So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Sunday, March 8, 2026
"The Next Economic Crisis Is Weeks Away"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 3/8/26
"The Next Economic Crisis Is Weeks Away"
Comments here:
"US-Israel-Iran War, 3/8/26"
Danny Haiphong, 3/8/26
"Iran's Missiles Devastate Haifa Port & Tel Aviv,
Trump Eyes Ground War"
"The US and Israel have opened up a new front in the war that has seen an even more furious retaliation from Iran and Hezbollah. The future of the war is moving rapidly toward even further escalation, and the crises keep piling up for the aggressors. War correspondent Elijah Magnier joins the show to break it all down."
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
OPTM, 3/8/26
"Iran Just Destroyed Israel’s Biggest Refinery –
Last Energy Gateway From Israel Incinerated"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Times Of India, 3/8/26
"Iran Missiles Leave Central Israel ‘Devastated’;
‘Explosions, Smoke, Injuries Tear Tel Aviv Apart"
"Central Israel was rocked by powerful explosions after Iran launched another wave of ballistic missiles towards Tel Aviv and nearby cities. Dramatic visuals from the Bnei Brak area showed thick black smoke rising into the sky and a vehicle overturned on the street following the impact. Authorities reported multiple strike sites across the region, raising suspicions that at least one missile may have carried a cluster-type warhead. Emergency teams from Magen David Adom rushed to the scenes, initially reporting three people injured by shrapnel. Officials later confirmed that at least six people were wounded, including a man in his forties seriously hurt in Tel Aviv and several others injured in Petah Tikva. Search-and-rescue teams and investigators are now assessing the damage as tensions between Iran and Israel escalate sharply."Comments here:
"Jiang Xueqin: Is This WW3? The Greater Israel Project: Truth or Conspiracy?"
Dialogue Works Highlights, 3/8/26
"Jiang Xueqin: Is This WW3?
The Greater Israel Project: Truth or Conspiracy?"
"This interview explores the growing conflict in the Middle East and the risk of a wider global war. It examines the escalating tensions between the United States and Iran, the possibility of ground troops, and how control of energy routes like the Strait of Hormuz could draw major powers into the conflict. The discussion also looks at the geopolitical impact of the Ukraine war, shifting global alliances, the role of Gulf states, and the fragile balance of power shaping the future of the region and the world."
Comments here:
"Col. Doug Macgregor: We're in a Run Up to WW3"
Daniel Davis, Deep Dive 3/8/26
"Col. Doug Macgregor: We're in a Run Up to WW3"
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"Scott Ritter: Trump’s Iran War is Doomed! “Something BIG Is About to Hit Israel and America”
"Scott Ritter: Trump’s Iran War is Doomed!
“Something BIG Is About to Hit Israel and America”
Global War Analysis, 3/7/26
"Former UN weapons inspector and military analyst Scott Ritter has warned that any escalation of the war with Iran into the nuclear domain would have catastrophic consequences for all sides. Ritter argues that using nuclear weapons in the Middle East would not bring victory but instead trigger uncontrollable escalation and long-term global instability.
Ritter has repeatedly warned that once nuclear weapons are used, the situation could spiral beyond anyone’s control because other powers and regional states would feel compelled to respond or develop their own nuclear deterrents. He has previously stated that the use of nuclear weapons in the region could lead to devastating retaliation and potentially guarantee Israel’s destruction, as it would encourage adversaries to pursue nuclear arms and escalate the conflict further.
Meanwhile, the current war between the United States, Israel, and Iran is already raising global fears of escalation. Experts warn that attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities may actually push Tehran closer to pursuing nuclear weapons, especially if Iranian leaders believe their survival is threatened. Ritter’s broader argument is that wars launched with the expectation of quick victory often turn into strategic disasters, especially when they provoke stronger resistance, widen the battlefield, and risk triggering nuclear brinkmanship among major powers."
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Saturday, March 7, 2026
"Israel Just Told Millions of Citizens: “We Can’t Protect You Anymore”
A MUST VIEW!
Full screen recommended.
Money Over History, 3/7/26
"Israel Just Told Millions of Citizens:
“We Can’t Protect You Anymore”
"Israel has issued one of the most alarming warnings of the entire conflict. Millions of citizens were informed that the country’s early warning and missile defense systems may no longer guarantee protection against incoming attacks.For decades Israel invested heavily in advanced defense systems such as Iron Dome, Patriot, and other missile interception technologies designed to detect and stop incoming threats. But recent developments suggest that warning times for incoming missiles may be dramatically reduced, leaving civilians with only seconds to react. In this video, we break down what this announcement means, how missile defense systems work, and why early warning networks are critical for civilian protection during modern warfare. We also analyze the broader regional escalation involving Israel, Iran, and multiple Middle Eastern countries, and what these developments could mean for global security and energy markets."
