Debt Rattle August 14 2026

[Raúl Ilargi Meijer]

Rembrandt The Descent from the Cross 1634 • Iran’s Military Command To Be ‘More Aggressive’ (ZH) • Skepticism Over Iranian Plot Against Trump In Turke
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle August 14 2026]

[Michael Reid]

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The Butcher’s Bill Comes Due: A Military Run Past Its Limits, and the Leaders Who Keep Saying Everything Is Fine
13 August 2026 by Larry C. Johnson 72 Comments

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Larry’s note: This article discusses suicide. Service members, veterans, and family members in crisis can reach the Veterans/Military Crisis Line by dialing 988 and pressing 1, texting 838255, or visiting VeteransCrisisLine.net.

When the Secretary of the Army orders every officer and sergeant in the force to personally check on every soldier, every single day, that is not a routine holiday gesture. It is an alarm. And in the ten months since Dan Driscoll issued that order, the alarm has kept ringing — from a carrier in the Arabian Sea, from a secretive command at Fort Meade, from the families of sailors who can no longer get a straight answer about why their children are hungry. The stories arrive from different branches and different missions, but they add up to a single indictment: the American military is being run past the limits of the people inside it, and too many of its leaders have responded not by fixing the problem but by denying it exists.

The order that was an admission
Start with what Driscoll’s November 2025 memo actually conceded. “Last year, we lost 260 soldiers to suicide,” he wrote. “Soldiers aren’t getting the help they need.” Read that again. The civilian head of the Army, in writing, told the entire force that its existing suicide-prevention apparatus — years of briefings, mandatory training, awareness campaigns, and dedicated prevention offices — was failing to reach the people who needed it. His solution was to fall back on the most basic human intervention available: order a person to call another person, once a day, and ask if they are okay.

There is nothing wrong with that instinct. A daily check-in is humane, and Driscoll deserves credit for making it personal and mandatory rather than performative. But strip away the sentiment and the memo is a confession. The Pentagon’s own data shows active-duty suicide rates rising more or less steadily from 2011 through 2023, through multiple administrations and countless “prevention initiatives.” When the fix for a decade-long institutional failure is to command individuals to manually watch each other, the institution is admitting its systems don’t work. The daily check-in treats the symptom. It does nothing about the conditions generating the wound — and those conditions were about to get worse.

The food fight the Navy tried to wave away
By April 2026, the strain had moved from statistics to meal trays. USA Today published photographs — from the families of service members aboard the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and the assault ship USS Tripoli — showing half-empty trays, small portions, and a gray slab of processed meat. A sailor reportedly told his mother the crew “eat when they can” and split food evenly when someone got more than the others. The Lincoln had been pulled into the war with Iran and was grinding through a deployment that would stretch past 250 days.

Here is where accountability stops being abstract. Confronted with photographs and firsthand accounts, the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, did not order an inquiry or promise to look into it. He went on social media and called the reporting “FAKE NEWS.” That response is the pattern this whole story turns on: when evidence of strain surfaces, the reflex from the top has too often been to attack the messenger rather than examine the condition. It is difficult to fix a problem you have publicly declared does not exist — and a denial from the Secretary of War sends an unmistakable signal down the chain of command about which answer leadership wants to hear.

Fort Meade: where the tempo became fatal
Then came the gravest signal, and it did not come with photographs. In August, Bloomberg reported that US Cyber Command — the force that defends American networks and runs offensive cyber operations — was investigating a cluster of deaths among its people. As many as five individuals who worked in or closely with the command died by suicide between early June and early July 2026, according to internal communications, records, and interviews the outlet reviewed. The concentration was abnormal enough that Cyber Command reportedly invoked the Pentagon’s “suicide cluster” designation; leadership had acknowledged three deaths in an internal email as early as June.

Precision matters here, and it cuts toward accountability rather than away from it. Officials have not established a common cause, and there is no public evidence connecting the deaths beyond their timing — no one should imply otherwise. But what the reporting does establish is the backdrop: a workforce hit by a workload surge driven by foreign conflicts, the Iran war above all, with the deaths landing in one of the most intense stretches of that war. Cyber Command had reportedly started embedding mental-health clinicians at Fort Meade in May — before the public knew anything — which tells you the leadership already understood its people were in trouble.

That is the accountability question in its sharpest form. If commanders were worried enough to move clinicians in during the spring, who was accountable for the operational tempo that made those clinicians necessary? Burnout in an elite cyber force is not weather. It is the downstream result of decisions about missions, staffing, and pace — decisions made by people with names and ranks. The Senate Armed Services Committee is reportedly now discussing more mental-health resources, and a House committee has called the rise in suicides a “critical issue.” Congressional attention is welcome, but it arrives after the deaths, not before, and more counselors do not answer the prior question of why the load was allowed to grow unchecked.

