Conflicting Stories

Prime Minister Netanyahu: We have nearly achieved total control of Iranian airspace.

Israel’s official emergency system sent a message to 7 million people that translates into plain English as this: Our early warning network has been destroyed. We cannot guarantee we’ll detect incoming missiles in time to warn you. And you need to figure out your own survival from here.

Israeli Channel 14 admitted the late warnings are caused by the destruction of US radars. The sensor network isn’t degraded anymore. It’s got holes you could drive a missile through. Which is exactly what keeps happening. Geroman tracked one salvo for over thirty minutes without a single interception being reported.

Half the THAAD batteries America has on earth are confirmed dead. Eight worldwide. Four gone. Prince Sultan in Saudi Arabia. Abu Dhabi and Al Ruwais in the UAE. Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan. Ground-level photographs of the Jordan site show a shattered radar array, housing torn open. I’ve been reporting IRGC claims on these since day one. All confirmed now.

The CIA station in Saudi Arabia is confirmed “inoperable” after a direct drone hit.

China-Iran safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz has now been confirmed. Iran’s military clarified: the strait is open, but vessels linked to the US, Israel or Europe “cannot pass”.

If there is an unconditional surrender, I doubt it will be Iran. I also note that I’ve seen several references to “the Epstein Alliance” to describe the US-Israeli alliance, mostly by Arab commenters. If that catches on around the world, it’s pretty clear which way the rhetoric and moral high ground is going.

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This is Not America’s War

Americans don’t support Israel’s war on Iran, no matter how rabidly the Short Fake Trump genuflects before President Netanyahu:

A majority of Americans disapprove of how President Donald Trump is managing the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran and oppose the military action outright, according to the latest PBS News/NPR/Marist poll. As Operation Epic Fury nears the end of its first week, the new survey found 56% of Americans oppose U.S. military action in Iran, while 44% support it. Support for U.S. action has remained relatively steady since January, before the attacks began.

Even that 44 percent is almost certainly a massive exaggeration. I very much doubt that one in five Americans actually support the war, and popular opinion is going to turn even more vehemently against it as the economic costs begin to hit home.

Also, this war means writing off both Ukraine and Taiwan, which is actually the right thing to do, but might discombobulate those Americans who have fallen for Clown World’s propaganda.

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Phase Two Begins

  • Tehran has decided to stop attacking targets in neighboring states, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in a televised speech. Pezeshkian also apologized to the countries of the region and expressed the Islamic Republic’s respect for their sovereignty.
  • Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran is not seeking a ceasefire and sees no reason to negotiate with the US, arguing that previous talks had been interrupted by attacks.
  • The Gulf State ambassadors have appealed to Russia to pressure Iran into a ceasefire, but Russia has pointed out that Iran was attacked by Israel and the USA and has a right to defend itself.
  • All of the social media companies except Tik Tok have banned videos and pictures of Iranian strikes.

Translation: Tehran has accomplished its phase one objective of disrupting the global economy and degrading the US military bases in the region and is now ready to concentrate its attacks on Israel and US military assets. So expect more heat and more over-the-top rhetoric in the coming week, not less.

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Who Gave You the Right?

An angry Arab billionaire writes an open letter to Clown World’s Short Fake Trump.

Mr. President Donald Trump,

A direct question: Who gave you the authority to drag our region into a war with Iran?

And on what basis was this dangerous decision made? Did you calculate the collateral damage before pulling the trigger? Did you consider that the first to suffer from this escalation will be the countries of the region?

The people of this region also have the right to ask: Was this your decision alone, or did it come under pressure from Netanyahu and his government?

You have placed the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and Arab nations at the heart of a danger they did not choose. Thankfully, we are strong and capable of defending ourselves, and we have armies and defense systems protecting our nations.

But the question remains: Who allowed you to turn our region into a battlefield? Before the ink dried on the Board of Peace initiative that you announced in the name of peace and stability, we now find ourselves facing military escalation that threatens the entire region. So where did those initiatives go? And what is the fate of the commitments made in the name of peace? Most of the funding proposed for those initiatives came from the region itself, and from Arab Gulf states that contributed billions of dollars on the basis of supporting stability and development.

These countries have the right to ask today: Where did this money go? Are we funding peace initiatives or financing a war that puts us at risk?

More dangerously, your decision does not only threaten the peoples of the region but also the American people, whom you promised peace and prosperity. Today, they find themselves in a war financed by their taxes, with costs — according to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) — ranging between $40–65 billion for direct military operations, and potentially reaching $210 billion including economic impacts and indirect losses if the conflict lasts four to five weeks. Even Americans themselves are being sacrificed in a war they have no stake in.

You also violated your promises not to get involved in wars and to focus only on America and place it as your top priority, as you ordered foreign military interventions during your second term that included seven countries: Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria, Syria, Iran, and Venezuela, in addition to naval operations in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. You ordered more than 658 airstrikes abroad in your first year of rule, which is equivalent to the total number of strikes during Biden’s entire term, whom you previously criticized for dragging the United States into foreign wars.

