The Evening Blues - 7-31-26
Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features Chicago blues harmonica player Little Walter Jacobs. Enjoy!
Little Walter – You're So Fine
"We make movies about saving the world as the real world hurtles toward ecological collapse.
We make movies about defeating diabolical villains while letting the real diabolical villains rule the world.
We make movies celebrating heroic acts while real heroes are imprisoned.
Somehow fighting the bad guys and saving the planet only ever stays in movie land. We are handed fictional triumphs in lieu of real victory."
-- Caitlin Johnstone
News and Opinion
It’s so creepy how evangelical Christians fetishize Jews and Israel
It’s so creepy how evangelical Christians fetishize Jews and Israel. They treat the modern state of Israel like a magical fantasy land and talk about Jewish people like fairy folk, because those words happen to appear in some ancient book of made-up stories.
They regard today’s genocidal apartheid colonialists in the state of Israel as biblical Israelites, and think some dentist in New York City is the same sort of person as the fictional characters they read about in the book of Exodus. It’s like if someone took over New Zealand and named it “Middle Earth” and started calling all the Kiwis “hobbits”, and then all the Tolkien nerds started oohing and ahhing about it and planning expensive trips to go see the land where Gandalf and Frodo once walked, and started organizing lobby groups and voting blocks to promote the foreign policy interests of “Gondor” (formerly Wellington).
And the modern state of Israel is built around facilitating this exact type of fetishization. They resurrected a dead language that hadn’t been spoken conversationally anywhere on earth for centuries and changed the name of their currency from the lira to the “shekel” in order to facilitate this Bible-LARPing and build on the illusion that their brand new ethnostate is the same as the nation that Jews and Christians have been reading about in their ancient scriptures. All to ensure that a western political support base will push western governments to pour modern war machinery into propping up this ridiculous apartheid state with the nonstop violence required for its perpetuation.
It’s so fucking insane. “Ooh, we’ve got to send bombs and attack helicopters to the magical Jew kingdom so that the magic Jesus prophecy can come true and make us all go to Eternal Paradise!”
TRUMP HAS NO OFF-RAMP AS MORE COUNTRIES JOIN WAR - w/ Trita Parsi
US Senate rejects bid to rein in Trump’s authority over Iran war
The US Senate on Thursday rejected a largely symbolic effort to limit Donald Trump’s authority to wage war in Iran, amid rising regional tensions after the US conducted a “heavy wave” of retaliatory airstrikes. The war powers resolution failed in a 49-50 vote, marking the second time in two weeks the chamber has taken up legislation aimed at forcing Trump to end hostilities.
The US military said it launched a fresh wave of airstrikes in Iran on Wednesday, in retaliation for an Iranian missile attack targeting a US base in Jordan. The exchange marked an escalation in the Iran war, following the collapse of a ceasefire between Washington and Tehran.
The Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman voted with Republicans to sink the measure, the only Democrat to do so. The Republican senators Susan Collins, of Maine, Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, and Rand Paul, of Kentucky, crossed the aisle to vote in favor of the motion, which would have directed Trump to withdraw US forces from hostilities with Iran absent explicit congressional authorization.
Mitch McConnell was absent for the vote as he continues to recover from a fall in June and has not received medical clearance to return to work.
The vote is the latest sign of eroding patience with a conflict that has now stretched more than five months, far beyond the “four to five weeks” Trump predicted when he co-launched the war with Israel against Iran on 28 February, killing the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. The often twisty aim has been to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to curb its support for militant proxies across the Middle East, though under its new leadership the regime seems more inclined to pursue a bomb than ever before.
Douglas Macgregor: Iran Became the Graveyard of the U.S. Empire & Israel
Saudi Arabia prepares sea and possible land offensive against Houthis
Saudi Arabia is preparing for a major military offensive against the Houthis by sea and possibly by land in central Yemen, Yemeni sources believe, in a move to break the chokehold on its oil exports through the southern Red Sea.
