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-- Charles Dickens

News and Opinion

Hey Americans! Escape Debt By Going To War With Iran

Today in dystopia, war pundits have begun suggesting that the US could recruit sufficient troops for a ground invasion of Iran by offering young Americans debt forgiveness in exchange for enlisting.

I guess it was only a matter of time.

In an article titled “The war with Iran will not be won through airstrikes, so what’s left?”, the Jerusalem Post’s AJ Jaff writes the following:

“Recruitment numbers are running below what a ground invasion of Iran would require. Estimates for a successful ground campaign against Iran’s 31 provincial commands and its Mosaic Defense Doctrine run between 750 thousand and 1.5 million American troops. The current active US Army stands at roughly 452 thousand. The math does not work, obviously.

“Based on American history, however, there is a path forward. Not conscription or a draft in a world war-era sense, but enlistment through a ‘debt forgiveness program.’

“The average American aged 18 to 34 carries more than $40 thousand in non-mortgage debt across student loans, credit card balances, auto loans, and personal loans, with some estimates go as high as $100 thousand.

“This is the cohort the Pentagon needs. A federally administered debt-forgiveness enlistment program that fully discharges student loan, credit card, and loan balances after 24 or 36 months of service, and extends the GI Bill, would produce voluntary enlistment at scale.”

“This is not theoretical.

“It is the American state doing what the American state has always done when it needed staff it could not otherwise generate. World War II offered the GI Bill. Vietnam offered college deferments. The post 9/11 wars offered signing bonuses and citizenship pathways. The Iran war will need to offer debt relief. The economics of the indebted American 20-and 30-something make this the most efficient conversion mechanism available to the Pentagon and the Trump administration.

“The moral reading on this is uncomfortable. But states generate the soldiers they need through the incentives that work on the population they have.”

The Jerusalem Post is now running editorials with ideas for how the Pentagon could recruit enough American soldiers to launch a ground invasion of Iran.

They want to exploit the crippling debt young Americans are carrying by offering them a chance at forgiveness if they’re… pic.twitter.com/O6659GwWIu

— Mel (@Villgecrazylady) September 2, 2026

In a Twitter essay on the same subject published earlier this month, AJ Jaff used more blunt language:

“When the choice is decades chained to $45,000+ in debt, or a few years of service that erases it and hands you a clean start, a huge share of desperate young people will take the offer. Not because they ‘support the war’. Because the debt was engineered into a cage, and service is the ONLY door out.”

The Jerusalem Post says that Jaff is a Canadian who currently serves as the head of security for an unnamed “multinational organization,” describing him in his author bio as “a retired officer of the Canadian Armed Forces and a recognized expert in international security, crisis management, and geopolitical risk.”

There isn’t much publicly available information about Jaff apart from this, and yet here he is being amplified by one of Israel’s largest English-language newspapers. So we can expect we’ll be seeing this idea pop up again elsewhere.

It’s just everything ugly about the US empire all rolled up in one neat little package, isn’t it? Struggling American citizens strapped with mountains of bills because they live in a dystopia which plunges people into debt for the privilege of living on the planet they were born on, desperately enlisting to go kill people in an imperialist war of aggression overseas in the hope of one day getting their heads above water financially.

It just might be the most American idea anyone has ever had.

KATZ THREATENS TO BOMB IRAN "INTO THE STONE AGE" – w/ Col. Larry Wilkerson

Israel ‘seeking Trump’s support for plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza’

Israel’s defence minister has said his country is seeking Donald Trump’s support to approve plans to expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip in what has widely been condemned as a potential war crime. Israel Katz said there was “no real solution for Gaza in the end without this migration” during a conference hosted by the Israeli news site Ynet and the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. He said the Israeli government was “organised and prepared to get them out by sea, by air, by every way possible”.

Trump discussed a US takeover of the Gaza Strip in early 2025 that would have involved removing Palestinians from the territory, but has since pulled back from the idea. A 20-point peace plan the White House drew up last year did not call for Palestinians’ deportation, an act that would be widely seen as ethnic cleansing.

