The Weekly Flail: June 14, 2025
OVERVIEW
As the Israeli attacks on Iran continue, Iran is retaliating as promised. America’s creation of genocidal Israel by unlimited delivery of weapons has not stopped despite propaganda statements calling for an end to attacks.
The continued escalation is on the brink of having a massive effect on the region. Any voices of sanity are overwhelmed by insanity. See links to updates below in DISASTERS.
What happens is directly the result of American support for Israel and the sudden destruction of the US as an international leader by the Trump regime. Trump and his administration are recognized internationally as incompetent agents of chaos.
The overriding question is how soon we will reach a point that triggers regional and planetary disaster beyond the already uncontrolled climate disaster.
If we can survive this and, somehow, remove the insane people in charge of much of our planet, we may be able to look at very large plans to salvage our planet. See HOPE at the end of this issue.
DISASTERS
[The following are from Al Jazeera Live Update June 15, 2025.]
Iran fires missiles as Israel strikes oil facility in Tehran
By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours and Brian Osgood
Published On 15 Jun 2025
Iran launches missiles at targets across Israel, including the port city of Haifa, after Israeli forces bombed civilian and energy infrastructure across Iran.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps says it targeted Israeli energy infrastructure, while Israeli emergency services said the attacks killed at least three people in northern parts of the country.
Iranian state media say efforts are continuing to bring a massive fire at the Shahran oil facility in Tehran under control.
Iranian media say Israeli attacks have killed at least 80 people and wounded 800 others over the past two days.
US President Donald Trump says he and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, agree that the hostilities between Israel and Iran must end.
Iran cancels a sixth round of nuclear talks with the United States, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi saying there is no justification for continuing negotiations in light of Israel’s continued attacks.
Explosions in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: Reports
Several explosions have been heard in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem after the Israeli military announced a new round of attacks by Iran.
Reuters reported a series of explosions in both cities, citing witnesses.
“Heavy bombardment of Tel Aviv right now, with multiple massive explosions heard,” Israeli reporter Haggai Matar said in a social media post.
Israeli military activates air raid sirens amid another round of Iranian missiles
“A short time ago, alerts were activated in several areas of the country following the discovery of missiles launched from Iran into the territory of the State of Israel,” a spokesperson for the military said in a statement.
“The public is asked to obey the instructions of the Home Front Command. At this time, the Air Force is working to intercept and attack wherever necessary to eliminate the threat. The defence is not hermetic, and therefore the instructions of the Home Front Command must continue to be obeyed.”
A recap of recent developments
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps says it targeted Israeli energy infrastructure with a new wave of missiles, warning that its retaliatory attacks “will continue more fiercely and widely if the evils and aggressions continue” by Israel.
At least three people have been killed in Israel in the latest Iranian missile salvo, which targeted several cities, including Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa.
The assault came after Israeli forces bombed the Shahran oil facility in the Iranian capital, Tehran, triggering large fires. Earlier on Saturday, Israel also attacked a gas field close to Bushehr and an oil refinery in Abadan, but the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says there is no damage at Fordow, one of Iran’s main uranium enrichment facilities.
US President Donald Trump says he and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, agreed in a phone call that the Israel-Iran conflict must end.
Iran has cancelled a sixth round of nuclear talks with the US, which were scheduled for Sunday, saying there is no justification for continuing negotiations in light of Israel’s continued attacks.
An Iranian member of parliament now says the country is considering shutting the Strait of Hormuz, an important transit route for major energy-producing countries in the Gulf.
June 13, 2025
The Illegal Attack on Iran [Counterpunch]
Israel’s consistent attacks on Iran since 2023 have all been illegal, violations of the United Nations Charter (1945). Iran is a member state of the United Nations and is therefore a sovereign state in the international order. If Israel had a problem with Iran, there are many mechanisms mandated by international law that permit Israel to bring complaints against Iran.