Saudi forces have been seen withdrawing from the east of Yemen in what could be preparation for a land offensive. At the same time, Riyadh is trying to organise a naval coalition to protect shipping from Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab strait.
The Saudi defence ministry said on Thursday that 14 states including Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Sudan and Djibouti had issued a joint statement supporting a multinational maritime defence coalition.
The Iran-aligned Houthis, who control Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, and much of its Red Sea coastline, announced on 20 July that they were implementing a blockade against Saudi ships, but they have denied they are planning to impose tolls on all ships.
The group says it will lift the blockade once Saudi Arabia lifts its blockade on Yemen, positioning the dispute as over the future of Yemen and not directly about Iran. Saudi Arabia intervened in the Yemeni civil war in 2015 in support of the country’s UN-recognised government against the Houthi rebels. Riyadh has also asked the US and a group of European countries including Germany, France, the UK and Italy to join a Red Sea coalition.
CENTCOM PLANS MASSIVE 2-WEEK BOMBING CAMPAIGN - w/ Col. Larry Wilkerson
US hits dozens of targets in Iran overnight as peace efforts under threat
The US struck Iran overnight and Tehran retaliated at US allies in the region, reigniting the low-intensity, tit-for-tat war as mediators struggled to pull the two countries back to the negotiating table. The US carried out overnight strikes on Iran – the first in more than five days – hours after Donald Trump vowed to hit the country “very hard” following Tehran’s targeting of a base in Jordan that hosts American troops.
The latest attacks come after a days-long pause in violence between the two sides. The resumption of fighting and the stalling of the diplomatic process has brought the war into uncharted territory and prompted concerns of a renewed regional war.
US Central Command said it hit dozens of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) targets in Iran as part of a “heavy wave of strikes”, including military command centres and missile and drone facilities, in a two-hour wave of strikes. “The strikes aimed to further diminish threats posed by Iran and its proxies to American forces, commercial shipping, and neighbouring Gulf countries,” it said.
Iranian state media said three people were injured in attacks on the island of Qeshm, in the strait of Hormuz, and that explosions were also reported in Khuzestan province, to the north-west. The IRGC said three of its members were killed by US strikes in the north-western province of Zanjan.
Jordan reported incoming missiles for the second day in a row, with no reports of casualties, while Kuwait accused Iran of carrying out a strike that hit a building, killing one person. Both strikes are believed to have been part of an Iranian retaliation against the US attacks. Mediators insisted talks were continuing despite the renewed exchange of strikes, with the Pakistani foreign ministry spokesperson, Tahir Andrabi, saying they were doing their “utmost to bring all parties back” to the negotiating table.
INTEL Roundtable - Weekly Wrap 31-July
Democrats demand answers over treatment of wounded US troops after Iran strike
The Trump administration is facing growing demands to explain why wounded US soldiers went more than a week without adequate hospital care after a March drone strike in Kuwait, just days into the US-Israel war on Iran. In a letter to the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, congressional Democrats urged the Pentagon to answer their questions – which include why the Pentagon’s public casualty count for the war with Iran briefly changed – by 12 August.
The letter, sent on Wednesday and led by the US senator Elizabeth Warren and the representative Pat Ryan, poses 23 questions to Hegseth over the 1 March strike on a US logistics hub at the port of Shuaiba, south of Kuwait City. It was first reported by the Washington Post.
A single Iranian drone evaded air defenses and hit the relocated operations center of the US army’s 103rd sustainment command, killing six reservists from Des Moines, Iowa, and wounding dozens more – the first US combat deaths of Operation Epic Fury, the war Donald Trump launched, alongside Israel, against Iran on 28 February.
The unit had asked for more medical staff and supplies before the strike and been turned down, according to reporting by the Washington Post and CBS News cited in the letter. There was no doctor on site afterward, no fixed aid station, and only one ambulance, with some of the wounded driving themselves to a hospital in Kuwait City, according to the reports. It took nine days before roughly two dozen soldiers, some still unscreened for brain injuries, were flown to the US military hospital at Landstuhl in Germany.