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Stipendium peccati mors est, Israel,
and you so deserve everything you get...
"A Look to the Heavens"
“A now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula. This false-color composite image views the nearby stellar nursery using data from the Herschel Space Observatory's panoramic exploration of interstellar clouds along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel's far infrared detectors record the emission from the region's cold dust directly.
The famous pillars are included near the center of the scene. While the central group of hot young stars is not apparent at these infrared wavelengths, the stars' radiation and winds carve the shapes within the interstellar clouds. Scattered white spots are denser knots of gas and dust, clumps of material collapsing to form new stars. The Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).”
"A Lot Of People..."
"When science discovers the center of the universe
a lot of people will be disappointed to find they are not."
- Bernard Baily
"The Difference..."
"One of life's best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire – then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference."
- Robert Fulghum
"Peak Focus for Complex Tasks, With Beta Isochronic Tones"
Full screen recommended.
"Peak Focus for Complex Tasks,
With Beta Isochronic Tones"
by Jason Lewis - Mind Amend
"This is a high-intensity audio brainwave entrainment session, using isochronic tones. Listen to this when you need a strong burst of intense focus to concentrate and study things like advanced mathematics, scientific formulas, financial analysis or any other complex mental activity. Listen to this track with your eyes open while doing the task/activity you want to focus on. Use this session in the morning, afternoon or early evening, to train your brain for better cognition, focus and thought processing. You can either sit somewhere quiet and comfortable with your eyes closed and give your brain a nice workout, or you can also listen to this while doing an activity that requires a boost in concentration.
Headphones are NOT REQUIRED for this video.
Although headphones are not required you may find they produce a more intense effect, because they help to block out distracting external sounds.
Isochronic tones are a fast and effective audio-based way to stimulate your brain. Among many of the benefits, they can help improve focus, relaxation, energy levels, sleep and more, without taking drugs or needing any special equipment. What isochronic tones essentially do is guide your dominant brainwave activity to a different frequency while you are listening to them, allowing you to influence and change your mental state and how you feel."
I strongly suggest you read Comments here:
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"Isochronic Tones –
How They Work, the Benefits and the Research"
This is a brainwave entrainment audio session using isochronic tones combined with music. The isochronic tones are the repetitive beats you can hear on top of the music throughout the track. If you are new to this type of audio brainwave entrainment, find out how isochronic tones work and how they compare to binaural beats here:
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Listen folks, we're out of time! Whether you want to know it or not we're literally in the fight of our lives, for our lives right now, and it's going to get much, much worse. Some of you reading this will not survive, and I may not either, so I'll take any edge I can get, and you should too... This works for me. Prepare yourself, brace for impact...
- CP
"The Denial Of Death"
Full screen recommended.
"The Lie We Created to Survive Life:
The Denial of Death"
o
"The Denial Of Death"
by Ernest Becker
"The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man."
Excerpt: "The prospect of death, Dr. Johnson said, wonderfully concentrates the mind. The main thesis of this book is that it does much more than that : the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man. I believe, that knowledge is in a state of useless overproduction
I have had the growing realization over the past few years that the problem of man’s knowledge is not to oppose and to demolish opposing views, but to include them in a larger theoretical structure .
CHAPTER ONE: Introduction: Human Nature and the Heroic: Freud discovered that each of us repeats the tragedy of the mythical Greek Narcissus: we are hopelessly absorbed with ourselves. If we care about anyone it is usually ourselves first of all. This narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn’t feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him.
The unconscious does not know death or time: in man’s physiochemical, inner organic recesses he feels immortal . In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from self- esteem, from a basic sense of self-worth. In childhood we see the struggle for self-esteem at its least disguised. The child is unashamed about what he needs and wants most. His whole organism shouts the claims of his natural narcissism.
We like to speak casually about “sibling rivalry,” as though it were some kind of by-product of growing up , a bit of competitiveness and selfishness of children who have been spoiled, who haven’t yet grown into a generous social nature. But it is too all-absorbing and relentless to be an aberration , it expresses the heart of the creature : the desire to stand out , to be the one in creation. When you combine natural narcissism with the basic need for self-esteem, you create a creature who has to feel himself an object of primary value: first in the universe, representing in himself all of life .
