have been killed, and two more died of noncombat causes.

I happen to believe Iranian lives are as valuable and precious as American lives. What gives the U.S. and Israeli governments the right to inflict such disproportionate casualties on Iran, on Lebanon, on Gaza? (I know: might makes right.) If you include the Palestinians, more than 100,000 people, and probably closer to 200,000, have been killed in the latest Israeli/U.S. wars, with the United States providing most of the deadly weaponry.

Speaking of weaponry, the liberal New York Times had an article last week lamenting the heavy expenditure of costly precision weaponry (like Tomahawk cruise missiles) by the U.S. since the beginning of the Iran War. Nowhere in the article was there a complaint about the death toll, nor was there much of a complaint about the cost. No – what the liberal New York Times was concerned about was how quickly the U.S. could replenish its stockpile of weaponry so it could be prepared for a future war against peer threats like China and Russia.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Since the Iran war began in late February, the United States has burned through around 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China, close to the total number remaining in the US stockpile. The military has fired off more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly 10 times the number it currently buys each year.

The Pentagon used more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war, at more than $4 million a pop, and more than 1,000 Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles, leaving inventories worrisomely low, according to internal Defense Department estimates and congressional officials.

The Iran war has significantly drained much of the US military’s global supply of munitions, and forced the Pentagon to rush bombs, missiles and other hardware to the Middle East from commands in Asia and Europe. The drawdowns have left these regional commands less ready to confront potential adversaries such as Russia and China, and it has forced the United States to find ways to scale up production to address the depletions, Trump administration and congressional officials say.

Again, if you read the article, nothing is said about morality. Nothing is said about death and dying and the bloody awfulness of war. The article simply says the U.S. has used a lot of very expensive missiles that we MUST replace if we’re to be prepared to wage more wars in the near future.

There’s not even a hint here that maybe America could be at peace – even in the most distant future. Apparently, America must always remain locked and loaded for a war with China, or Russia, or some other country and combination of countries, even as all this is couched as defending the homeland.

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Stagflation Incoming: The Donald Ain’t Gonna Like What Happens Next!

Here is a salient place to start regarding the economic impact of the Donald’s misbegotten war on Iran: To wit, approximately 7 billion ton-miles of freight moves by truck each and every day in the USA, which heavy truck fleet consumes upwards of 2.9 million barrels per day (mb/d) of diesel fuel.

Alas, the price of diesel fuel was about $3.55/gallon both a year ago and as of early January 2026, but has since soared by more than+$2.00 per gallon to $5.60. That’s a 56% rise in the cost of pumping goods and commodities through the arteries of the US economy. On an annualized basis, the diesel fuel bill for the US truck fleet went from $155 billion per year to $250 billion per year at current oil prices.

The big question, of course, is through which channel these drastically higher fuel acquisition costs will be absorbed – in higher prices or reduced output? And that pertains not just to the microcosm of the trucking sector, but the entire GDP now being battered by the Donald’s elective war-based dislocation of the world’s 175 million BOE/day oil and natural gas markets.

We’d bet it will be a combination of both inflation and deflation, otherwise known as stagflation. The mix of these outcomes depends upon supply and demand conditions in individual sectors of the economy in part, but also, and ultimately and more importantly, on the Fed. That is, whether the nation’s central bank pumps incremental demand into the economy via credit expansion with a view to “accommodating” the soaring price of energy today, and, soon, food and other commodity inputs to GDP, too; or holds firm on the printing press dials and allows the now cresting energy and commodity shocks to work their way through the interstices of the $30 trillion US economy.

Of course, during the previous comparable petroleum supply disruption during the 1970s, the Fed made the huge mistake of printing the money to counteract what was a “supply shock” in the form of soaring petroleum prices. But that led – just as sound money advocates had always held – to double digit increases in the general price level by the end of the decade, and thereafter the trauma of the Volcker administered application of the monetary brakes.