The Lincoln, again — and the same reflex
If the April food dispute could be waved off as a one-time supply hiccup, August removed that excuse. The outlet MS Now reported — citing about a dozen family members and recordings of meetings between families and Navy leadership — that the Lincoln’s crew was contending with food shortages, long meal lines, broken toilets, mold in the showers, dead laundry machines, missing soap and toothpaste, and collapsing morale after roughly 250 days at sea. The reporting raised safety concerns and, in some family accounts, attempted suicides aboard a crew worn to the bone.

And the institutional reflex held. A 5th Fleet spokesman allowed that a 250-day deployment “is challenging for the crew and their equipment” but insisted the sailors “remain resilient and ready” and the ship “remains fully capable of meeting all mission tasking.” Fact-checkers still listed elements of the allegations as under investigation. The specific claims are not all settled, and honest accounting requires saying so. But notice the shape of the answer: not “we are pulling this crew home,” not “we failed to resupply them,” but a reassurance that the mission can still be accomplished. That is the tell. When the reflexive priority is defending readiness rather than the readiness of the human beings, you have learned exactly whose welfare sits at the bottom of the ledger.

Who is accountable
It would be dishonest to collapse four situations into one conspiracy, and equally dishonest to pretend they are unrelated coincidences that happened to land in the same year across the same military. The truth is structural, and it has an address.

The common accelerant is a war with Iran now in its sixth month, layered on top of years of high operational tempo — and operational tempo is not an act of God. It is a policy choice about how many missions to run, how long to keep carriers forward-deployed, and how hard to push a cyber force that never appears on a casualty list. Someone chooses that pace. The recurring second thread is the response to evidence: an Army secretary who at least named the failure in writing, set against a Defense Secretary who called firsthand reporting “fake news” and a fleet that answered allegations of a broken crew with assurances about mission capability. A military that cannot admit its people are breaking cannot protect them, because the first step in every prevention program ever written is to acknowledge the problem out loud.

Driscoll’s daily check-in, viewed from here, looks less like a holiday courtesy and more like a quiet vote of no confidence in everything above it — an acknowledgment that the formal systems have failed and the only thing left is to have one exhausted person watch over another. That may save lives at the margin. It should. But it is a tourniquet, and a tourniquet is what you reach for when the institution responsible for preventing the wound has already let it open. The people who set the tempo, who cut the resupply, who reached for “fake news” instead of an investigation — they are the ones with the authority to actually stop the bleeding. So far, too many of them have chosen to insist there is no blood.

If you or someone you know is a service member, veteran, or military family member in crisis, the Veterans/Military Crisis Line is available 24/7: dial 988 then press 1, text 838255, or visit VeteransCrisisLine.net. This is a sensitive subject; anyone struggling personally is encouraged to reach out to that line or another trusted source of support

https://sonar21.com/the-butchers-bill-comes-due-a-military-run-past-its-limits-and-the-leaders-who-keep-saying-everything-is-fine/

[Michael Reid]

fmr CIA Analyst Larry Johnson: We’re Trapped, How the MIC Ruined the US

[Michael Reid]

Paradoxical Politics of Climate
Why is it the only environmental cause for which governments have gotten ahead of citizens?
Josh Mitteldorf
Aug 14, 2026
When scientific controversies have major consequences for politics and profits, we’ve come to expect a thumb on the scale of scientific objectivity. The paradox in this case is that the thumb has switched sides.

In 1965, Lyndon Johnson’s science panel was already warning of an effect on global climate from burning fossil fuels. At the time, the response was just what you might expect. The idea was suppressed, and never gained much traction. Privately, Exxon was studying the issue as a defensive precaution. They had both computer modelers (crude at the time!) and an observational program collecting air samples at sea.

At the same time that their internal program was corroborating the logic and predictions of the President’s Panel, they sought proxies to negate this narrative publicly. The American Petroleum Institute funded scientists who would muddy the water and sow doubts, just as the Tobacco Industry had used surrogate scientists to deny there was a link between smoking and cancer a generation earlier.

During the 1990s, the PR battle was joined. James Hansen was writing journal articles and testifying before Congress, while Al Gore was a voice in the wilderness, and the whole story was being suppressed and denied by Big Oil. This is what capitalism does to science. This is the expected norm.

But starting around 2005, something flipped. The scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming got weaker, and at the same time, the political establishment latched on to the weakened narrative and brooked no debate.

The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. New funding drew young researchers into climate modeling, and it was all contingent on supporting the narrative of an impending climate disaster caused by fossil fuel burning. Big Oil was no longer suppressing the CO2 narrative; on the contrary, they were joining the choir, advertising their commitment to a carbon-neutral future.