“Doctors told them that because they hadn’t been recorded as medical evacuees on the flight’s manifest or as seriously injured in [the defense department’s] casualty-processing database, they could only get limited treatment and had to wait in nearby barracks because the hospital was unable to admit them,” the letter states. Soldiers later sent to Fort Hood, Texas, are said to have gone weeks without seeing a doctor able to diagnose traumatic brain injury, despite repeatedly failing post-blast cognitive tests, and families have told CBS News the US army downplayed the severity of individual wounds.
ENDLESS WAR: Saudi Arabia Preps Yemen Assault + US-Israel Plot Iran Blockade
Trump claims agreement for ‘complete disarmament’ of Hamas in Gaza but support uncertain
Donald Trump has said a deal has been reached for Hamas to disarm and for Israel to withdraw its forces from Gaza, however briefings from both sides exposed disputes over its implementation that could prove difficult to overcome. “This agreement is a critical step towards Gaza finally being governed by a new Palestinian government that will work closely with the Board of Peace to help the Palestinian people,” Trump said in a social media post. “At the same time, Israel will have the security it deserves, with Gaza no longer used as a base for terror attacks.”
Trump’s 20-point ceasefire plan announced last year calls on the Iran-backed militant group to surrender its weapons and destroy its vast network of tunnels. It also envisions Israeli forces withdrawing from Gaza, the arrival of a new technocratic Palestinian government, deployment of an international security force and the rebuilding of the battered Palestinian territory after more than two years of war.
Senior Hamas officials have reportedly agreed to the plan, but the question of whether the group disarms before or after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza has already emerged as a point of contention. “We will not take any action regarding disarmament prior to Israel’s withdrawal from the Strip,” Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas negotiating team, told Al Jazeera. Hamad told Agence France-Presse in a separate interview: “The agreement contains a clear provision stating that Israel must commit to and implement its obligations. If Israel does not implement the agreement, neither will we.”
Earlier an Israeli official told the Reuters news agency that the proposed terms were not satisfactory. “Israel demands the complete disarmament of Hamas, including the removal of weapons from Gaza and the complete demilitarisation of the Strip as a precondition for any process,” the official said, adding that the plan under discussion did not “provide a satisfactory response to these demands and Israel conveyed its objections”. In a briefing to reporters late on Thursday, a US official appeared to acknowledge that differences between the two sides remained, saying Israel was “very sceptical that Hamas will disarm”. The official added that Trump would be “very, very disappointed” if Israel didn’t adhere to the agreement.
Hamas wants Israel to commit to ending attacks on Gaza and withdrawing its forces, and its leaders will reportedly hold talks with mediators from Egypt, Qatar and Turkey on the second phase of Trump’s Gaza plan in the coming days. Hamad told AFP: “This process will take about 14 days, or perhaps longer. We must agree on every detail: how the agreement will be implemented, when it will be implemented and the mechanisms for carrying it out.” So far, the reality on the ground in Gaza remains far from this roadmap.
Supreme court says Palestine Action co-founder can challenge ban on group
The co-founder of Palestine Action has won permission to challenge the ban against the group at the UK’s highest court. The direct action group was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in July last year but its co-founder, Huda Ammori, has been fighting to have the ban overturned amid a mass civil disobedience campaign. In February, the high court ruled that the ban was disproportionate and unlawful but its decision was overturned by the court of appeal last month.
On Thursday, the supreme court said Ammori could appeal against the court of appeal’s decision and that the case would be heard in the final quarter of this year. It means the fate of more than 3,500 people who have been arrested for alleged support of Palestine Action since the ban remains in limbo as their cases are on hold until the legality of proscription has been definitely resolved.
Ammori welcomed the supreme court’s decision, saying: “The proscription of Palestine Action has become a vehicle for a far broader crackdown on expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people. “This unprecedented attack on free speech and the right to protest in this country is already having a chilling effect at a time when speaking out about Israel’s crimes could not be more urgent.” She appealed directly to the supreme court to hear the case after the court of appeal’s decision refused permission to appeal against its own decision within hours of the application.