Sibling rivalry is a critical problem that reflects the basic human condition: it is not that children are vicious , selfish , or domineering. It is that they so openly express man’s tragic destiny: he must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else.
It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning .
Society itself is a codified hero system , which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. Every society thus is a "religion” whether it thinks so or not: Soviet “religion” and Maoist “religion” are as truly religious as are scientific and consumer “religion,” no matter how much they may try to disguise themselves by omitting religious and spiritual ideas from their lives .
CHAPTER TWO: The Terror of Death: "Is it not for us to confess that in our civilized attitude towards death we are once more living psychologically beyond our means, and must reform and give truth its due ? Would it not be better to give death the place in actuality and in our thoughts which properly belongs to it, and to yield a little more prominence to that unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed? This hardly seems indeed a greater achievement, but rather a backward step… but it has the merit of taking somewhat more into account the true state of affairs..." - Sigmund Freud
Of all things that move man , one of the principal ones is his terror of death. Heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most the courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would be. The hero was the man who could go into the spirit world, the world of the dead, and return alive .
These cults, as G. Stanley Hall so aptly put it, were an attempt to attain “an immunity bath” from the greatest evil: death and the dread of it. Zilboorg says that most people think death fear is absent because it rarely shows its true face; but he argues that underneath all appearances fear of death is universally present: Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
Such constant expenditure of psychological energy on the business of preserving life would be impossible if the fear of death were not as constant. The very term “ self-preservation ” implies an effort against some force of disintegration ; the affective aspect of this is fear, fear of death .
Therefore in normal times we move about actually without ever believing in our own death, as if we fully believed in our own corporeal immortality. We are intent on mastering death… A man will say, of course, that he knows he will die some day , but he does not really care. He is having a good time with living , and he does not think about death and does not care to bother about it - but this is a purely intellectual, verbal admission. The affect of fear is repressed. Repression takes care of the complex symbol of death for most people."
“Death twitches my ear; 'Live,' he says...
'I am coming.” - Virgil
Freely download "The Denial Of Death", by Ernest Becker, here:
"Above All..."
"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love. "
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov"
"Alert! A Red Warning: No More Oil, Nuclear Risk Is Extreme"
Canadian Prepper, 3/7/26
"Alert! A Red Warning:
No More Oil, Nuclear Risk Is Extreme"
Comments here:
Adventures with Danno, "Gas Prices Skyrocketing...This Is About To Get Ugly"
Adventures with Danno, 3/7/26
"Gas Prices Skyrocketing...This Is About To Get Ugly"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 2/28/26
"Gas Prices About To Explode After Iran Strike"
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o
$250 a barrel? Then YOU will pay $20 a gallon, if you can find it...
What then?
"How It Really Is"
Full screen recommended.
The Temptations, "Ball of Confusion" (1970)
Prophetic...
“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and
dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit.
I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either.”
- Christopher Hitchens
"March, 6-7: The Grind Goes On"
"March, 6-7: The Grind Goes On"
By NO1
"These are the main highlights of March 6 & 7. It took a bit longer than expected because events kept on happening, and I had to add them. It’s a bit rough, a lot of datapoints, but you’ll get the gist of it. Four days became four weeks became eight weeks became a hundred days became six months. Six months. CENTCOM is now planning “through September”. The goalposts haven’t moved. They’ve been loaded onto a kamikaze drone and fired through Hormuz. Let me give you a picture first, because the individual events won’t make sense without it.
Both sides are hammering each other simultaneously, every hour, across multiple countries. Iran is absorbing thousands of airstrikes while firing back at Tel Aviv, Haifa, and every US base from Kuwait to the UAE to Baghdad to Erbil. Israel is hitting Lebanon. Hezbollah is hitting Israel. Iraqi resistance groups are hitting US positions in Baghdad and Kurdistan. Iranian navy drones are burning tankers in the Gulf. And ships are pretending to be Chinese to sail through a strait that used to be international waters.
It’s not a war. It’s seven wars being prosecuted simultaneously with one set of logistics. And the US, eight days in, is down half their THAAD batteries, five F-15Es, multiple Reapers, and is currently on its seventh extension of the official timeline.
Tehran is burning. Not a base on its periphery, not a missile complex in the Zagros. The capital. Full of people. Devoid of missile launchers. Mehrabad Airport took a full wave of Israeli strikes overnight. Mehrabad isn’t a military target - it’s Tehran’s domestic hub, thirteen million passengers a year. But it shares its runways with IRGC transport infrastructure. An old Boeing 747 is burning on the tarmac. One of the few aircraft Iran inherited from the Shah and kept airborne for fifty years. Irreplaceable due to the sanctions.