With the Fed fixing to welcome a new Chairman, as today’s congressional hearings remind, it is therefore a question of whether or not the Kevin Warsh Fed will want to take its place in the monetary policy villains gallery along with Arthur Burns and the hapless William G. Miller.

We think not. We actually believe that for the first time since Volcker, we are about to get a Fed chairman who understands the requisites of sound money and noninflationary finance, as well as the profound error of Keynesian demand management at the central bank.

And not only that. As far as we can tell, he also has the experience from his prior service on the Fed during the so-called Great Financial Crisis and the cajones to lean heavily against the supply shock now emanating from the Persian Gulf.

Of course, in a perfect world of honest money and free markets – including in the production of money and credit – there wouldn’t be any central bank “leaning” to do. Under an honest money gold standard, for instance, the impending petroleum supply shock would cause relative price changes, thereby generating a sharp curtailment of activity in petroleum intensive sectors and the reallocation of activity, output, jobs and capital to less petroleum intensive sectors. That’s what the miracle of free markets do when they are allowed by the state to operate.

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The Cowardice of Qualification: When Anti-War Voices Speak the Language of Empire

A respected human rights activist has spoken repeatedly against the US-Israeli aggression on Iran. She recognizes the illegality of the war and does not shy away from condemning it in clear terms. Yet, almost invariably, she feels compelled to qualify her position, reminding her audience that Iran has killed “tens of thousands of protesters” during recent anti-government demonstrations.

The number itself is highly questionable. Even widely cited figures from international reporting – such as Reuters coverage in January 2026 – place the death toll of the protests in the thousands, not tens of thousands. But the issue here is not the exact number, nor even the complex context of those protests, which began as genuine expressions of discontent but were later exploited by various external and internal actors seeking to destabilize the country.

The issue is the qualification itself.

Many who consider themselves progressive, anti-war, liberal, or even leftist seem unable to take a clear moral position on US and Israeli actions in the Global South without inserting these qualifications. The habit may appear harmless, even responsible, but in reality, it is deeply damaging. It is not a sign of nuance – it is a symptom of a deeper moral hesitation.

By qualifying their condemnation, these voices neutralize their own position. They suggest, whether intentionally or not, a form of moral equivalence: the US-Israeli war on Iran is wrong, but Iran is also guilty; the genocide in Gaza is horrific, but Palestinians are also to blame. The result is not balance – it is paralysis.

Compare this to the moral clarity of those who support war. Their position is never qualified. It is assertive, absolute, and often built on exaggeration or outright falsehoods, yet it carries conviction because it does not undermine itself.

This pattern is not new. It is deeply rooted in the history of Western political discourse. From the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which was justified as a necessary act to save lives, to the Cold War military interventions in places like Guatemala in 1954, where regime change was framed as a defense against communism, the language of morality has consistently been used to legitimize violence.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 offers one of the clearest examples. Saddam Hussein was presented as the ultimate embodiment of evil – the “new Hitler” – while the United States and its allies were cast as liberators.

Indeed, American officials spoke openly of being “greeted as liberators,” even as the country was plunged into chaos and extreme violence. A few years later, then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described the devastation created by the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006 as “the birth pangs of a new Middle East,” reducing immense human suffering to a necessary step in a grand geopolitical transformation.

This tradition extends even further back, to the era of colonialism, when European powers justified conquest through supposedly humanitarian missions. The abolition of slavery, for example, was frequently invoked as a moral justification for colonial expansion in Africa, recasting domination as benevolence and violence as a civilizing duty. Killing, in this paradigm, happens in the name of saving; destruction is presented as progress.

Israel has long operated within this same framework. Its wars have consistently been presented as existential and necessary for the survival of democracy and civilization itself.