The supreme court said it was arguable that the ban represented a disproportionate interference with articles 10 and 11 of the European convention on human rights, which protect the rights of freedom of speech and protest respectively.
Ammori has pledged to challenge the ban, which has been widely condemned by civil liberties groups, as well as by UN experts and politicians from across the divide, at the European court of human rights if it is upheld by the UK courts.
Russia Chokes Ukraine Logistics; Missile In Poland Nervous West Silent; US Kills Kiev Patriot Dream
John Mearsheimer: Ukraine Is Landlocked & Donbas Enters Endgame
Russian missile destroys US firm’s Kyiv drone factory
A drone factory in Kyiv destroyed by a Russian ballistic missile on Friday was owned by a US corporation registered in Delaware, in what appears to be the first time Moscow has targeted a US company in the conflict. Terminal Autonomy makes precision “deep-strike” drones with guidance systems that are resistant to Russian jamming signals, according to a person familiar with the company.
The phrase “terminal autonomy” refers to the final phase of a kamikaze drone’s attack in which AI takes over control of the weapon after the defending force jams radio waves or mobile service.
State records show that the corporation was registered in Delaware in 2023. The company’s website says: “We deploy AI-guided loitering munitions and precision munitions, which are already in active service against enemy assets on the frontline.”
Anthony Vinci, a former senior US intelligence officer who wrote The Fourth Intelligence Revolution: The Future of Espionage and the Battle to Save America, said: “The Russians don’t care who owns the manufacturing facility. It’s still a target. They don’t care if it’s American or someone else’s.”
David Harvey: Marx and Capitalism | Doomscroll
Anthropic’s AI Claude escaped testing environment and hacked organizations
Anthropic said on Thursday its AI Claude model hacked systems of three organizations during testing, days after rival OpenAI revealed a rogue agent had gone on a days-long hacking spree at AI firm Hugging Face.
Claude gained unauthorized access to the systems during cybersecurity evaluations after a misconfiguration allowed the models to reach the internet from testing environments that were supposed to be isolated, Anthropic said.
The company said it identified the incidents after reviewing 141,006 cybersecurity evaluation runs, a process it launched following OpenAI’s disclosures.
The breaches signal that AI’s expanding capabilities are already fueling the security threat experts have long feared and that even top developers can be caught off-guard by flaws their models can exploit.
“Claude compromised the impacted organizations’ infrastructure using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints,” it said.
We dodged a bullet by millimetres
ABC argues that early license review by FCC is ‘retaliation’ for network’s coverage
ABC has pushed back aggressively against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for putting the network under an expedited license renewal process for eight local television stations it owns, charging in a lengthy filing that the process is payback for the network’s editorial decision-making and coverage of Donald Trump.
“The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: Accommodate the administration’s view of what news coverage should look like or pay the price,” lawyers representing the Disney-owned network wrote in a 109-page filing, submitted as a reply to petitions from conservative media groups to deny ABC’s licenses. “The tools vary; the objective does not: a media industry too fearful of official reprisal to report the news freely.”
The FCC chair, Brendan Carr, has denied that inquiries into the network relate to its editorial decision-making and instead said they stem from concerns about the company’s employment practices and compliance with statutory obligations. ABC’s lawyers pointed out how unusual it is for the FCC to demand that a group of network-owned stations apply several years early to renew their licenses. Other ABC-owned stations have licenses that run all the way until 2031.
“The commission’s departure from those norms lays bare what is really going on: the administration is retaliating against ABC for the exercise of its First Amendment rights,” ABC’s lawyers wrote. “Because this whole proceeding rests on an unconstitutional premise, the stations should never have been asked to justify license renewal years early.” Responding to petitions to deny ABC’s licenses based on accusations of liberal bias, the network’s lawyers pointed out that the “commission has no authority to regulate the content of television programming”.