Fifty Israeli aircraft dropped a hundred bombs on Khamenei’s underground bunker complex. New management had already moved in, apparently trusting the concrete. Humint suggested they were there. Suggested.
Absard missile base. Jomhuri Avenue - a major artery through central Tehran. Multiple strikes near Tehran University. A military academy. Power outages in Parand. All residential areas. Over 3,000 targets struck since day one. 1,230 dead, 6,000 wounded. 181 children. Then Shiraz. An ambulance station and a children’s playground struck in a suburb. Twenty dead. Thirty injured. Then Qazvin. A boys’ school, narrowly missed. Minab. The school with girls aged 7 to 12. The most damning civilian toll of the opening strikes. 165 dead. And the official position was silence. “Unable to confirm”. “Under review”. “Fog of war”.
In a classified briefing, Congress was told the school was on the Pentagon strike map. NBC confirmed it. The building was a deliberate target. They went to school one morning. Never came back.
“In memory of the schoolgirls of Minab.” One of last night’s Khorramshahr missiles had something written on it.
“Giveth and thou shalt receive”… And oh boy, receive Israel did. Waves 20 through 24 of True Promise 4 arrived across a sixteen-hour window. The IRGC stopped bothering with the cheap stuff. Khorramshahr-4s. Fattah hypersonics. Kheibar Shekan. Cluster submunitions over Tel Aviv - at least 80 per warhead from what the footage shows.
Tel Aviv took hit after hit. Bat Yam too. Fires across central districts. I wrote yesterday about the first missiles arriving without sirens - today that became routine. 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.
The warning time collapse I’ve been tracking since day three is now a daily reality. MIT’s Ted Postol explained it simply: with five minutes of warning you can calculate the ballistic arc and place interceptors properly. With sixty seconds you can only fire into the descending path with almost no margin for error. Iran didn’t destroy the radars as preparation for the war. It is the war.
And it didn’t slow down on Saturday morning. Multiple ballistic launches at 05:00, 05:30, 06:30 targeting central and southern Israel. Then 14:49. Then 15:33. Then 271 alerts in a single Hezbollah barrage. Geroman tracked one salvo for over thirty minutes without a single interception being reported. Thirty minutes. I can barely find video of any of this. That’s not an accident.
The BBC’s own reporter said it: the censorship right now is unprecedented. Not my word. Theirs. Journalists are banned from broadcasting live during strikes. Banned from showing footage of the city. So I’m piecing this together from secondary effects, from people on the ground who still have a signal. Hearsay and inference, basically - because the alternative is nothing at all.
And it’s not just Israel. The UAE filed a takedown request with X to scrub low-resolution satellite images of damage inflicted. Planet Labs quietly delayed all Gulf imagery by 96 hours. They called it “operational security”. Iran has Chinese reconnaissance satellites. They know exactly what’s down there. The damage isn’t being hidden from the enemy. It’s being hidden from us.
Now let’s go through what’s burning. Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait. Hit again. Still burning from last time. All radomes and satellite communications at Camp Arifjan confirmed destroyed by satellite imagery. The Kuwaiti Air Force quietly moved its KC-130J tankers to a Saudi base rather than park them next to American aircraft. Hard to blame them.
Al Dhafra in the UAE: hit twice in twenty-four hours. The IRGC Navy drone unit struck it again this morning - air warfare centre, satellite communications, early warning radars, fire control radars. The IRGC also stated, publicly, that the Minab school bombing “was carried out from this base”. The UAE hasn’t commented.
Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia took a ballistic missile on video. Flash, impact, soldiers nearby. Multiple US personnel reportedly injured. Hours before, an F-35 had flown there from an Israeli base with its transponder on. Visible on Flightradar24. Broadcasting the exact route Riyadh had publicly promised Tehran it would never allow. Smooth move.
Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan: Shahed-101 kamikaze drone. The IRGC claims eleven US soldiers killed. CENTCOM hasn’t confirmed this. Given their track record on casualty counts, that’s not especially reassuring either way.
Victory Base complex, Baghdad: Arash rockets and drones. Fires. Five US bases in three countries hit in one day. The US State Department, bypassing Congress, authorized emergency delivery of 12,000 aerial bombs to Israel. $151.8 million. Because everything is going so swimmingly.
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. By CNN. By satellite imagery. By photographs. More reliable than CENTCOM...