Thus far, Israel has avoided these international forums because it is clear that it has no case against Iran. Allegations that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, which are constantly raised by the United States, the European Union, and Israel, have been fully investigated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and found to be unfounded. It is certainly true that Iran has a nuclear energy programme that is within the rules in place through the IAEA, and it is also true that Iran’s clerical establishment has a fatwa (religious edict) in place against the production of nuclear weapons. Despite the IAEA findings and the existence of this fatwa, the West – egged on by Israel – has accepted this irrational idea that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and that Iran is therefore a threat to the international order. Indeed, by its punctual and illegal attacks on Iran, it is Israel that is a threat to the international order.
Over the past decades, Iran has called for the establishment of a Middle East Nuclear Free Zone, a strange idea coming from a country accused of wanting to build a nuclear weapon. But this idea of the nuclear free zone has been rejected by the West, largely to protect Israel, which has an illegal nuclear weapons programme. Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a nuclear weapon, although it has never tested it openly nor acknowledged its existence. If Israel was so keen on eliminating any nuclear threat, it should have taken the offer for the creation of a nuclear-free zone heartily.
Neither the Europeans, who so often posture as defenders of international law, nor the United Nations leadership have publicly pushed Israel to adopt this idea because both recognise that this would require Israel, not Iran, to denuclearise. That this is an improbable situation has meant that there has been no movement from the West or from the international institutions to take this idea forward and build an international consensus to develop a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.
Israel does not want to build a nuclear-free zone in the region. What Israel wants is to be the sole nuclear power in the region, and therefore to be exactly what it is – namely, the largest United States military base in the world that happens to be the home to a large civilian population. Iran has no ambition to be a nuclear power. But it has an ambition to be a sovereign state that remains committed to justice for the Palestinians. Israel has no problem with the idea of sovereignty per se, but has a problem with any state in the region that commits itself to Palestinian emancipation. If Iran normalised relations with Israel and ceased its opposition to US dominion in the region, then it is likely that Israel would end its opposition to Iran.
Israel and the United States Prepared the Way
In January 2020, the United States conducted an illegal assassination at Iraq’s Baghdad Airport to kill General Qassim Soleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Soleimani, through the Quds Force, had produced for Iran an insurance policy against further Israeli attacks on the country. The Quds Force is responsible for Iranian military operations outside the boundaries of the country, including building what is called the ‘Axis of Resistance’ that includes the various pro-Iranian governments and non-governmental military forces. These included: Hezbollah in Lebanon, various IRGC groups in Syria that worked with Syrian militia groups, the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, several Palestinian factions in Occupied Palestine, and the Ansar Allah government in Yemen. Without its own nuclear deterrent, Iran required some way to balance the military superiority of Israel and the United States. This deterrence was created by the ‘Axis of Resistance’, an insurance policy that allowed Iran to let Israel know that if Israel fired at Iran, these groups would rain missiles on Tel Aviv in retaliation.
The assassination of Soleimani began a determined new political and military campaign by the United States, Israel, and their European allies to weaken Iran. Israel and the United States began to punctually strike Iranian logistical bases in Syria and Iraq to weaken Iran’s forward posture and to demoralise the Syrian and Iraqi militia groups that operated against Israeli interests. Israel began to assassinate IRGC military officers in Syria, Iran, and Iraq, a campaign of murder that began to have an impact on the IRGC and the Quds Force.
Taking advantage of its genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, Israel, with full support from the United States and Europe, began to damage the ‘Axis of Resistance’, Iran’s insurance policy. Israel took its war into Lebanon, with a ruthless bombing campaign that included the assassination of the Hezbollah leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September 2024. This campaign, while it has not totally demolished Hezbollah, has certainly weakened it. Meanwhile, Israel began a regular bombing campaign against the Syrian military positions around Damascus and along the road to Idlib in the north. This bombing campaign, coordinated with the US military and with the US intelligence services, was designed to open the roadway for the entry of the former al-Qaeda fighters into Damascus and to overthrow the government of al-Assad on 8 December 2024. The fall of the al-Assad government dented Iran’s strength across the Levant region (from the Turkish border to the Occupied Palestinian Territory) as well as along the plains from southern Syria to the Iranian border. The consistent campaign by the United States to bomb Yemeni positions further resulted in the loss of Ansar Allah’s heavy equipment (including long-range missiles) that fundamentally threatened Israel.
