Iran War early fallout, plus fearmongering and handwaving

The world currently produces 100 million barrels of oil per day.

Let us say that the Iran War shuts the spigots on 10 percent of that, or 10 million barrels per day.

Trump's release of 172 million barrels from the strategic petroleum reserve in the US, plus the International Energy Administration's announcement of 400 million barrels of release from global reserves, detailed here, is 57 days of relief. (That's if the two releases are separate; if not, 40 days.)  More on the IEA move here; if you're wondering, that would be one-third of its reserve. If Iranian damage to Gulf Arab refineries is severe enough, that won't be easily replenished. The US reserve has about 415 million barrels, per CNBC. So, this would be about 45 percent.

Is Trump still hoping he can force Iran's ruling regime to collapse? Won't happen. 

The end of the month until the US can escort tankers? That 10 million barrels of damage by Iran might be small. 

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 "Iranian drones could strike California!" Change "Iranian" to "Japanese," "drones" to "submarines," and we're right back in 1942. Only this is surely Trump Admin rumor-mongering with even less basis in fact, targeting California cuz California.

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As for the fallout? It's more than oil prices, at least in Merikkka. How direct the connection is, I don't know, but mortgage rates are going up in Middle America. Homeowners will notice that soon after gas prices. 

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Since Sen. Mark Kelly has beat the rap on his unlawful orders comment, due to this thing called the First Amendment, does he think Trump has issued unlawful orders to start the Iran war? You're pretty quiet, Mark. Well, you did say something about how the Senate needs to return to Washington and do its duty, but you're otherwise quiet. 

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Meanwhile, the car ramming of the Dearborn synagogue? Without condoning it? Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Blowback, even when indirect, is still blowback. Non-Zionist Jews as well as goys have been warning against this since Oct. 7, 2023. 

Bobby Kennedy, Edith Hamilton and Aeschylus — wrongness compounded, perhaps deliberately

Bobby Kennedy's quotation of Aeschylus on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death is probably one of his greatest known moments. It has flickered in and out of my mind through the years, and came to my starker attention recently. On the divine? It's bullshit, really, whether classical Greece's panoply or Aeschylus going henotheistic, on one hand, or Kennedy's Christian god on the other. 

Anyway, here it is:

"In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

First, per several sites, the Edith Hamilton translation is "despite," not "despair." Aeschylus is slightly less bullshitting than RFK with "despite." The original idea doubles down on "against our will." Bobby's sounds more poignant.

But, neither is true. In the Christian dual-omni god world of Bobby, this runs straight on into the problem of evil, Aeschylus' original or his misremembered version equally so. A god who can't teach wisdom outside of suicides or homicides is either less than omnipotent or less than omnibenevolent.

That said, of course, Hamilton herself mistranslated the last word. In Aeschylus, it's, to give the whole phrase, "the awful grace of the gods." 

For more on that, and other problems with Hamilton's translation, go here. I quote author Tara Wanda Milligan:

Even more than this, it is perhaps Hamilton’s reconstruction of Athenian tragedy, Americanized to focus on individual “poetically transmuted pain,” that appealed to Robert F. Kennedy. Hallett says that tragedy as conceived by Hamilton, a school headmistress with a master’s degree in classics but no further training, “focused intensely on individual suffering, democratic to the extent that it equalizes, and minimizes differences among, individuals who suffer and exult in their suffering.” A man of forty-two who had witnessed both his elder brothers die unexpectedly (Joe Jr. died while fighting in World War II), Kennedy needed solace and founded it in Hamilton’s writing. “Reading the Greeks was Jackie’s idea but something Bobby was ready for,” writes biographer Evan Thomas, adding that Aeschylus’s words “seemed to be speaking directly to Bobby.”

Going past that, the author notes that Hamilton misconstrues Hellenic Greek tragedy in general. Indeed, the Americanization is tragedy as individualized pathos.  

While that's not "the problem of evil," per se, and it's not "theodicy," it is A problem of evil of sorts.

Go back to World War II, where African-American combat deaths, or service short of death, received less valourous recognition than that of Whites. Or look at "Drunken" Ira Hayes. 

But, that issue goes yet deeper.

And I quote her again:

Donald Lateiner, professor of classics at Ohio Wesleyan, says that Hamilton’s notion of Athenian democracy, which overlooks its oppressive and hierarchical qualities and use of slavery, could serve as a sort of justification for American anti-communist foreign policy during the Cold War. That Robert, who served as his brother’s attorney general and enforcer during John’s presidency, found Hamilton’s depiction of Athens inspiring is unsurprising. “The Kennedys found in Edith Hamilton someone who presented a way of conceiving of American power that gave them some cache of the ancient democracy but also found justification for the use of power in the promotion of an ideology of democracy,” Lateiner says. Kennedy, therefore, was an ideal embodiment and champion of Hamilton’s conception of tragedy, and, conversely, Hamilton’s rendering of Athens provided a template for Kennedy to project his longing on—a nostalgia for an existence that never existed, a sort of left-leaning version of the #MAGA moment that took hold of Americans in 2016.

