Trump increasingly worried & angry as his war flops

• The Islander CENTCOM announced they lit up IRGC targets across Iran at 10pm Eastern last night: Here’s the official version. 'At precisely 10:00 PM EST on July 29, US Central Command claimed a series of precision strikes against dozens of IRGC sites inside Iran - command nodes, missile and drone facilities, coastal radar, and naval assets.' They say it was in response to Iranian ballistic missiles launched the previous day at US forces in the region. All those missiles, they insist, were intercepted. More than 50,000 American troops remain on high alert across the Middle East. Iran already told anyone paying attention that any further use of Gulf territory as a launchpad would be treated as participation. Kuwait has allowed itself to become one of those launchpads. If that continues, Kuwaiti soil may not remain sovereign for long. Tehran has the range, the inventory, and the political will to make that a reality. Hormuz is already running on Iranian forbearance. Bab el-Mandeb is under Yemeni control. Now the Empire is daring the region into a wider fire while its own interceptor stocks and strategic petroleum reserve both run critically low. Hello $150 oil! Iran will hit back. The only question is how many more 'precision' nights the Empire thinks it can afford before the cost arrives at the pump and at the bases that still believe the fairytale they are safe. 

• IRGC announced Iranian missile struck the Muwaffaq al Salti Air Base, in Jordan, targeting & destroying 3 US F-35 fighter jets & damaging 3 others. The attack also killed several US officers & technicians. This was in retaliation for the US bunker-buster bomb attack on residential homes in Qeshm that killed 3 family members and orphaned 2 children. Iranian Civil defense teams miraculously rescued the two children transporting them to a hospital. How was this a legitimate target? The war crimes keep piling up as the US becomes more desperate. 

• New York Times: Hundreds of Jordanian political, legal, and public figures have signed an open letter demanding the withdrawal of US forces from Jordan. They call the American presence a security, political, and economic risk pulling the country into a war it wants no part of. Most Jordanian outlets refuse to publish the letter, and organizers warn signatories could be jailed. 

• NBC News: Reports indicate that Trump is frustrated by the lack of progress in ending the war with Iran and by divisions within his administration over strategy. Some officials support continued military action, while others warn that prolonged strikes could deplete US weapons stockpiles and escalate the conflict. [As well as destroying the global economy and most of the western imperial nations who vainly refuse to accept the coming multi-lateral world.]

• Iran’s Army (Artesh) says it targeted: US military power generators; Navigation system; Administrative buildings; Logistical and support buildings at Sheikh Isa Air Base, Bahrain.
• The yellow line is 2026: Total US “Big 4” inventories from crude including the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, gasoline, distillates and jet fuel have fallen off a cliff since spring. No other year on the chart, not even the worst stretches of 2022 (Ukraine war) comes close to this kind of sustained collapse. The Empire is burning through its last real buffer while two of the world’s most critical oil chokepoints answer to Iran and Yemen. Paper sanctions never stopped Russian nor Iranian barrels. Physical control of the straits is a different game entirely. When the cushion is gone, price is the only remaining signal. There is massive cost to waging an illegal war of terror and aggression on adversaries you vastly underestimate.

• Speaking to Al Mayadeen on Tuesday, Professor Mohammad Marandi in Iran said the UAE has committed “enormous injustices” against the Iranian people and has been complicit in the US assault on Iran and the killing of thousands of Iranians. He noted that the UAE is now seeking de-escalation, adding that Iran has been engaging with all countries hosting US bases, including the Emirates, with varying responses and levels of progress. Marandi stressed that if the US attacks Iran and escalates the war, Iran will retaliate, and countries hosting US bases “will not be forgiven.” He warned that if Washington targets Iran’s critical infrastructure, “Iran will retaliate against those countries that have hosted the Americans and have facilitated the aggression against Iran,” because without these countries, “the US cannot carry out aggression.”
• Stars & Stripes: Nearly 100 U.S. troops have been injured in the Iran war in the past two weeks, the Pentagon said following growing attacks on American service members in the Middle East. A large portion of the wounded are suffering from head trauma which has led some military health experts to worry that traumatic brain injuries - caused by damage to the brain that can impact thinking, movement and emotion - could become the signature injury of this war, as in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. [As these severe injuries are increasing, Trump's Wall Street team are cutting the Veterans Administration budget as they begin to privatize the VA. When the injured troops return home the medical care for them will not be what it used to be.]