“No Petitioner has established any ‘violations’ of Commission rules or regulations, let alone the ‘serious’ ones or the ‘pattern of abuse’ required to warrant denying renewal,” they added.
Trump says he may ‘temporarily’ drop bid to make Blanche US attorney general
Donald Trump said on Thursday he may “temporarily” pull the nomination of Todd Blanche to serve as attorney general, but would keep him in the role in an acting capacity until two Republican senators objecting to his confirmation leave office next year – an extraordinary escalation of an intra-party fight over an agreement to create a $1.8bn slush fund and give the president tax immunity.
Two Republican senators – John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina – have refused to back Blanche’s nomination until they receive written confirmation from the justice department that it is not moving forward with a widely criticized agreement creating a $1.8bn fund to compensate people claiming they were targets of political weaponization and granting the president, his family and business entities broad immunity from past tax investigations.
Blanche has already said publicly that the payout fund to compensate victims of so-called government weaponization is not moving forward amid bipartisan backlash. But Cornyn and Tillis had sought assurances in writing, something Blanche has refused to do. Cornyn also sought to clarify the terms of the tax immunity portion of the agreement.
The Senate judiciary committee canceled a vote on Blanche’s confirmation scheduled for Thursday when it became clear he did not have the votes to advance. The two senators – who are both leaving Congress in January – appeared to be negotiating language with the justice department on Wednesday.
On Thursday, Trump blasted Cornyn and Tillis and vowed that he would instead keep Blanche, the president’s former personal lawyer, as the acting attorney general – a role he has held since April, when Trump fired Pam Bondi. Federal law allows the deputy attorney general – Blanche’s role under Bondi – to serve indefinitely as the acting attorney general until a successor is confirmed.
Haley Stevens CRASHES OUT As Abdul Hits DOUBLE DIGITS
Mandela Barnes drops out of high-stakes Wisconsin governor’s race
Mandela Barnes, the former lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, dropped out of the Democratic primary for governor on Thursday, upending the high-stakes contest less than two weeks before the 11 August election. Barnes announced the decision in a video posted on social media, saying he no longer saw a viable path to the nomination, as democratic socialist Francesca Hong surged ahead with a commanding lead.
“It’s become very clear who our nominee is going to be,” Barnes, 39, said.
A Marquette Law School poll showed Hong significantly ahead of Barnes in a distant second place, with 38% compared to his 16%, having consolidated liberal support, especially among young voters, although about a third of primary voters remained undecided.
His departure adds another twist in the Democratic primary for governor in Wisconsin, a perennial presidential battleground that has also been at the center of national disputes over election administration since the 2020 election.
He is the third Democrat to exit the race, following lieutenant governor Sara Rodriguez, who withdrew two weeks ago amid a campaign finance scandal. After Rodriguez’s exit, Milwaukee county executive David Crowley re-entered the race with the endorsement of Governor Tony Evers, who is not seeking re-election.
Kshama Sawant in HOME STRETCH of Campaign Against Adam Smith
Fifteen elephant deaths at Kenya park may be due to cyanide poisoning
The recent deaths of 15 elephants near a park in southern Kenya in the past month were likely caused by the animals ingesting pesticides used on nearby tomato farms, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has said. Erustus Kanga, the agency’s director general, told Citizen TV that analysis of samples collected from the carcasses had found traces of cyanide, a chemical compound used in farming as a predator control poison and a pest fumigant, which has also been used by poachers.
“Cyanide is a highly toxic chemical,” he said. “If elephants consume cyanide, they cannot survive a day or two.” The deaths occurred in the Kimana sanctuary and Kuku Group ranch areas around Amboseli national park, an area covering 392 sq km (96,865 acres) and that, together with other neighbouring conservancies are home to more than 1,600 elephants.
Kimana town is a leading tomato producer and a place where researchers at the Route to Food Initiative, a food rights programme, have previously reported the use of a cyanide substance on the crop. Isaac Lekolool, the head of veterinary and capture services at KWS, told Citizen TV that the stomach contents of one member of a herd that roamed Kimana sanctuary included “lots of tomatoes,” suggesting agrochemical poisoning.