Ouch. Right?

Well, not so "ouch" for those who know the real RFK. That's especially true for those of us who know that in the 1968 primaries, he threw elbows at Clean Gene McCarthy, and also, in California, in a debate shortly before his assassination, opposed moving public housing in Los Angeles out to Orange County, while McCarthy supported it, noted in the link below. It's also not so ouch for those of us who know, re our current geopolitics, that he was a Zionist (contra overblown anti-Zionist conspiracy theories about Jack's assassination).

And, as far as the Kennedy take on Hamilton's take on Greece, another way of putting it is that "the grandeur of the Fourth Rome" was being covered with the lipstick of "the glory of Greece." 

In other words? American Exceptionalism 101. 

Coming up: One red heifer, without blemish or spot?

Per the old bible verse of Numbers 19:2, Texas Monthly reports on the efforts of rancher Jerome Urbanosky and businessman Byron Stinson to raise just such animals. (Another rancher, Ty Davenport, eventually has his ranch looped in by Stinson, too.)

Stinson is a Christian Zionist wingnut. Urbanosky raises Santa Gertrudis, which caught his eye. The story says Stinson also looked at Red Angus.

The entire red heifer and purification water ceremony is in Numbers 19. Not all Christian Zionists, nor all religiously Orthodox Jewish Zionists, believe the red heifer is necessary to build a new Jewish temple, but many do. Ultra-Orthodox Jews are generally non-Zionist to outrightly anti-Zionist; their stances on temple rebuilding in general as well as the need for a red heifer can vary. Within Christianity, amillennial Christians reject the entire temple rebuilding nuttery as being necessary to bring on the apocalypse. On paper, this is the official stance of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and all mainline Protestant churches. In reality, it's not so clearcut among the laity. Outside of this, postmillennialists also generally reject this.

Shockingly, the Monthly gets several things wrong.

First, technically, it's to enter the tabernacle, not the temple. TM quotes Numbers 19 as saying "temple"; it does not.

Second, as with much of Numbers, there's no indication on how much this was ideal and aspirational vs being real, per Yonathan Adler's book.

Third, it was for general purification as much as anything. 

Fourth, there's no indication in either the Tanakh or the New Testament that it was specifically necessary for temple rebuilding. (The Monthly does note that Orthodox Judaism sees a temple already ready to come down from heaven; see also Revelation.)

Yitshak Mamo, Stinson's partner, is an ultra-Zionist Israel settler colonialist nutter. 

Related to that, the Monthly does tell you this:

Urbanosky told me he knew “doodley-squat” about the significance of a perfect red heifer. “You’re Christian, and they’re Jews,” Urbanosky said to Stinson. “So when the Temple gets built, who’s coming back, Jesus or the Jewish messiah?”

There you go. Millennialist Christian Zionist and Zionist Jews figure that, like other things, they'll fight it out after they kill the last Palestinian and finish making Eretz Israel Arab-rein. 

Cut to the chase: Five heifers eventually got sent to Israel in 2022. (The Monthly and other sites have reported on this before.) Hamas noticed and mentioned this in early 2024, after the start of the current intifada; and the Israeli rabbi who will have the last word on making the purity call says they're not.)

According to [Rabbi Joshua] Wander, Rabbi Azria Ariel, of the Temple Institute, is the world’s foremost authority on the red heifer and perhaps the only figure with the clout to compel the necessary consensus to move forward. Ariel wasn’t satisfied with the candidates. “At this moment, it is unclear whether we have in our possession in Israel a red heifer that is verifiably kosher and suited for the ceremony,” Ariel announced in March 2025. One of the five heifers had sprouted white hairs; another grew warts on the side of its neck.

There you are. Perhaps it's a stall tactic, too. 

It gets nuttier from there, with Stinson eventually finding some Israeli Jews, including an alleged priest raised for this moment, to do a practice red heifer ceremony. From there, Stinson goes MAHA with the ashes.

The author does note that the claims of Stinson and his ilk are rejected by mainstream scholars, but not until the last paragraph. 

Texas Progressives talk votes, Iran

Off the Kuff did his initial analyses of the 2026 primaries. 

SocraticGadfly had a roundup of coverage, reaction and issues with the first week of war in Iran, including callouts both of most mainstream media coverage and of actions and reactions by much of both duopoly political parties.

Steve Toth and his backers surely can't handle the truth, per Dan Crenshaw, but Dan? You're not a reliable dispenser of it yourself. Have fun playing your tiny violin in the corner.

Calhoun County GOP officials, because of hand-counting ballots, missed a state-mandated reporting deadline. Will any local officials actually be subjected to the Class B misdemeanor penalty prescribed by law? The Secretary of State's office punted, saying any legal action is in the hands of the county attorney's discretion.

Will banning institutional investors from buying homes stop a housing shortage and price-gouging? Shock me that the dude representing Redfin doesn't think so. Shock me more that he presents institutional investors as fighting housing segregation. Pontificating aside, he's right that more housing is needed.

