FLASH NEWS: BEFORE THE FLOOD

  

 

11-05-2026: INTERESTING developments in Israel over the last few days: According to Haaretz, Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition coalition Yashar! (an amalgam of four parties) has entered a controversial partnership with the two Israeli-Palestinian parties (Ra’am and the Joint List) in a bid to reach a majority in the Knesset. All opposition lawmakers agree ousting PM Netanyahu from power is their number one priority. Beyond that, there is still some opposition among Eisenkot’s Jewish MKs (Member of Knesset) as to whether they will work with the two “Arab” parties. So, things are still in flux. The deal has not been inked.

👉Another change post-elections is the United Torah Judaism party (UTJ) declining to support Netanyahu, removing seven seats from the Likud coalition, leaving 48 in support of the PM.¹

IT SHOULD BE NOTED these political machinations occur during the legislated process whereby Israel’s president, Issac Herzog, consults with all parties to decide which group has the best chance of forming a stable majority in parliament; the recent Israeli elections were inconclusive, leaving no party with enough seats to form a majority. Netanyahu’s Likud party lost nine seats in the general election leaving it with fifty-three—the most of any other party but well shy of the 61 necessary to form a majority in the 120-seat parliament. Anyway you look at it, Netanyahu has lost the confidence of a considerable portion of the Jewish Israeli vote. Corruption scandals and questions over what Netanyahu knew about the October 7/23 attacks dog the PM. Eisenkot’s coalition had 48 elected parliamentarians, and with the addition of 19 “Arab” party members it has 67 seats. 

But, Herzog’s consultations continue, with a decision coming next week from the Israeli president as to which coalition forms the next government.²

 

THE SURPRISE SHOWING of the two Palestinian Israeli parties (nearly doubling their previous seat numbers from 10 to 19) was because this time there was a much larger turnout of Palestinian Israelis voting. How they can work with Eisenkot’s coalition after Netanyahu is ousted is a good question. Israeli politics has gone so far to the right and the tenets of Zionism are so mainstream, I personally don’t see much legislation the Palestinian-Israeli parties will be able to swallow. But it is a change, a positive one. Let’s wait and see. Let's see if any of their members gains a cabinet post. At the very least, different voices will be heard from the government in the poisionous echo chamber known as the Israeli Knesset. 

 

CHEERS, JAKE. _____________________________________

 

* His policies on Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria between 75-80% of Israels think he is doing a fine job. If only he wasn’t such crook and dissembler! That’s the problem. But genocide? Ethnic cleansing? Hey, what’s wrong with that?

 

1.The UTJ’s withdrawal from Netanyahu’s coalition was triggered because his government was deciding whether to conscript the nearly 1.4 million ultra-orthodox Jews, who have been exempt from military service since 1948. (In 2024, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled their blanket immunity from mandatory military service was illegal.) As an aside, the nearly 2.1-million Palestinian  Israeli citizens are also exempt from military service.

 

2. Before everyone starts doing a happy dance over the prospect of Benjamin Netanyahu being ousted as Prime Minister, don’t count the wily political veteran out just yet. As well, a Gadi Eisenkot government, should he succeed in holding his alliance together in the following weeks and months, will not usher in a sea change in Israeli politics. Eisenkot, after all, is a former general and IDF Chief of Staff (2015-2019) and the author of the “Dahiya Doctrine” that calls for rapid, over-whelming and disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure and urban centres in combatting non-state actors like Hezbollah and Hamas. We’ve seen what his doctrine has done in Gaza and southern Lebanon recently, as well as in the West Bank. What the two Palestinian-Israeli parties in Eisenkot’s coalition will have to figure out is how to work with such Zionists.

 

"You'd better believe it's time for a change, mother fucker!"