Is this a cause for celebration? A rare case of government and industry prioritizing environment over profits and people over corporations? Is government action on climate a hopeful light against the dark background of GMO crops, deforestation, and microplastics in our brains?

Call me a cynic; I suspect that the climate narrative has been joined to a more sinister agenda.

What is the scientific status of the CO2 / global warming narrative?
It’s complicated. Yes, human activity is having an effect on global climate. The effect is much smaller than natural variations over the last 200,000 years since man has been on the planet, but is a visible signal in the data. There is no doubt that CO2 as a percentage of the air we breathe has steadily increased over the last 100 years. Whether there has been a corresponding increase in global temperature is more difficult to determine, because averaging temperature readings from thousands of sites around the world can be done in many ways. But it seems true that there has been a 1oC rise during the time that reliable measurements have been available. The net result is probably a boon for life on earth. But computer modeling of climate is a very uncertain science, and published models today are politically influenced in the direction of maximizing alarm.

Historically, there is a strong correlation between atmospheric CO2 and global temperature, but the reason is not the greenhouse effect. You have probably noticed that a can of warm soda bubbles over when opened, much more than cold soda. That’s because water holds less CO2 as it warms. When the earth warms, CO2 comes out of the oceans into the air, and when the earth cools, CO2 comes out of the air and into the oceans. This is a much bigger effect than the greenhouse mechanism. It runs in the same direction, but cause and effect are reversed.

When CO2 in the atmosphere rises, land-based plants grow faster, and the base of the food chain supports richer ecosystems.

H2O has a far larger effect on global temperature than CO2. Cloud cover is the biggest variable in the earth’s albedo, the amount of sunlight reflected back into space before it has a chance to heat the ground or the air. It takes only a small change in the earth’s cloud cover to overwhelm a much larger proportional change in greenhouse CO2. There are complex interactions between CO2 and cloud cover, interactions in both directions that we do not yet understand well enough to make accurate computer models. This is the main reason that current climate models do not have predictive value.

Historically, humans, along with other life forms, have thrived during warmer periods in earth’s history, and ice ages have driven sharp population declines. Warm temperatures mean that more of the earth is habitable, and more CO2 means that plant growth is goosing the base of the food chain.

There are cycles of about 100,000 years — we don’t understand the cause — in which temperatures rise gradually, then fall precipitously and another ice age begins. We are presently at the end of one of these cycles. Temperatures are warmer than they have been in the last 100,000 years, and this was true before humans started burning fossil fuels. It was only 12,000 years ago that all of Canada and half the US were under glacial ice several kilometers thick. That is actually the norm of the last million years. It will happen again. One possibility is that anthropogenic “global warming” has actually forestalled the next ice age.

Interviewed by Danny Jones, Danish Prof Henrik Svensmark tells how he lost his tenured job and his funding for bucking the preferred narrative about global warming. Prof Svensmark studies correlations between earth’s temperature and various astronomical events, especially solar storms and cosmic rays. That was sufficient cause to derail his career.

This kind of scientific censorship is almost always associated with corporate profits or a political agenda. But climate alarmism seems to be bad for corporate profits. Is there a possible political agenda?

Three years ago, I speculated about the mother of all conspiracy theories. Is someone trying to bring down the global economy, shrink the food supply creating misery and starvation? I asked whether inscrutable projects and improbable disasters could be part of an agenda.

New legal pressures threatening the already-impossible economics of small farming. [link]

Grain silos that caught fire or happened to be right under a small plane that fell out of the sky. [link]

Hurricanes contrary to usual weather patterns in Acapulco [link] and Asheville [link]. (FEMA interference actually made the situation worse.)

Earthquakes in Turkiye, Venezuela, and Haiti. [link]

Simple train derailment turned to ecological devastation in East Palestine, OH. [link]

A barge that executed acrobatic maneuvers to bring down a Baltimore link in the N-S shipping corridor of the Eastern US.

“Wild” fires in Lahaina, California, Canada, and now across southern Europe. [link]

What in heck are chemtrails? [link]

A pandemic seeded by bioweapons, used to justify a toxic genetic “vaccine” that killed more people than the virus. [link]

And now, a suicidal war against Iran that has shrunk the world’s supply of petroleum, natural gas, and the fertilizers on which so much of world agriculture has become dependent. [link]

Viewed in this context, I ask whether steering The Science™ in support of a climate horror movie could be part of an agenda to justify restrictions on travel and consolidation of housing as part of Agenda 2030. Do they want to keep us poor and dependent so we have no time or energy to organize opposition to their agenda? Who is doing this? Is it a conspiracy of power-hungry sociopaths? Demons? Extra-terrestrials? My ontology is stretching to try to understand such evil.

https://mitteldorf.substack.com/p/paradoxical-politics-of-climate

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