Kanga warned that the effects could reach a wider population, as livestock may also eat from farms in the area. “We have the goats, we have the cattle that are there. Eventually, if this cyanide is truly the one that is in the system, then we are going to see a bigger impact.”
Farmers and herders in Kenya have in the past poisoned wildlife in retaliation for eating their crops and livestock. In Zimbabwe, poachers have killed dozens of elephants by lacing watering holes and salt licks with the chemical compound.
Raja is a vibrant, agrarian celebration in the richly forested eastern Indian state of Odisha that celebrates fertility, womanhood and Basumati, the Hindu goddess of the Earth. Traditionally, the three-day event is held from 14 to 16 June to mark the start of the rainy season and the beginning of sowing crops. But this year the fields remained untouched, and the skies clear. The monsoon did not arrive until the end of the month.
Global experts have officially declared that this year would see the onset of a “super” El Niño, an extreme version of the weather cycle, and expect it to intensify rapidly from July to September. In India, El Niño years are usually associated with a weak monsoon, delayed and uneven rainfall, dry spells and extreme temperatures, leading to agricultural droughts, increased energy use and water shortages as reservoirs are depleted.
June ended with a 40% shortfall in rain and even with the excess rainfall this month, the effects of drought have not been mitigated. The state has faced at least 19 droughts over the past 50 years. Despite the dry conditions and a lack of irrigation facilities, farmers in Laxmipur cautiously sowed seeds in their paddy fields in the last days of June, hoping it would rain in time for germination. Mangala Sabar, 45, remembers the 2023-24 El Niño years “when the transplanting attempts failed twice in each year, and we lost the entire crop”.
During El Niño, the main concern is reduced rainfall and lower soil moisture, which adversely affect farming, says Nitin Bassi, a water management specialist at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a Delhi-based thinktank. “Monsoon happens after a peak summer in our country, and the soil is dry. If the soil is not saturated enough when it rains, there won’t be any runoff going into the reservoirs, natural tanks and ponds, and there won’t be sufficient water to supply for winter crops either,” he says.
According to Bassi, nearly 50% of the cultivated area in Odisha is largely rain-fed, where irrigation is not practised or available. A 2024 analysis by CEEW found that the monsoon arrived up to a week late in Odisha over the past decade, and winter rainfall from October to December had increased. The India Meteorological Department also launched an initiative last year to provide accurate forecasts of the monsoon’s arrival up to 30 days in advance. Tailored forecasts are now being delivered to more than 38 million farmers via SMS and phone calls, including in Odisha. Similarly, several El Niño-related advisories were issued by the government recommending farmers delayed sowing, choose low-duration or other less water-intensive crops, and adopt drought-resilient varieties.
Also of Interest
Here are some articles of interest, some of which defied fair-use abstraction.
Al-Houthi Says There Are Indications Saudi Arabia Is Planning Major Escalation in Yemen
Capacity v.s. Desire: What I Got Right & Wrong At The Start of the Gaza Genocide
‘Moderate’ Netanyahu Alternative Who Met With Dems Wants Israel to Keep Expanding Its Borders
As Attacks Grow, Lebanon Army Chief Accuses Israel of Obstructing Pilot Zones
US Merges Wars in Eurasia, West Asia
Two More US Courts Reject Trump’s Mass Detention of Immigrants
Flock surveillance cameras can pose a crash risk for drivers, US experts say
US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference
Let them eat SUVs: Trump White House orders fleet of luxury cars as Americans struggle
A Little Night Music
Little Walter – Tell Me, Mama
Little Walter - Mellow Down Easy
Little Walter - Key To The Highway
Little Walter – My Babe
Little Walter - I Had My Fun
Little Walter - Juke
LIttle Walter + Muddy Waters - Walkin On
Little Walter - It Ain't Right
Muddy Waters w/ Little Walter - Evans Shuffle
Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and Little Walter - You Don't Love Me