 

 

 

RANT: A BILL BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD STILL REEK TO HIGH HEAVEN

 

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.) is a Viet Nam War vet. He was chief of staff to the American Sec of State Colin Powell in the early 2000s and has for years taught Government and Public Policy at the venerable College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Recently, he was interviewed by Glen Diesen on his go-to eponymously-named podcast where the Colonel expressed concern over a piece of legislation, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that is currently winding its way through congress. The grossly inflated military budget bill (nearly $1.15-trillion!) for fiscal year 2027 comes with additional provisions 

 

“…labeled Section 219 or Section 224 in respective drafts, that seek to structurally integrate the U.S. and Israeli defense industrial bases and shift the bilateral relationship from traditional direct military aid to joint co-development and co-production.” (Bloomsbury Intelligence)

 

👉WILKERSON calls the provisions anathema for those who would preserve the sovereignty of the United States and keep its national interests at the forefront of policy-making and legislative initiatives. In effect, NDAA provisions such as the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative*  allows for “bilateral research, development, and co-production of military equipment, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems”. In other words, Israel will have access to new weapons technologies as if it were part of the U.S. government and it would have a say about where and how new weapons should be produced and distributed.¹ It works both ways, of course, but clearly Israel would be the main beneficiary if the NDAA bill is ratified by the Senate.

👉It’s no coincidence that Israeli PM Netanyahu quipped some days after the Bill was before the House of Representatives that Israel wouldn’t need the $3 billion it receives annually from the U.S. in cash and war materiel if the Bill passes in the Senate. Ever-the-expert in three-card monte, Netanyahu neglects to inform the American public that this Bill simply hides the aid money and weapons transfer to Israel within opaque War Department budgetary statistics.² Essentially, the NDAA makes Israel part of the U.S. government in ways those pesky Russkies or inscrutable Chinese can only dream of!³  

 

👉While Israel has become, arguably, the most loathed country on the planet—a rogue, apartheid and genocidal nation whose security is ensured by making its neighbours insecure with all its warmaking—you would think the U.S. would want to take a step or two back from its unwavering support of the place. This NDAA bill, if it becomes law, will make separating American national interests from Israel's more difficult and will further erode American sovereignty, along with adding another layer of opacity between the government and the people it purports to serve.😕   

 

CHEERS, JAKE. _____________________________________

 

* Same goes for provisions labelled: “Missile Defense”; “Counter-Unmanned Systems”; “Subterranean Operations”; “Emerging Technologies” and “Intelligence Sharing”.    

1. The proposed budget of the Department of War for fy2027 includes additional expenditures totalling an eye-watering $1.5trillion!

2. Note: Since 2018, when annual audits of federal government departments became mandatory, the War Department has failed every single attempt to account for the money it is given by U.S. taxpayers. Round and round she goes! Where the money stops, nobody knows!

3. Trump’s slavish backstopping of Israel’s military adventures in the Levant to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, and his supine acquiescence for its genocidal actions in Gaza and assorted war crimes in Palestine and elsewhere that clearly do not benefit the United States in the court of world opinion, is puzzling. Along with billions spent defending Israeli interests, to the detriment of America’s own, Trump has opened the proverbial can of worms in his standoff with Iran—a war done at the behest of Israel. With such misadventures in West Asia and elsewhere during the Trump administration, the ‘glow’ is definitely gone from the nation that once saw itself as that “shining city on the hill” and a model for countries everywhere to emulate.

👉The issue of Trump’s kowtowing at every turn to Israel’s Netanyahu may come down to ‘kompromat’ stemming from Trump’s association with Jeffry Epstein. [We’ll only have to wait 60-80 years for those files to be released! Ed.]

 

 

 

 

RANT: AUGUST 6, 1945

 

YESTERDAY, AUGUST 6, was the 81^st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. August 9 will be the 81^st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Both cities received widespread destruction with total deaths estimated at around 210,000 civilians.* The Hiroshima bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy”, used Uranium-235 as its explosive core, while the Nagasaki bomb used Plutonium-239, with yields of 15 kilotons of TNT and 21 kilotons of TNT¹ respectively.