Foreign Policy quietly confirmed that Qatar’s radar (killed on day 1) will take 5~8 years to rebuild. The Bahrain one: 1~2 years. And that assumes the raw materials exist. China banned rare earth exports. Yttrium - which goes into every radar and sonar the US manufactures - is up 140 times in price. China holds 98% of global production. You can’t rebuild what you can’t source. The radar network being dismantled is, in practical terms, permanent.
And in case you thought it was only radar: Iran has shot down another MQ-9 Reaper today, this time over Hormozgan Province. Roughly 50 surveillance drones claimed downed. Without persistent ISR you can’t tell real missile launchers from decoy trucks. Which explains why CENTCOM keeps releasing footage of destroyed trucks.
The CIA station in Saudi Arabia is confirmed “inoperable” after a direct drone hit. A Patriot battery in the UAE was photographed post-impact, the hangar gutted. Both runways at Ali Al Salem reportedly cratered. The US infrastructure in the Gulf isn’t just being degraded. It’s being dismantled. Piece by piece, base by base, radar by radar.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, Trump went on Truth Social:
“UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” All caps. No context.
He would work to rebuild Iran and give it a great future. MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).
MIGA.
He actually wrote MIGA.
The oil market, processing this faster than the State Department, sent Brent straight through $90 the moment the post landed. Crude is apparently a more attentive reader of US foreign policy than the people conducting it. Roosevelt used that phrase in 1943 too. Took two more years, a land invasion, two nuclear bombs, and about twenty million additional corpses. Iran’s response was to fire more missiles.
Pezeshkian announced that the Temporary Leadership Council approved ceasing attacks on neighboring Arab states. Sounds peaceful. Unless you read the subordinate clause: unless attacks on Iran originate from their territory. Every Gulf state hosting a US base now has to decide whether it’s “neighboring” or “complicit”. Kick out the Americans: you’re a neighbor. Keep hosting them: you’re a target. Iran isn’t stopping the war. They’re franchising it.
Trump immediately posted that Iran had “apologized and surrendered to its Middle East neighbors”. Sirens in Bahrain, hours later. Kuwait declared Force Majeure on oil production. Dubai’s billionaire Khalaf Al Habtoor went public: “Who gave you the right to drag our region into war with Iran?” Nobody answered.
"Jeffrey Sachs: We Are Now in the Early Days of World War III"
Glenn Diesen, 3/7/26
"Jeffrey Sachs:
We Are Now in the Early Days of World War III"
Comments here:
"Pezeshkian’s Statement: What Does It Mean? Hypersonics Hammer Israel; Dubai Airport Blast"
Full screen recommended.
Mahmood OD, 3/7/26
"Pezeshkian’s Statement: What Does It Mean?
Hypersonics Hammer Israel; Dubai Airport Blast"
Comments here:
"Are You Prepared For The Worst Global Oil Crisis In More Than 50 Years?"
by Michael Snyder
"If you have not already done so, I would recommend filling up your vehicle, because it looks like the price of gasoline is going to go much higher. At the very beginning of this war with Iran, the price of oil didn’t rise too much because many investors were anticipating a quick victory over Iran. But now it has become exceedingly clear that there will be no quick victory, and the price of oil is spiking dramatically. Unless something really crazy happens, this is going to be an extended conflict, and that means that the flow of oil out of the Middle East will not return to normal for quite some time.
According to CNBC, the Iranians just hit another oil tanker with a missile…"Iran claimed to have struck an oil tanker with a missile, according to a state media report. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard ordered a closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week and threatened to attack tankers passing through it, according to state media. The British Navy on Thursday reported a large explosion at a tanker at anchor in Iraqi territorial waters. The ship’s master reported seeing a small vessel flee the scene. The crew is safe and no fires were reported."
The Iranian side of the Strait of Hormuz is absolutely teeming with anti-ship missiles. Until something is done about that, traffic through the Strait of Hormuz will continue to be paralyzed… “You’ve essentially had the Strait of Hormuz grind down to a halt,” explained Matt Smith, an analyst at Kpler, a data and analytics firm. He said the slowdown isn’t necessarily because Iran has formally closed the waterway, though Tehran has threatened to, but because shippers are weighing the risk of missile or drone strikes in the narrow corridor.
The result, Smith said, is a growing bottleneck of crude and refined products. And if the disruption stretches from days into weeks, Smith warned, the fallout could intensify quickly. “If this drags on for weeks, the ramifications are huge,” he said, pointing to early ripple effects already emerging in global energy markets.