These numbers have strongly reflected on your approval ratings among Americans, which declined since the start of your second term, dropping by 9% within 400 days. These figures clearly show something: Even within the United States, there is growing concern about being dragged into a new war and about putting American lives, the economy, and the future at risk unnecessarily.

True leadership is not measured by war decisions but by wisdom, respect for others, and pushing toward peace. If these initiatives were launched in the name of peace, then we have the right today to demand full transparency and clear accountability.

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Killing Isn’t Winning

  • Tehran took the heaviest bombardment yet. Again. I know I wrote that sentence yesterday too. Strikes across residential neighbourhoods, police stations, a hospital in Bushehr where footage shows newborns being evacuated. The IDF claims 113 waves across western and central Iran. 5,000 airstrikes. 1,600 sorties. Iranian state media puts the death toll at 1,045.
  • The IRGC announced wave 20 of ballistic launches today. Twenty. And for the first time, incoming ballistic missiles hit the centre of Tel Aviv without sirens going off. Read that again. No sirens.
  • Siren warning to impact time in Israel has been reduced from 15 minutes to 2 minutes.

I understand the rhetoric coming out of Washington and Jerusalem is impressively fearsome. But the thing is, this is a country that lost 15,000 civilians during 80 days of missile attacks during the Iran-Iraq War out of a total of 450,000 fatalities during the eight years of the war.

They didn’t surrender then, so why would they even be thinking about surrendering now? Especially when the global economy that sustains the US and Israeli war machines is a matter of weeks, and possibly just days, away from breaking down.

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Two Weeks

That’s how much longer oil can be stored in the various storage facilities before it will become necessary to start shutting down oil wells because there is nowhere for the oil to go. And even that assumes that no further damage to the oil production and storage facilities is done by future Iranian missile attacks.

Right now, the Straight of Hormuz is effectively closed to oil traffic. Ships aren’t moving. Tankers are anchored. The oil that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE pump out of the ground every
single day has nowhere to go. So, it gets stored, pumped into massive holding tanks on land while the world waits for the straight to reopen. Those storage tanks are almost full. Maximum capacity
10 to 14 days away. The moment those tanks hit capacity, the Gulf States have only one option. Stop pumping. You cannot produce oil you have nowhere to put. Production shuts down. And the second Gulf production shuts down. The global oil supply doesn’t tighten. It collapses.

Every $10 increase in oil prices adds roughly $400 to $500 per year to the average household’s cost of
living.

I give it about one week before the American public starts demanding that Fake Trump shut down his air war for Israel, withdraw the US Navy, and effectively surrender to Iran. He doesn’t have another 100 days. He may not have another two weeks, especially given the fact that the Iranians have already forced the USS Lincoln’s carrier group to retreat with a warning shot aimed at the carrier itself.

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Service and Sales Disrupted

If you can’t buy Sigma Game on Amazon, it’s not shenanigans, it’s the Gulf war:

Amazon data centers have been deliberately destroyed for the third day. Last night there was an attack on Data Centers in Bahrain – this is already the fourth attack in 3 days; In Dubai, a data center was deliberately razed to the ground; The operation was carried out to “determine the role” of data centers in supporting US military and intelligence activities against Iran, the Iranians say.

Because of this, there is a complete collapse in the Middle East – banks are not working, a lot of information has been lost, even the delivery of goods is not working; Amazon panics and shifts capacity to other servers, but it doesn’t help —the load only increases and the speed drops.

For some reason, the UK and European sites are unaffected, but the US listings are mostly down.

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Even Judas Got Paid

The first rule of selling-out: be sure to get paid first.

BREAKING: Israeli officials allegedly hired social media influencers for $7,000 per post, failed to pay them, and are now facing lawsuits totaling millions of dollars over unpaid invoices.

The only thing worse than being a sell-out is selling out for nothing.

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Veriphysics: The Treatise 028

XI. Conclusion: Ascending Through and Toward Truth

The Enlightenment is dying. Its death is not the result of external attack but of internal collapse. Its premises were unsound; its methods were fraudulent; its promises were false. The political freedom it proclaimed has become managed democracy and soft totalitarianism. The economic prosperity it predicted has become debt, stagnation, and decline. The scientific progress it celebrated has become institutional corruption and paradigm entrenchment. The rational inquiry it championed has become credentialed sophistry and rhetorical manipulation. The light it promised has become darkness, both undeniable and darker than anything one could have ever imagined.

The tradition it displaced remains true. The world is intelligible because it is created by intelligence. Truth is real, knowable, and worth pursuing. Goodness is not a projection but a feature of reality. Human beings are not accidents in an indifferent cosmos but creatures made in the image of God, capable of knowing and loving what is true and good and beautiful. The Christian vision of reality coheres, explains, and satisfies in ways the Enlightenment vision never could.