• There were 1,275 mosques in Gaza before October 2023. Israel has now completely destroyed 1,050 of them and partially damaged 191 others. That is not collateral damage. That is the systematic erasure of a civilization's spiritual architecture, one building at a time. Yesterday, Israeli jets added another name to the list. Al-Muttaqin Mosque in central Gaza City was struck and destroyed, along with the tents sheltering hundreds of displaced Palestinians who had gathered around it. These were not combatants. They were families who had already lost their homes to earlier strikes and were living under canvas near a house of worship. Both the mosque and the tents are now rubble. 

• The Trump administration wants to sell 2,840 acres of Ohio’s only national forest for oil and gas drilling. The Bureau of Land Management announced it will auction off land in Wayne National Forest for fracking, despite the protected forest being home to multiple endangered species. A month ago, this would've been illegal. But Trump just gutted the Endangered Species Act - clearing the way for Big Oil to take over Wayne National Forest. (Due to Washington's massive debt Trump wants to sell off as many of the nation's assets as possible to his Wall Street oligarchic buddies. They will likely reward Trump with a cut of the action as well.)

• Leo S. Lo, Dean of Libraries; Advisor to the Provost for AI Literacy; Professor of Education, University of Virginia: Artificial intelligence systems are thirsty, consuming as much as 500 milliliters of water – a single-serving water bottle – for each short conversation a user has with the GPT-3 version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT system. They use roughly the same amount of water to draft a 100-word email message. That figure includes the water used to cool the data center’s servers and the water consumed at the power plants generating the electricity to run them.

• As recent conflicts consume weapons at a ferocious rate, America’s defense industrial base is becoming more prepared to sustain a major war, according to a new report. “The trends are moving in the right direction,” Jerry McGinn, co-author of a study for the Center for Strategic and International Analysis, told Defense News. Pistol Pete Hegseth has vowed to “transform the entire acquisition system to operate on a wartime footing.” Roughly 10,000 new firms have entered the market in the past two years and nontraditional companies received over $120 billion in contract obligations in FY 2025, adding 'competition and innovation' to the sector. Munitions contract obligations have risen 330% since FY 2010. Spurred by this increased demand and depleted inventories, the Pentagon is signing multiyear agreements with munitions producers and suppliers. Also notable is federal investment in rare earths, which has seen production soar from 95 tons in 2022, to 8,900 tons in 2025. Nonetheless, 'the erosion of domestic rare earth manufacturing capacity and the rise of Chinese control took decades to unfold, however, and it will take several years of enduring effort for the US and its allies to build, scale, and sustain the production capacity of these key defense inputs.'

• Eric Arnow writes: The new commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Mykhailo Drapatyi, stated that Russia as a nation have no right to exist, and that only “criminal elements” have lived in Donbas their entire lives. After his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Drapatoy was finally allowed to speak to journalists. During his first interview, the general stated that he did not consider Russians equal to Ukrainians. According to him, Russians had never been civilized for “thousands of years,” waging wars of conquest and attempting to build an empire. And their behavior hasn’t changed. The West’s 500 year implacable and relentless war against ‘The Rest’, is headed for a climax. It will not and cannot allow sovereignty of other nations. Indeed, it views itself as The Garden, despite the fact that Eurasian civilizations existed long before European and  the US were even founded. Somehow the US thinks it should determine what Iran should be. Iran was unified as a nation under the Median kingdom in the 7th century BC. Russia, for its part, goes back at least 1,000 years. The Mongols invaded in 1240, followed by Poles, Swedes [repeatedly], French, Germans, and even the English attacked Russia three times, and the US attacked once after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Wall Street plunder in the 1990s after the demise of the former Soviet Union.

• Ukraine (with full US-NATO-EU support) began the war on the Russian-ethnic parts of their own country in 2014 by attacking eastern Ukraine along the border with Russia. For years Moscow tried to settle it with the Minsk 1 & 2 agreements which France, Germany and Ukrainian leaders later admitted they signed just to buy time to build up Kiev's military so they could keep the killing going. It's been going on ever since. [Now in Kiev the people are spending alot of time in the underground. They should have realized that Russia's patience had obvious limits. Ukraine should surrender while they still have something to hold on to.]