Katz, however, said on Wednesday that he believed US support could tip regional opinion in favour of the forced resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza. He said Trump’s approval was crucial to convince neighbouring countries to accept Palestinian refugees. “Every country that is willing to take them in wants American backing,” he said. “Trump has not cancelled this at the moment. He has frozen it.”

Katz pointed in particular to Egypt, which he said had lobbied Washington to oppose the forced removal of the Palestinian population. “It has not been cancelled,” he said. “It is being discussed all the time, including now, and I think there is no other solution in the end that is in everyone’s interest.”

The remarks come during a competitive election season in Israel in which the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his rightwing allies have appealed to voters by calling for more aggressive measures against Palestinians.

Tony Blair asked PA to remove 'Palestine' from textbooks, former UK envoy says

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was recently sent by Donald Trump's Board of Peace to ask the Palestinian Authority (PA) to replace any mention of the word "Palestine" in schoolbooks with the Jewish designation of "Samaria", Middle East Eye has heard.

Jeremy Greenstock, who was Britain's ambassador to the UN between 1998 and 2003, told MEE that Blair attempted to exert pressure on the PA and said that if it was serious about being seen by the Board of Peace as capable of reaching an agreement with Israel to end the war on Gaza, then the word "Palestine" should be erased from textbooks.

In a wide-ranging interview on the David Hearst Podcast, Greenstock said the demand was rejected by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Greenstock also said that his former boss was experiencing "difficulties" in his new role overseeing the postwar management of Gaza for the board.

Trump SILENT After Iran LIGHTS UP Middle East

Iran accuses US of ‘war crime’ after missile blast kills four people at wedding

Iran has accused the US of a war crime after a missile blast killed at least four people and injured 68 who were attending a wedding at a private home in a coastal city of southern Iran, as the fresh exchange of strikes prompted fears of a wider renewal of hostilities. Iranian media said that the wedding ceremony was being held in a home in the city of Kuhestak, Hormozgan province, late on Tuesday when a US missile struck, with shrapnel and debris from the strike killing and injuring people.

Among the dead was a four-year-old child, Amir-Ali Karimi, and a 16-year-old, Mohammad Mollahi. “It’s a terrible thing. I’m extremely worried and upset about what happened – really upset,” Ali Mollahi, the father of the bride, told Mehr News.

A video of the aftermath shows colourful wedding streamers and decorations strewn across the ground, and shoes abandoned in the rush to escape the attack. “You wicked people have attacked people’s homes and turned their wedding ceremony into a funeral,” said a man filming the aftermath of the strike, shared by Fars news agency.

The chief Iranian negotiator, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, said the attack had killed families with children, and called the US the “great Satan”.

“If a power acts like Satan, picks targets like Satan and kills like Satan, it’s Satan. Shields a junior Satan that does the same? It’s THE Great Satan,” Ghalibaf said in a post on X.

Richard Wolff & Michael Hudson: Trump's Operation Economic Outcast on Iran in FREEFALL

Trump Says He May Rename Hormuz Strait the ‘Trump Strait’

President Trump on Wednesday again claimed that the Strait of Hormuz was under US “control” and suggested he may rename it the “Trump Strait,” comments that came as Iran’s IRGC said that two tankers attempting to cross the strait hit Iranian mines.

“Now that we have it under USA. control, should we change the name Hormuz Strait to TRUMP STRAIT??? Like America itself, it would be ‘hotter’ than ever before! Thank you for your attention to this matter,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

Prof Pape: Iran AMBUSHES US Bases! Why America Has NO WAY OUT of 'Escalation Trap'

White House aides reportedly want US war on Iran kept 'quiet' until November midterms

Top White House aides are pushing to keep the US war on Iran from escalating before November's midterm elections to staunch Republican electoral losses, four people familiar with the discussions said, a strategy already under strain as the US and Iran exchanged back-and-forth attacks overnight.

White House officials will consider ramping up military action after the November 3 vote, Reuters news agency reported, citing sources who requested anonymity to describe internal thinking, though any return to full-scale conflict is far from a given.

The US military said its latest attacks were retaliation for recent attacks on American forces and marine traffic in the region.

For now, the sources told Reuters, the administration wants to rely on applying more economic pressure on Iran in an effort to extract concessions in any future negotiation that months of military action failed to secure.