Long before the emergence of Hamas, Palestinian resistance was framed through shifting labels that served the same purpose. During the 1936–39 revolt, Palestinian fighters were described in British and Zionist discourse as “terrorists,” “brigands,” and “gangs.” In later decades, the label shifted – from nationalist fighters to communists to Islamists – but the underlying logic remained unchanged: the enemy is always illegitimate, and therefore any violence against them is justified.

Many of us recognize this pattern, yet instead of exposing its fallacies, some continue to operate within it, searching for a “balanced” position while still presenting themselves as anti-war or even pro-Palestinian. They acknowledge Israeli crimes but feel compelled to condemn Palestinian “terrorism.” They oppose Israeli policies yet insist on distancing themselves from Hamas and the others, as if Palestinian resistance exists outside the historical and political reality that produced it. They speak of “extremists on both sides,” as though figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and a Palestinian fighter in Gaza can be meaningfully compared.

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The Emerging Push To Extend Some US Veteran Benefits To IDF Soldiers

A real policy push has emerged in the United States to extend certain legal protections to Americans who serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). In 2024, members of Congress introduced H.R. 8445, a bill that would amend federal law “to provide for the eligibility of United States citizens who serve in the Israeli Defense Forces for certain protections relating to such service.” 

Under current law, US veterans’ benefits are tied to service in the US armed forces. The statutory definition of “veteran” appears at 38 USC § 101(2) and limits eligibility to those who served in U.S. military forces or narrow statutory exceptions. The proposal in H.R. 8445 would move away from that framework.

Who Is Pushing for It and What They Are Saying

The legislation was introduced by Representatives Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA) and Max Miller (R-OH). In their official statement, they said the bill is intended to support Americans serving in Israel and noted that “over 20,000 American citizens are currently defending Israel.” They added that the legislation would “ensure we do everything possible to support these heroes.” 

The proposal explicitly frames IDF service as deserving of treatment similar to US military service for certain protections. Reporting summarizing the bill states that it would treat Americans serving in the IDF “in the same manner as service in the uniformed services” for specific legal protections. 

What Exactly They Are Trying to Extend

The bill focuses on extending two core legal protections that apply to US servicemembers.

The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) provides protections such as limits on interest rates, protections against eviction and foreclosure, and relief in certain legal proceedings. 

The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) guarantees that individuals who leave civilian employment for military service can return to their jobs and are protected from discrimination. 

H.R. 8445 would extend these protections to Americans serving in the IDF, effectively treating that service as qualifying military service under US law for those purposes.

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Israel Awaits U.S. OK to Attack Iran; State Dept. Admits U.S. Went to War at Israel’s Request

Israel is preparing to renew its attack on Iran, and awaits only the “green light” from the United States, the country’s defense minister said.

Israel Katz said the upcoming attack will erase the Khamenei dynasty and blow Iran back to the “age of darkness and stone,” reiterating U.S. President Donald Trump’s vow in early April to bomb Iran back to the “Stone Ages.” Katz threatened the attack as Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced a visit to Islamabad, where peace talks between the U.S. and Iran have been going on but failing miserably.

Katz’s remarks, former U.S. counterterror chief Joe Kent said, show that Israel is attempting to force the U.S. to continue attacking Iran. Days ago, the State Department admitted what Secretary of State Marco Rubio said early on: Israel dragged the U.S. into the war. 

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Decades-Old Iranian Jet Breached US Defenses, Struck Gulf Base in Early Phase of War — Reports

Iran’s early retaliatory strikes in the US-Israeli aggression caused significantly more damage to US military infrastructure than publicly acknowledged, with over 100 targets hit across bases in multiple Gulf countries, NBC News reported.

In the opening phase, an Iranian F-5 — a Cold War-era aircraft — penetrated air defenses and struck Camp Buehring in Kuwait, despite the presence of advanced US systems.

Facilities including hangars, runways, radar installations and command sites across Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE were damaged, with repair costs estimated in the billions.

When a decades-old jet can get through and land a hit, the image of untouchable “air dominance” starts to look a lot less convincing.

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