  

THE PHOTOGRAPHS BELOW are of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the days after the bombings. One should note that while the Nagasaki bomb was more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the damage to the city was less and the death toll lower. This is because the bomb was dropped slightly off target, whereas the earlier Hiroshima bomb was dropped on the city centre, not far from city hall, where the building’s skeletal remains at ground zero can be seen in the distance on the left bank of the Ota River. Hiroshima is on a flat river plain where there are few natural obstacles to deflect the blast and fire. The city of Nagasaki, by contrast, sits in “an amphitheater of steep coastal slopes and peaks”, which absorbed and deflected some of the 21 kT blast. Both cities were destroyed and tens of thousands died in an instant with many more succuming to injuries and radiation poisoning in the days, weeks and months after the bombs fell. 

 

HIROSHIMA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NAGASAKI

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

THE DRAWING BELOW is from the book Unforgettable Fire—Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors, published by Pantheon Books, 1977. 

 

"The girl was injured on the chest and covered with blood. She had no shoes on her feet. Still able to think clearly she avoided the many splintered things on the road and trudged towards her home where her family was waiting for her.

Passing through Matoba section, the girl and I came to the area called Kojin-machi Akebono-cho. On both sides of the road there were temples. Everywhere was a sea of fire. No road was open for us anymore except for a narrow path and that was barely passable. The clothes which we earlier had dipped in water had already dried so much that they were almost to the point of burning. There was no time to lose. We dipped our clothes in the water that was stored in an air-raid shelter and dashed through the fires desperately.

‘Awfully hot! Is this the end of my life?...Oh God!...Help me!’ I murmured and prayed.

When we managed to come to a safer place, we looked back at the path we had dashed through. It was the most frightful scene I had ever witnessed in my life. Yet even at this safer place, I found many dead bodies lying in the air-raid shelter, under fallen trees, and everywhere. When we final arrived at the girl’s home at Nakayama section, the darkness of the summer’s night was already falling upon us.”

CHEERS, JAKE. ____________________________________

 

* Figures include immediate deaths from the explosions and those later succumbing to radiation burns and radiation sickness by the end of 1945.

 

1. “TNT” stands for “trinitrotoluene”, a compound that has a chemical “punch” less than dynamite but is more stable with a longer burn rate, making it useful as a propellant in firearms, bombs and artillery shells. Dynamite’s higher shattering effect (“brisance”) and shorter burn rate is aided by the addition of nitroglycerin, a relatively unstable substance, which gives dynamite a “higher detonation velocity, a sharper shattering effect, and more chemical energy per kilogram than TNT.” Dynamite is a “high explosive” useful in mining, excavation, and blowing shit up.

TNT is used as the “benchmark” from which to gauge the relative power of various explosives including nuclear weapons. For comparison, the explosive potential of today’s nuclear weapons are orders of magnitude greater than those early bombs at the end of WWII. For example, 1 megaton=1000 kilotons=1,000,000 tons. Recall that the Hiroshima detonation was roughly 15 kilotons or 15,000 tons of TNT. Just a burp by today’s standards!

 

👉The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated was in 1961 over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in Russia’s far north. Dropped from a high-altitude bomber, the explosion registered as 50 megatons or 50,000,000 tons of TNT. The Nagasaki bomb (“Fat Man”) yielded 21 kilotons or 21,000 tons of TNT.

 

💥DID YOU KNOW that a Plutonium-239 sister to the Nagasaki bomb, was the one they tested at the Alamogordo (nicknamed "Trinity") test site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945? The bomb's builders didn't bother testing a Uranium-235 bomb because they knew it would work with its relatively simple firing mechanism. The bomb with the Plutonium core was triggered by explosive charges surrounding it, forcing the core to implode and in doing so releasing a tremendous burst of light, heat and blast. The scientists at the Trinity test site weren't sure if it would work. But it did. And here we are.💥

 

👉WE CAN REST EASY, HOWEVER, with the assurance that modern nuclear arsenals rarely keep in stock warheads with over one or two megatons of explosive power (something about overkill, I should think). And, should anyone want to get an understanding of what it would be like to live in a city when a 1 Mt nuclear device is detonated they should read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War. [A word of caution for those who like to read in bed: Be prepared or you’ll shit the sheets for sure! Ed.]