"We are keeping the pressure on Iran," one White House official said. "But November is a priority." Keeping the war mostly contained until then would help prevent the unpopular conflict from dominating the news as Trump's Republicans campaign to defend thin majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives, said the sources, three of whom are White House officials.

Jeffrey Sachs: America’s “Legacy of Delusion” Fueling Financial Bubble & Iran Failure

Pfffffttttt!!! Dream on, congressworms do what Israel tells them to.

Congress Urged to Sue Trump to End Iran War

With no end in sight to President Donald Trump’s illegal war with Iran, Congress is being urged to take legal action to bring the conflict to an end.

Jamal Abdi, executive director at National Iranian American Council (NIAC) Action, said on Wednesday that Congress must go to court to enforce the war powers resolution that passed in the House and the Senate earlier this year.

“We are in a constitutional crisis and our lawmakers cannot simply roll over or bide their time as Trump traps the country in an illegal forever war,” said Abdi. “For the first time in US history, Congress has passed legislation mandating the president withdraw from the war, and now they must take him to court to enforce it.”

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced a resolution in July that would compel House Speaker Mike Johnson (D-La.) to sue Trump and enforce the will of Congress to end the war.

However, Abdi argued that US lawmakers are not moving with the proper urgency to stop Trump from continuing his illegal attacks on Iran, which have been carried out for more than six months despite receiving no congressional authorization.

“Congress must assert its authority as a co-equal branch of government and sue to end the administration’s illegal war,” Abdi emphasized. “We need urgent action, not more deliberation. Sitting and doing nothing is not an option and is eroding our democracy and system of checks and balances.”

According to Politico congressional reporter Riley Rogerson, Meeks on Tuesday said that there are currently no plans to bring up a new war powers resolution, although he didn’t rule out taking action.

“Democrats are unsure how long the House will be in before the midterms,” wrote Rogerson, “which makes planning a challenge.”

Holland PULLS ALL GOLD FROM US In SCREW YOU To Trump

Dutch central bank moves 86 tonnes of gold to UK from US and Canada, citing ‘geopolitical unrest’

The Dutch central bank says it has moved 86 tonnes of its gold reserves out of the US and Canada to London, citing “increasing geopolitical unrest”. De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) said gold reserves held in London could be traded more easily than those held in New York and Ottawa. “This makes it the quickest for DNB to deploy in a crisis situation,” the bank said in a statement on Wednesday.

“With this step, we have improved the deployability of the gold reserves. We assume that we will never need to deploy the gold, but it is nevertheless necessary to strengthen our resilience and preparedness,” said DNB’s president, Olaf Sleijpen.

The total Dutch gold stock amounted to 612.4 tonnes and was valued at €72.2bn ($83.7bn) at the end of 2025, said the DNB. Before the deployment, the Dutch bank held 31.3% of its gold in New York and 19.7% in Ottawa. After the move, each country accounted for 18.5% of the Dutch gold reserve.

The share of gold held in London increased from 18.1% to 32.1%. The bank still holds 30.8% of its gold in the Netherlands. The transfer was carried out partially by buying and selling and partly by physically transferring gold, the bank said. The operation took place between March and August of this year, it said.

Alexander Mercouris: Ukraine Unravelling - War Enters New & Dangerous Phase

US prosecutors refuse to say if they secretly obtained Don Lemon’s phone records

Federal prosecutors have declined to say whether they secretly obtained phone records for the journalist Don Lemon using an unusual administrative summons, his lawyers said in a Monday court filing, highlighting concern about a controversial legal authority the government has claimed to gather information as it charged Lemon and dozens of others with civil rights crimes in connection to a January protest at a church in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

In January, officials served Verizon with an administrative summons for a log of Lemon’s phone records between 19 December and 20 January. The subpoena did not come from a grand jury, as is typical in criminal investigations, and also was not a court-approved search warrant. Instead, it was a unilateral request from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which said it was requesting the information under 19 USC 1509 – an obscure law that gives the department power to investigate records related to customs issues. Experts say the government is abusing that authority to gather records on journalists, activists, unions, non-profits and online critics, and have expressed deep concerns that the practice runs afoul of the fourth amendment’s right to privacy.