Many are comparing the current state of affairs to the oil embargo of 1973. But the truth is that the supply disruption that we are experiencing now is far greater than anything that we experienced back then…
So how does this get fixed? Well, the truth is that it isn’t going to get fixed until the war ends. At this stage, the U.S. and Israel have achieved full aerial dominance and are bombing the living daylights out of Iran. But that won’t bring an end to the regime.
Regime leaders are now hiding deep underneath hospitals, schools and mosques, 125,000 heavily-armed members of the IRGC have full control of the major cities, and Iran has one of the largest armies in the world. Sending in a few thousand Kurds won’t do much against an army that boasts more than 600,000 men on active duty and more than 300,000 men among the reserves. In order to bring the regime in Iran to an end, it will require either a ground invasion or the use of nuclear weapons. Needless to say, the Trump administration is not even considering either of those two options.
The other way that this war could stop is if the U.S. and Israel simply decide to stop attacking and allow the current regime to remain in power. That would be considered a victory for Iran and a loss for the U.S. and Israel. Personally, I don’t think that President Trump will be eager to admit defeat any time soon. So for now, the war will continue, and the global oil crisis will escalate.
Interestingly, the Chinese are trying to convince the Iranians to allow vessels that are carrying oil and liquified natural gas to China to travel safely through the region…"China is in talks with Iran to allow crude oil and Qatari liquefied natural gas vessels safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz as the US-Israeli war on Tehran intensifies, three diplomatic sources tell Reuters.
The war, which entered its sixth day on Thursday, has left the critical shipping passageway all but shut, with countries around the world cut off from a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies. China, which has friendly relations with Iran and relies heavily on Middle Eastern supplies, is unhappy about the Islamic Republic’s move to paralyze shipping through the Strait and is pressing Tehran to allow safe passage for the vessels, according to the sources."
China is very dependent on oil and liquified natural gas from the Middle East, and I have a feeling that the Iranians may make an exception for them. But the rest of us are going to experience significant pain. Since the war began, gasoline prices have already been jumping all over the country…"Retail gasoline prices in the U.S. have jumped nearly 27 cents since last week to $3.25 per gallon on average, according to the motorist group AAA. The last time gas prices made a similar jump was in March 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, the group said."
It is obvious that this is just the beginning. Unless some sort of a miracle happens, the price of gasoline is only going to go higher, and the White House is desperately searching for solutions…"President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is telling his advisers to bring ideas to the Oval Office to lower gasoline prices in the wake of the U.S. attack on Iran, according to two energy industry executives familiar with the conversations. The White House is “looking under every rock for ideas on improving energy prices, especially gasoline prices,” said one of the executives, who was granted anonymity to describe internal administration discussions."
Apparently things are so tense that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and other top advisers “are getting screamed at”…"Energy Secretary Chris Wright and other advisers focused on energy policy, including a council led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, “are getting screamed at to find some good news” on bringing down prices, the same executive said. “Folks are scrambling for announcements and messaging to counter the narrative” of rising prices, this person said." I don’t know what Doug Burgum is supposed to do. He can’t stop this war. Now that missiles are flying back and forth, there is no turning back now.
Sensing an opportunity, Vladimir Putin is threatening to cut off the flow of natural gas to Europe…"A smirking Vladimir Putin has threatened to halt gas supplies to Europe and Britain amid a spike in energy prices triggered by the Iran crisis. Oil and gas prices have soared following the US and Israeli attack on Iran and Tehran’s strikes on Gulf Arab neighbours. The conflict has paralysed shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and forced the shutdown of Qatar’s LNG production and Saudi Arabia’s largest oil refinery. The Russian president said oil prices were rising due to the ‘aggression against Iran’ and due to Western restrictions on Russian oil, while European gas prices were rising because customers were willing to buy gas volumes at higher prices due to events in the Middle East and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz."
During the weeks ahead, global energy prices are going to be such a huge story. All over the world, people are going to be blaming the United States and Israel for the price of gasoline. We were warned in advance that this sort of a scenario was coming, and now it is here. The longer this war drags on, the worse global economic conditions will become. Our entire way of life depends upon cheap energy, and now that entire paradigm has been put at risk."
"Jiang Xueqin: The Iran War: The Watershed Moment That Changed the Middle East Forever"
Dialogue Works, 3/7/26
"Jiang Xueqin: The Iran War:
The Watershed Moment That Changed the Middle East Forever"
Comments here:
"The Trump Administration is Lying About American Casualties in the Persian Gulf Region"
"The Trump Administration is Lying About
American Casualties in the Persian Gulf Region"
by Larry C. Johnson
"First let me explain the meaning of the X message and photo that appears above… the cancellation of the training exercise is a key indicator that the Pentagon is going to deploy the some, if not all, of the 82nd Airborne Division to the Persian Gulf. Final destination unknown. You may recall an article I wrote on February 18 when I reported that a CENTCOM exercise scripting conference, which was scheduled to begin on Sunday, 22 February 2026, had been abruptly cancelled. Six days later the war started.
