Trump & Bibi: What next?

• Boss Bibi giving fresh orders to everyone, including Rubio and Pistol Pete Hegseth. Also to Ukraine's drug addict puppet President Zelensky further down this post. Pretty clear who runs the show. (No sound in the videos but the picture tell the story.)

• Patrick Lawrence writes: What will the Trumpster do? This is the question on many minds just now. In brief, Trump is going to have to decide what it is he will lose and then figure out how to lose it — either a war, on one hand, or on the other the global economy, the American electorate, and the midterm elections. Accepting defeat in the Iran war will be a messy schmear the American public cannot read for what it is, and it will never be called a defeat. In my view we are in for some variant of “peace with honor”—another name for the other side’s victory, as coined after Vietnam’s triumph in 1975. When and how this is presented remains to be seen, but I do not see any alternative open to Trump. I have previously argued that Trump would continue aggressing against Iran because he has been so thoroughly a captive of the Israelis. For Trump it was Israel über alles, as I put it earlier in the war. But there now seems to be no more obliging the psychotic, war-obsessed Netanyahu and all the monied Zionists Trump has served until now. If he betrays them—and absent a crystal ball or a Ouija board I expect him to do so out of sheer self-interest—we will at that moment be witnessing the making of history.

• The seized Iranian “TOSKA” ship by the US Navy carried dialysis supplies and vital medical equipment for Iranian civilians. Before, the US claimed its blockade would not seize/stop ships that transported food or medical equipment, well that turned out to be an outright lie. Finally released.

• Yemen military: "Saudi Arabia, along with America, has begun bombing sites in Iraq. We condemn and denounce all this brutal aggression, and this aggression will not pass without a response."
• Brian Berletic: US pauses its attacks on Iran once again to begin rearming, reorganizing and eventually restarting hostilities at a time of its own choosing; The pause also cools off energy markets the US is deliberately disrupting and dismantling to its benefit – but in a way that doesn’t trigger a united front against US disruptions; The war on Iran is part of a wider war on multi-polarism the US continues to wage – if the war on multi-polarism continues, so will the war on Iran; US foreign policy is driven by unelected corporate-financier interests, not politicians, thus any analysis or solution based on the notion “politicians” instead of the largest corporations in the US are making decisions is destined to fail.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani of “fomenting hate” following the mayor’s call for his arrest in relation to the war in Gaza. Speaking to Fox News on Sunday, Netanyahu dismissed the ICC case against him as “bogus” and said he would still travel to New York despite Mamdani’s calls for his arrest. Accusing the mayor of “fomenting hate,” the Israeli leader said: “He’s supposed to be the mayor of all New Yorkers – Jews, Christians, Muslims, everyone. But he’s trying to turn one group against the other.”
• RT: Three-quarters of Poles have expressed a negative attitude toward Ukraine's Vladimir Zelensky, according to a recent poll. The disapproval comes amid an ongoing scandal over Kiev’s veneration of Nazi collaborators involved in the mass killing of Poles during World War II. Zelensky sparked outrage in Poland in May by giving an elite commando unit a “heroes of UPA” award referring to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which carried out an ethnic cleansing campaign targeting mostly Polish Catholic residents of what is now Western Ukraine, which resulted in over 100,000 deaths. He and other top officials declared that “no one will ever dictate to Ukrainians which heroes to honor.” 

• Al Mayadeen: The Israeli embassy in Canberra has publicly challenged proposed changes to the Australian Labour Party’s policy on Palestine, drawing attention to what appears to be an unusual attempt by a foreign government to influence an internal party debate, The Guardian reported. In a four-page statement released on Monday, the embassy criticized sections of Labour’s draft national platform ahead of the party’s conference in Adelaide this week. The proposed platform includes stronger language opposing the occupation and “annexation” of Palestinian territory, as well as Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank. The intervention is notable because the Labour platform is an internal party document debated and approved at the party’s national conference every three years. Foreign governments rarely issue detailed public objections to policies that remain under discussion within an Australian political party.