Records produced by the government to Lemon’s lawyers in the case have left it unclear whether Verizon complied with the request, his attorneys wrote. His lawyers said they had contacted prosecutors on Friday for clarity on the issue and had not received a response as of Monday. The justice department and DHS declined to comment. Verizon did not return a request for comment.

Lemon was charged in January with conspiring to violate federal laws that protect religious expression after he covered a protest at a church where activists said a pastor was a member of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The DHS used a 1509 summons to secretly obtain six months’ worth of telephone records from T-Mobile for Georgia Fort, an independent journalist who, like Lemon, was covering the protest and subsequently charged. Fort’s lawyers said in a filing last month they were “stunned” the government had obtained the records without notifying Fort or giving her a chance to contest the demand. Unlike a grand jury subpoena, companies are not required to respond to a 1509 summons, and can force the government to go to court to enforce them.

The government’s effort was especially alarming, they said, because a magistrate judge in the case previously rejected a separate effort to obtain YouTube records on Fort and Lemon. In his decision, the judge told the government there were special protections that applied when the government sought records from journalists and that the government needed to give the reporters a chance to challenge the effort to get information. The filing from Lemon’s lawyers came on the same day that nearly all of the defendants charged in the case sought to have the case dismissed, in part because of the way the government has abused 1509 summonses. In a joint filing on Monday, they said the government had filed more than 90 administrative summonses in the case for information including telephone, airline, social media, car rental and employment records. They also said the DHS did not have the legal authority to investigate the case.

Justice department orders US states to expand how they report undocumented immigrants

The US Department of Justice has ordered states to expand how they report undocumented immigrants to the federal government, according to a legal opinion from Tuesday that reverses a policy that has been in place for nearly 30 years.

Under the new opinion, issued by the department’s office of legal counsel, any state that takes federal money through support schemes for low-income Americans, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI), must now report undocumented immigrants across its entire state government, not just through the specific welfare office that runs the program.

TANF and SSI are two of the country’s largest programs helping low-income families, and elderly and disabled residents. The opinion withdraws a 1998 interpretation issued during the Clinton administration, which had confined the reporting requirement to the state agency directly responsible for administering the federal program in question.

Deputy assistant attorney general Joshua Craddock, who authored the new opinion, wrote that the earlier interpretation was based on flawed legal reasoning. “We are forced to conclude that our prior opinion erred in its analysis and result,” he wrote. Craddock also dismissed the argument that Congress’s decades of inaction on the issue amounted to implicit endorsement of the narrower reading. “The fact that subsequent congresses have not affirmatively corrected the 1998 Opinion’s interpretation of section 404 does not alter the plain meaning of the statute,” he wrote.

Almost half of world’s farmers poisoned by pesticides every year

Almost half of the world’s farmers are poisoned by pesticides every single year, a study has found. Using publicly available data from 2006-2023, the study, which was commissioned by Pesticide Action Network, found there to be an estimated 402-433m cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning of farmers and farm workers every year.

Based on a worldwide farming population of 934 million, this means approximately 46% of farmers are being poisoned every year. The greatest estimated number of poisonings was in southern Asia, followed by south-east Asia and east Africa. The overall highest national incidence of poisoning was in Burkina Faso in west Africa, where nearly 84% of farmers and farm workers were reported to have experienced poisoning.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health on Wednesday, also found that an estimated 11,000 deaths occur every year due to pesticide poisoning, with nearly 60% of these in India.

The study states that despite global efforts to highlight the dangers, pesticide use has continued to grow steadily, with 3.8m tonnes used in 2023, a doubling since 1990.

Global heating will hit at least 1.8C, UN warns, and there are ‘no good outcomes’

Global heating will reach at least 1.8C under even the most optimistic future, well beyond the Paris agreement goal of 1.5C, according to a UN report that warns every fraction of temperature rise intensifies destructive extreme weather, glacier melt, ecosystem loss, and island and coastal city submersion. The report by the Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme confirmed overshooting the 1.5C goal inscribed in the landmark Paris agreement of 2015 was now “unavoidable” and, despite some progress in addressing the human-caused climate crisis driven by burning fossil fuels, likely in the next few years. It said: “There are no good outcomes above 1.5C”.