The imminent deployment of the 82nd does not mean they are going into battle in the next couple of days. I expect it will be at least two weeks before they reach their base camp. However, this does mean that Trump and Hegseth were not just making an idle comment when they mentioned putting boots on the ground.
Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to downplay US casualties after seven days of war in the Persian Gulf, clues are appearing on the internet that indicate the US has suffered more combat losses than reported. The first clue is this Xhitter (pronounced SHITTER) from Stars and Stripes.
K-Town refers to Kaiserslautern, a US Army base in Germany, which is located 13 miles east of the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. So what? Well, on March 4, 2026 the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC) in Germany—the largest US Department of Defense hospital outside the United States and the primary overseas trauma/evacuation hub for injured service members from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa—sent out a memo announcing the temporary suspension of its labor and delivery services “until further notice.” The memo did not explicitly define the “primary objective,” but LRMC’s core role is treating combat- and training-related injuries. It also is the main medical evacuation point for wounded troops from ongoing operations.
A knowledgeable friend who supervised DOD’s Wounded Warrior Program during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and worked with personnel at the LRMC, learned today that there is a flood of casualties arriving at the hospital. The numbers are so large that the hospital could no longer continue to spend resources on birthing babies. Then this picture popped up on Telegram a little bit ago:
It is not a stretch to conclude that Iran’s attacks on the US bases in the Persian Gulf produced more than a few casualties. DOD/DOW is working hard to keep this information from the public. Most Americans do not support the unprovoked war… This is likely to fuel more opposition."
Friday, March 6, 2026
"Iran Just Destroyed Ben Gurion Airport - Last Exit From Israel Closed"
Full screen recommended.
OPTM, 3/6/26
"Iran Just Destroyed Ben Gurion Airport -
Last Exit From Israel Closed"
Comments here:
"Mohammad Marandi: Iran Can Send Oil Prices To $250 Per Barrel; Iran Prepared To Fight Until The U.S. Midterms?"
Trends Journal, 3/6/26
"Mohammad Marandi: Iran Can Send Oil Prices To $250 Per Barrel;
Iran Prepared To Fight Until The U.S. Midterms?"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in these increasingly turbulent times."
Comments here:
$250 a barrel? Then YOU will pay $20 a gallon, if you can find it...
What then?
o
Full screen recommended.
Money Hand, 3/6/26
"$90 Oil Breaks Markets - Qatar Just Warned:
Gulf Energy STOPS 'Within Weeks' as Iran Seals the Trap"
Comments here:
o
Click image for larger size.
"Alert! Fill Up Your Gas Tank! 82nd Airborne Deploy To Iran? Ground War! China WTF?!"
Full screen Recommended.
Prepper News, 3/6/26
"Alert! Fill Up Your Gas Tank!
82nd Airborne Deploy To Iran? Ground War! China WTF?!"
Comments here:
"Walmart And Other Big Retailers Report Price Increases On Everyday Items"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist,3/6/26
"Walmart And Other Big Retailers
Report Price Increases On Everyday Items"
"Walmart and other major retailers are reporting price increases on thousands of everyday items, and Americans are feeling it every time they walk into a store. From groceries to clothing to household essentials, the cost of living continues to climb while wages stay the same. In this video, we take a closer look at what's really going on behind these price hikes and why so many people are starting to question whether tariffs are truly to blame or if something deeper is happening.
Big corporations like Walmart, Target, Amazon, and Costco have used tariffs as a reason to raise prices across the board. But when you look at the actual numbers, the increases don't always match up with the tariff rates being imposed. In many cases, prices have gone up 50% or more on products that aren't even directly affected by tariffs. And now that some of those tariffs are being legally challenged, these same companies are looking to get reimbursed by the government. That means consumers could end up paying for these tariffs twice: once at the register and once through their tax dollars.
Meanwhile, small businesses and family owned companies are absorbing the extra costs without passing them on to their customers. They're taking real losses because they understand that people are struggling. That's a very different approach from what we're seeing at the corporate level, where profit margins and executive compensation continue to grow even as everyday Americans are forced to cut back on the basics.