Daniel Lubetzky, the guy who created the Kind health and hiking bars, wants to improve healthcare. Like Mark Cuban, the guy he followed on Shark Tank, his ideas here are incrementalist and at the edges. Will they be achieved? If so, will they be better than nothing? Probably no on the first, maybe on the second, just like his liberal semi-Zionism that was behind Kind's founding. 

Forrest Wilder talked about the newest revival of "Will Texas Turn Blue?" G. Elliott Morris says "yes," at least on Luke 1 says Abort It Pander Bear James Talarico.

Were votes deliberately suppressed in Dallas County? Per The Barbed Wire, I would say no by local GOP offices, no by the Secretary of State, but maybe yes by Kenny Boy Paxton and the Texas Supremes. 

The Observer covers the weirdest primary upset — Dallas County DA John Creuzot's stunning loss. 

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project said with the primary over, we can get back to the more essential business of organizing ourselves and in his case, continuing to ignore Palestinians.

Audubon Texas is urging everyone to turn off all non-essential nighttime lighting on buildings and other structures from 11:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. each night, to help migratory birds get where they're going.

Bay Area Houston hopes you weren't fooled by phony endorsement slates.

Pete von der Haar has seen this movie before. 

The Lone Star Project reminds us that John Cornyn is in a bad position no matter what happens with the possible Trump endorsement.

Environmental news roundup — methane undercounts and more

If drillers and frackers in Colorado are undercounting methane emissions — and they are — you know that's the case in Tex-ass.

A unique aerial measurement campaign found that emission inventories compiled by energy companies to account for planet-warming methane leaking from equipment on Colorado oil and gas production sites undercount such pollutants by at least two times.

Yeah, I'm sure it is more than that here. 

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A Midland federal judge officially agreed with delisting the lesser prairie chicken in a lawsuit by environmental organizations against the pseudoenvironmental US Fish and Wildlife Service. 

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The decline in bird populations is accelerating:

Birds in the United States are not only declining, but they are declining faster, especially in areas with intensive agriculture, according to new research. Overall drops in bird population, measured from 1987 to 2021, were sharpest in warm and warming areas, suggesting that climate change may play a role.

Well, that would be my part of the world. The NYT piece, discussing a new study in Science, notes correlation is not causation, but still.

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US environmental scientists and others have independently released a report on the state of global nature health that Trump killed shortly after entering the White House. As for Team Trump claiming in response that killing this was strengthening Merikkka's edge in research and development? Er, why are so many European PhDs going back to Europe, then>

What's next from and vis-a-vis Iran?

First, in the week ahead, we will find out whether President Masoud Pezeshkian or Iran's remaining top mullahs, even without an appointed successor to Grand Ayatollah and Supreme Leader Khamenei, have more control in the country, I do believe. That's in part as divisions seem to be arising between Pezeshkian and other avenues of leadership over targeting the Gulf Arab states. More on that here.

That said, Iran can target "Israel abroad," just as Israel has targeted "Iran abroad" in Hezbullah. Or the US abroad, and I don't mean US military bases in Gulf Arab states. It's done this, or tried this, all before, per the Atlantic. 

THAT said, would Trump really be dumb enough to send ground troops to Iran, after mocking Shrub Bush for Iraq, and starting the Afghanistan withdrawal process? Dumb enough or egotistical enough, he would. At a minimum, he's not ruled it out.

THAT that said, per Palestine Will Be Free, is Trump stupid enough to listen to junior grade Zionist neocons in Merikkka and the likes of Naftali Bennett, if not Bibi himself, and do something to Turkey? Speaking of, how craven will Turkish President for Life it seems Reccep Tayyip Erdogan look over the next week? 

What will NOT be next is Trump admitting any responsibility for killing at least 175 kids in a school bombing. What will also NOT be next is capitalists discontinuing betting on war. What will also also NOT be next is Trump admitting Netanyahu played him for a fool rather than him refusing to green-light an Israel-only attack. (The Dissident's Internet Archive link to a WaPost piece kept resending me to "captchas" time after time and never would load.)

Finally, in all of this, don't forget about Noam Chomsky as militarist. 

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Monday Morning additions:

First, Trump continues to show this war is as Netanyahu's lackey, saying Bibi will be in on on peace talks. 

Second, we have dueling UN resolutions as the Israeli-US lackeys among Gulf Arab states laughably expect Russia to also pick their side. 

Third, and huge, Ms. Unchristian, Karoline Leavitt, refuses to rule out a military draft. 

Fourth, with Ayatollah Khamenei's son, Mojtaba, elected to succeed him, and beyond the smears of Graeme Wood at the Atlantic (not linking) aside, it appears that President Pezeshkian has been shunted aside as far as having final say-so on attacking Gulf Arab states and that will actually ramp up.

As for Wood? Dishonest over Russia-Ukraine four years ago. When I got to the graywall-paywall on his piece about Khamenei fils, I was barfing. Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ scribe. The dood IS a member of the CFR.