But the tradition, as it existed, failed to defend itself. It spoke when it should have shouted. It reasoned when it should have fought. It possessed the tools of logic, mathematics, and empirical inquiry and did not deploy them. It assumed good faith in a rhetorical war and was outmaneuvered by opponents who understood that assumptions are vulnerabilities.

Veriphysics offers something new: not merely the tradition preserved but the tradition renewed and armed. Aletheian Realism provides the metaphysical foundation—a grounding for truth, goodness, and meaning that the Enlightenment could not supply. The Triveritas provides the methodological criterion—a standard for distinguishing warranted assent from unwarranted, more demanding than the Enlightenment’s “scientific method” and actually applied rather than merely invoked. The collapse of materialism in physics provides confirmation from the Enlightenment’s own proudest domain, that the mechanical universe was an illusion, and the mysterious universe the tradition always described is what we actually inhabit. The Christian metaphysics provides the ultimate grounding, not faith against reason but faith completing reason, revelation illuminating what inquiry alone cannot reach.

We see through a glass, darkly. The darkness is real; we cannot fully dispel it on our own. And yet, we see. We know what what we perceive through the glass shows us that which is both real and true. And we can ascend, however gradually, toward veriscendance, through lesser truths toward the unitary Truth, through partial knowledge toward fuller understanding, through the shadows of this world toward the light of the world that casts them.

The ascent is possible. The tools are available. The opportunity is open. All that is required is the will to ascend.

This concludes the treatise. If you’d like to continue following the developments in Veriphysics, please subscribe to the new substack devoted to it.

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A Very Weird War

Military historian Big Serge points out there are fundamental inconsistencies in the new Gulf war:

It’s a very weird war.

Iran prepared for decapitation strikes by pre-authorizing field commanders to retaliate at will. You have the Iranian Foreign minister admitting that military units are mostly out of command at the moment. So in a sense, Iran turned itself into a giant bomb, primed to detonate when it got hit. The Iranian military is essentially weapons free, which makes it hard for them to coordinate or mass strikes. It also makes them unpredictable and difficult to control.

On the other hand, you have the United States pursuing contradictory war aims. The White House seems to want to negotiate, but decapitation leaves you with nobody who is clearly empowered to negotiate. Since Iran’s military is basically emptying the clip without central direction, it’s not even clear that a ceasefire could be implemented by Iran if they want it. Trump explicitly said that the people they expected to take charge in Tehran are now dead.

It’s all a recipe for maximum chaos with few brakes. The US has to commit to a throw weight game either until Iran’s strike capability is completely degraded, or until Tehran reasserts central control and can submit to some sort of negotiated ceasefire. The latter doesn’t seem likely because the US is systematically degrading Iranian command and control.

The fundamental problem is that no one is in full control on either side. The Iranian central command is dead and their military structure is entirely decentralized, so there is no way for them to stand down even if most of the operational commanders were inclined to do so, which they almost certainly are not. It’s the Gamergate strategy applied to war: everyone knows that central command equals unwanted attention from hostile forces, so everyone focus on shutting up and emailing. The Gulf States are the advertisers and the objective is to prevent them from supporting the US military.

And it’s working. The US Navy has retreated and is running out of its ability to defend itself or Israel.

On the Israeli side, there is also a bifurcation between command, which is Netanyahu, and control, which is the US military. Netanyahu is giving the orders and setting the objectives for the Trump administration, but he has neither direct control over nor accountability to the US military. So the structure is fundamentally unstable and inefficient; even if Fake Trump wasn’t a natural agent of chaos, his inability to know exactly what Netanyahu wants in any given moment and the inherent degradation of information passing through an intermediary is going to reduce the effectiveness of implementing any strategy.

Which is why the ground offensive is going to be one enlisting Kurdish proxies, which is unlikely to be any more successful than past Kurdish proxy wars. These reliably ended up with the Kurds needing to be protected from being eliminated by the Turks and the Syrians, so even with a higher level of air support from the US and Israel, Iran’s drone inventory doesn’t bode well for the offensive.

Hundreds of Kurdish fighters have begun ground activity inside Iran from areas near the Iraqi border, Israeli and American officials confirmed to The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday, in a development that could open an additional front against Tehran as regional tensions continue to escalate.

The Kurdish forces operating along the Iran-Iraq border are considered one of the most prominent armed opposition groups confronting the regime in Tehran. The organizations involved are Iranian Kurdish groups that maintain thousands of fighters, most of whom operate from territory in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq along the frontier with Iran.

According to Kurdish sources, these forces have been preparing in recent days to participate in ground operations in western Iran with the aim of pressuring Iranian security forces and dispersing them across multiple arenas.

The strategic concept behind the activity, the sources said, is that fighting along the border areas would force the Iranian regime to divert military and security resources there, potentially easing pressure on protesters and opposition elements in major cities inside Iran.

In other words, the strategic objective is still color revolution against a regime with a nonexistent leadership on behalf of the foreign countries actively bombing the populace. That sounds more like a means of ensuring that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps becomes a military dictatorship than anything else, although if Israel has someone inside the IRGC in a position to become that military dictator, that strategy could make sense.

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