• Oregon Capital Chronicle: In a sign of the economic times, multibillion dollar grocers Walmart and Amazon have among the most listed employees on publicly funded health care, according to an analysis of Oregon Health Authority data. Not all employees at the companies qualify for employee-sponsored health care. “One in six of the most listed employers on Medicaid forms in Oregon was a major grocer and retailer,” the publication reported.
• Sovereignista: This week Bloody Bibi and Zelenski are both in Washington. Neither was welcomed on a red carpet or with senior US officials meeting them. With Trump, it will be like a rerun of a macabre and grotesque. Unfortunately it is a circus that we have to pay attention to. There is a trend of a coalescence of the Ukraine War (Ukraine hitting a Iranian carrier in the Caspian Sea) with the War on Iran and region. The Ukrainian soldiers in Iraq are not necessarily mercenaries but soldiers on the payroll, just the same as they are in West Africa in the Sahel. Ukraine is not only selling weapons to any shadow military group or drug cartel, but soldiers as well. War is indeed a racket. Iraq’s National Security Advisor, Qasim al-Aboudi, says that Ukrainian cells are active throughout Iraq, participating in false flag attacks. 'Ukrainian intelligence cells carry out attacks in Iraq and falsely attribute them to various factions. We arrested individuals and elements who confessed that they were working for Ukraine,' al-Aboudi said. The issue concerns attempts to internationalize the conflict with Russia as much as possible through attacks on an Iranian vessel and facilities of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium. According to Ukraine’s allies, this is being presented as a global conflict that threatens their own interests, said Konstantin Kosachev, Deputy Speaker of the Russian Federation Council. He also expressed hope that Iran and Kazakhstan would find a way to respond, while not allowing themselves to be drawn into Kiev’s agenda. Dmitry Peskov stated 'Kiev’s terrorist activity is growing around the world, including Iraq, underscoring the importance of achieving the goals of Russia’s special military operation.'

• Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has denounced Europe’s military buildup and escalating confrontation with Russia, arguing that Western governments are steering the world toward catastrophe while arms manufacturers and political elites profit from perpetual war. Speaking Monday on The Sanchez Effect, Waters said calls for European NATO members to increase military spending to 5% of national GDP were “effing insane.” He questioned how Western leaders could even contemplate a direct conflict with Russia, given the Soviet Union’s decisive role and immense losses during World War II. “I often say to people, do you know who the Russian people are? They won the Second World War, for God’s sake. Twenty-five million of them died, saving the world for us,” he said. “And you want to have a war with them? How dumb.”  

• United Farm Workers Union (UFW): Last night we joined the ACLU and our other partners in asking the court to block ongoing federal immigration raids based on shocking newly disclosed records, body camera footage and sworn testimony from government officials. In a video cited in the filing, one agent said to another: “Yeah, just plug us in wherever you see some tonks…,” while other agents guessed whether people were “wet” simply based on appearance. “Tonks” is a derogatory and violent term understood to refer to the sound of a flashlight striking a migrant’s head. “Wet” is short for “wetback” and is a racist slur historically directed at Mexican and other Latino immigrants crossing the Rio Grande. “A year ago, farm workers across California were terrorized by brutal and unconstitutional raids based on racial and class profiling,” said Teresa Romero, president of the United Farm Workers Union, a plaintiff. “Today, the fear left behind by those raids continues. Farm workers go to work afraid they may not come home, even as they put food on all of our tables. The workers who feed this country deserve so much better.” This motion asks the court to prohibit immigration agents from stopping or detaining people because they appear to be low-income or working class and Latino. The court has scheduled a hearing on the motion for September 24. [In coming years people of color will become the majority population in the US. Thus the racist Trump administration is doing all it can to ship people of color out of the country now, no matter their legal status.]

• Consortium News: In a wide-ranging conversation with Chris Hedges about her new book, Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America, Political scientist Marie Gottschalk traces how deregulation, mass incarceration, militarized policing, endless war, media consolidation, and bipartisan deference to corporate power converged to create the conditions for today’s authoritarian politics. The result, she argues, is a country where state violence at home and imperial violence abroad reinforce one another — and where Trump’s rise represents not a break from the American system, but its logical consequence. Marie Gottschalk’s Crime and No Punishment is about far more than crime. It is a sweeping examination of how the US built a political and economic order that punishes ordinary people while increasingly protecting the powerful.

• reddit: Nvidia chip founder Jensen Huang recently explained, the future of AI depends on continuous knowledge sharing between AI models. (Some people call this "LLM poisoning.") The idea is that they will then incorporate the "poisoned" framing into all the material they generate -- both as part of phony AI websites and as answers to queries -- so that these lies ultimately dominate our collective information space. When these two stories are read together one after another, a deeply disturbing pattern emerges. A rush is on to destroy the legacy of human culture and replace it with a fiction-filled, privatized digital twin that has been bought, paid for, and -- because of its digital nature -- is utterly controllable. This tactic is at the heart of colonialism's playbook.
• Edward Snowden’s Ominous Warning to the World: These Programs, Mass Surveillance is NOT about public safety.  It is not about terrorism. It is about power. It is about economic espionage.  It is about diplomatic manipulation. And it is about social influence. It is about understanding the actions of everyone in the world as carefully as they can, no matter who they are, no matter how innocent their life. But we see how these same technologies are being applied to create what they call the social credit system.