Heating of up to 3C above preindustrial levels could lead to glaciers losing more than a quarter of their mass by 2100, raising sea levels by up to 13cm. Global food production could decline by up to 14% by 2050 if there are not effective strategies to adapt. Human health, water supplies, nature, cities, infrastructure and economies could all be severely damaged. Some losses would be irreversible. Many communities may have to relocate or change their livelihoods.

The report said the best hope for humanity to limit damage was to adopt an “overshoot, peak and decline” pathway that required immediate and sustained greenhouse gas emissions cuts combined with steps to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It described the goal of net zero emissions – increasingly politically contentious in some countries – as “an essential milestone that cannot be skipped” and stressed carbon dioxide removal through steps such as establishing vast new forests must occur alongside, not as an alternative to, deep cuts in fossil pollution.

Crucially, the authors of the report, titled Limiting Overshoot, said the average global temperature could be returned to 1.5C this century only if heating stayed below about 1.8C. They warned nature’s capacity to store carbon was uncertain and would shrink the more the planet heats.

Temperature check: alarm as prediction markets lean into weather and climate bets

Online prediction markets, saturated by money staked on sport, crypto and politics, have now set their sights on a promising new area of growth: betting on the future livability of the planet itself. The rise of gamified predictions on the unfolding climate crisis, and shorter-term weather forecasts, has been underscored by a new deal that allows Kalshi, a leading online financial exchange, to access data from the Weather Company, owner of the Weather Channel, to verify weather-related betting outcomes.

The weather is “one of the fastest-growing and most crucial categories” at Kalshi, the company said, with monetized predictions made by people, and bots, on weather and climate events growing 500% in the past year into a $1.1bn market. “The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” Tarek Mansour, co-founder of Kalshi, said of the company’s broader objectives last year.

Startlingly, Kalshi even claims that this gauge of public opinion can not only act as a financial hedge for businesses exposed to extreme weather, but also help shape the weather forecasts themselves. Kalshi’s betting markets will appear on the Weather Channel’s app, which is used by more than 330 million people worldwide.

“Given the severity of the climate crisis, it’s crucial for policymakers and the general public to have well-calibrated forecasting data about future climate impacts,” said a Kalshi spokesperson, citing a company study on how accurate its markets’ predictions are. Asked whether this meant Kalshi saw its weather markets as part of delivering well-calibrated forecasting data, the spokesperson said this was the case.

People visiting Kalshi or Polymarket, its main rival, can bet on weather predictions such as how hot it will be in certain places on a given day, as well as longer-term bets – from how many climate-fueled disasters the US will have, to whether the world will avoid catastrophic global heating, to how severe the die-off of corals in Hawaii will be. You can even wager how far Lake Mead, the US’s largest reservoir and a crucial water source for the American west, will drop below its already record-low levels.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some of which defied fair-use abstraction.

Chris Hedges: The Next Election May Be Our Last

Iran War: US Lashes Out at Civilian Targets with Iran Claiming US Military Deaths in Disproportionate Retaliation on US Bases; Servicemembers Becoming Demoralized with Lack of Strategy, No-Win Situation

What Huckabee is doing about dead Americans in the West Bank

Plaguing the Americas With Misery in the Name of Liberty

JD Vance implies God is too lazy to do his own work

A Little Night Music

Grady Gaines & The Flirts - Let Your Thing Hang Down

Grady Gaines & the Texas Upsetters - Something On Your Mind

Grady Gaines and the Texas Upsetters - Hey Hey Hey Hey

Grady Gaines with Teddy Reynolds - Shaggy Dog

Grady Gaines & the Texas Upsetters - Hard Times Blues

Grady Gaines & The Texas Upsetters - Looking For One Real Good Friend

Grady Gaines & The Texas Upsetters - Baby Work Out

Grady Gaines & the Texas Upsetters - Mr. Blues In The Sky

Grady Gaines & the Texas Upsetters - Lonesome Saxaphone Part I

Grady Gaines & the Texas Upsetters - Let Your Thing Hang Down