What this meant was that by early 2025, the Iranian insurance policy against Israel had collapsed. Israel began its march to war, suggesting an attack on Iran was imminent. Such an attack, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows, would help him in a domestic political fight with the ultra-orthodox parties over the question of a military exemption for their communities; this will prevent his government from falling. Cynical Netanyahu is using genocide and the possibility of a horrendous war with Iran for narrow political ends. But that is not what is motivating this attack. What is motivating this attack is that Israel smells an opportunity to try to overthrow the Iranian government by force.
Iran returned to the negotiations brokered by the IAEA to prevent such an attack. Its leadership knew full well that nothing would stop a scofflaw such as Israel from bombing Iran. And nothing did. Not even the fact that Iran is still at the negotiation table. Israel has taken advantage of Iran’s momentary weakness to strike. And that strike might escalate further.
SURVIVAL
How to Survive The Hottest Summers in Human History
Practical advice
The entire world is already dealing with killer heat waves.
Alaska just issued its first heat advisory in history. Iceland and Greenland have both experienced record heat this year. Arizona is seeing its first triple-digit days of the summer. In India, temperatures have already hit 47.3C degrees (117F). The last two years have been the hottest in recorded history, with temperatures reaching 52C degrees (126F) in parts of China. More and more, temperatures across the world in major cities are breaking into the 110s and 120s. In fact, the last ten years have been the hottest ten years on record. Heat deaths are rising, while governments and corporations respond by cutting water breaks and raising prices on essential goods like water—because they can.
A 2023 study predicted that a heatwave accompanied by a blackout in major cities like Phoenix would send half the population to the ER. According to a separate analysis covered in The New York Times, two-thirds of North America already face “shortfalls in the electrical grid, particularly during periods of extreme heat when demand for air conditioning spikes, straining resources.”
Odds are, you or someone in your family will be living through something like this in the foreseeable future—an intense heatwave accompanied by a blackout, or at least a grid flickering as it buckles under energy demand.
How are you going to survive?
I looked into it.
Yes, you can survive
Melissa Norris and her family survived several days at 120F degrees without air conditioning. Their indoor air temperature topped out at 88F degrees. It wasn’t comfortable, but they made it. They explain what they did in this video, and it covers a range of simple strategies like blinds and blackout curtains, limiting stove use, and strategic use of fans at night to promote air exchange.
Frozen towels and sheets do the job
Melissa Norris is spot on with the advice about frozen towels. If you’ve heard this before, there’s a fancier term for it in emergency medicine. It’s called ice sheet cooling (ISC), and the military considers it a standard intervention in field medicine to treat heat-related illnesses and injury.
A 2023 study in The Journal of Emergency Medicine found ice sheets effective in treating heat stroke and preventing mortality, and it’s a good alternative to the “gold standard” of cold water immersion. If they’re reasonably effective in treating someone already suffering from heat stroke, then it stands to reason they’re even better at keeping you cool to prevent it in the first place.
A 2022 study in Military Medicine reached a similar conclusion. In this study, participants exercised in a heated chamber until they underwent “exertional hyperthermia,” and then they were treated with “bed sheets soaked in ice water… at the neck, chest, and groin with another sheet covering the body.”
So, get soaking.
They’re a good alternative to AC
It’s worth keeping this method in your playbook, because brownouts and grid failures will increasingly accompany heat waves as cities that aren’t prepared for the climate crisis struggle with thousands of residents blasting their AC all day. Air conditioners are a modern luxury that we probably can’t count on for the indefinite future, especially as grids start to flicker and fail. Even before grid failures become the norm, power bills will soar and price a lot of us out.
It’s incredibly difficult to keep an air conditioner running with solar power. I’ve done the math. A really good portable battery setup with solar panels can produce 750-1000 watts per hour. A window unit or portable AC would consume most of that, and probably all of it, depending on the size and the circumstances. Even a fully-fledged rooftop solar system would struggle to power a central AC unit during a heatwave. It’s just not a very good use of resources.
But…
You can power a freezer with a few solar panels. Your average chest freezer uses half the electricity of a window unit, at 80-200 watts per hour. Depending on size, a freezer can even use a third or even less electricity.
Freezers are far more energy efficient because they cool air and then keep it insulated. So, freeze something and then put it next to your body’s hot spots to cool you down, around your neck or under your arms.