People are sharing their experiences online, showing grocery hauls that cost nearly $100 and barely cover a week's worth of meals. Ground beef at $30 a pack. Coffee that's doubled in price in six months. Cereal, milk, fresh produce, all of it climbing higher and higher. Families are being forced to choose between eating healthy and eating at all. That's not something that should be happening in a country with no real shortage of food or resources.
On top of all that, retailers are finding new ways to squeeze even more out of consumers. Dynamic pricing, app only discounts that trade your personal data for savings, and charity roundups at checkout that benefit billion dollar corporations more than the causes they claim to support. These practices are becoming more common and more aggressive, and they raise serious questions about where the line is between smart business and outright exploitation.
The bigger picture here is the declining value of the U.S. dollar itself. As the dollar weakens, everything costs more, and the people who are hurt the most are those living paycheck to paycheck. The wealthy protect themselves with assets and investments while working families watch their savings shrink in real time. This is a conversation that affects all of us regardless of political affiliation or background. If you've noticed these changes at your local stores, you're not alone. Share your thoughts in the comments and let us know what you're seeing out there."
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Judge Napolitano, "INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern: Weekly Wrap for 6-March"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 3/6/26
"INTEL Roundtable w/Johnson & McGovern:
Weekly Wrap for 6-March"
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Musical Interlude: Supertramp, “The Logical Song”; "Take The Long Way Home"
Supertramp, “The Logical Song”
o
Full screen recommended.
Supertramp, "Take The Long Way Home"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 3521 is a mere 35 million light-years away, toward the constellation Leo. Relatively bright in planet Earth's sky, NGC 3521 is easily visible in small telescopes but often overlooked by amateur imagers in favor of other Leo spiral galaxies, like M66 and M65. It's hard to overlook in this colorful cosmic portrait, though.
Spanning some 50,000 light-years the galaxy sports characteristic patchy, irregular spiral arms laced with dust, pink star forming regions, and clusters of young, blue stars. Remarkably, this deep image also finds NGC 3521 embedded in gigantic bubble-like shells. The shells are likely tidal debris, streams of stars torn from satellite galaxies that have undergone mergers with NGC 3521 in the distant past."
"Does Anyone Know..."
"All sins, of course, deserve to be treated with mercy: we all do what we can, and life is too hard and too cruel for us to condemn anyone for failing in this area. Does anyone know what he himself would do if faced with the worst, and how much truth could he bear under such circumstances?"
- Andre Comte-Sponville
○
Joe South, "Walk A Mile In My Shoes"
The Poet: David Whyte, "The Truelove"
"The Truelove: Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on
Reaching Beyond Our Limiting Beliefs About the Love We Deserve"
By Maria Popova
"Few things limit us more profoundly than our own beliefs about what we deserve, and few things liberate us more powerfully than daring to broaden our locus of possibility and self-permission for happiness. The stories we tell ourselves about what we are worthy or unworthy of - from the small luxuries of naps and watermelon to the grandest luxury of a passionate creative calling or a large and possible love - are the stories that shape our lives. Bruce Lee knew this when he admonished that “you will never get any more out of life than you expect,” James Baldwin knew it when he admonished that “you’ve got to tell the world how to treat you [because] if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble,” and Viktor Frankl embodied this in his impassioned insistence on saying “yes” to life.
The more vulnerable-making the endeavor, the more reflexive the limitation and the more redemptive the liberation. That difficult, delicate, triumphal pivot from self-limitation to self-liberation in the most vulnerable-making of human undertakings - love - is what poet and philosopher David Whyte, who thinks deeply about these questions of courage and love, maps out in his stunning poem “The Truelove,” found in his book The Sea in You: Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love (public library) and read here:
"The Truelove"
by David Whyte
"There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.
I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.
Years ago in the Hebrides
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of the baying seals,
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,
and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them,
and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly,
so Biblically,
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love,
so that when we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all the struggle
and all the years,
you don’t want to any more,
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness,
however fluid and however
dangerous, to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours."
“The Truelove” appears in the short, splendid course of poem-anchored contemplative practices David guides for neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris’s Waking Up meditation toolkit, in which he reads each poem, offers an intimate tour of the landscape of experience from which it arose, and reflects on the broader existential quickenings it invites.
Couple this generous gift of a poem with “Sometimes” - David’s perspectival poem about living into the questions of our becoming, also part of Waking Up - then revisit the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on great love and James Baldwin (who believed that poets are “the only people who know the truth about us”) on love and the illusion of choice."
o
Freely download "Poems Of David Whyte" here:
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