You can still try to run a portable AC with solar panels, but you can leverage an energy-efficient freezer as a backup.
It could save lives.
Take a bath
Just like ice, liquid water cools you down.
According to science, it takes 3200 times as much energy to heat water to the same temperature as air. It also transfers heat away from your body at a high rate. Water’s density also makes your body work harder to heat it up. This piece in The Conversation recommends water at 26 or 27C degrees (80F) for someone suffering heatstroke (to avoid cold shock), but you can go lower if you’re not having an emergency. Generally, your tap water comes out at 10-20C degrees (50-70F). So, just taking a cool bath or shower could save your life.
If you can’t take a bath or shower, you can just submerge your hands or feet in a tub of water or wrap them in sheets. You can also use a mister.
They all work.
Turn off the lights and appliances
During a heatwave, you want to add to the problem as little as possible. According to HVAC experts, people don’t think about the significant amounts of heat they’re adding to their homes throughout the day with lights, electronics, and appliances, especially ones like dryers and stoves. Even a high-performance PC in a closed room can feel like you’ve got a heater running. This article also explains the way overlooked appliances and lightbulbs add heat to your home.
So in our dystopian, low-energy future, it’s going to make sense to use less electricity so you don’t cook yourself in your own home.
Not fun news, I know.
Use fans strategically
Fans can help with air flow, but they work better if you understand the basic principles of positive and negative air pressure. Simply parking yourself in front of one can actually speed up dehydration and heat illness. Above 35C degrees (95F), they start to pose more of a liability than anything.
It’s a little counterintuitive…
Just putting a fan in the window often doesn’t do enough. This article from Instructables explains how to create pressure systems to manage the air in your home depending on the time of day.
So, use fans to exchange air in your home.
For example:
If you want to cool one room, like a bedroom, then open a window at the other end of your home. Seal the other rooms.
Put a fan near but not in the far window opening to create a vortex, then open the bedroom window. That creates a windstream that replaces warm, stuffy air with fresh, cool air. Do this at night, and then keep your place sealed during the day to keep that cooler air inside, and the hotter air outside.
Invest in good curtains
Sunlight heats rooms. It’s called heat gain. The more you can do to block out sunlight during a heatwave, the better. Even basic curtains can reduce heat gain by 33 percent. Window quilts do an even better job.
Make a zeer
Cultures around the world have been keeping goods cool with zeer pots, or pots within pots, for thousands of years. You can cool food, or you can cool water, and cool water can help you stay alive during a heat wave.
Drinking cool water lowers your core temperature.
This guy shows you how to make one.
So does this article.
The inside temperature of a zeer pot can be 20-30F degrees lower than the outside temperature, especially in drier climates. They can chill down to 40F degrees (4C), even during the summer. They still work in more humid environments, just not quite as well. So, that’s a powerful tool.
They’re simple and robust.
Make a terracotta cooler
According to a 2024 study in the Journal of Engineering Sciences, terracotta has resurfaced as a material for cooling as the world cooks. Research has found that terracotta coolers can lower indoor temperatures “up to 6-10C in arid and semi-arid regions,” or up to 18F degrees. They work best in areas with low humidity. Some companies like Team Solstice have even designed air conditioners with terracotta that use much less energy while lowering room temperatures to 22-27C (mid-upper 70s in farenheight). Other companies like CoolAnt have designed terracotta beehive structures to cool the air up to 15C (27F).
This video shows you how to make a “mud pot air cooler” that can cool air from 40C down to 15C and distribute the air with a simple DC fan.
Here’s an alternate design. Some versions use a water pump, but it’s not essential. You basically mount two small fans on a clay pot, fill it with water, and take advantage of terracotta’s natural cooling properties.
The terracotta option is going to work better under certain conditions than others, but it’s a good option to know about.
You can also scale it up.
Other long term options
Go downstairs, or into a basement if you have access to one. For the long term, it’s not a bad idea to find a home with some kind of underground level. It’s always going to be cooler. You can also grow a vine trellis outside your home to provide shade. Vines do a great job of blocking heat, and growing them on a trellis means you don’t have to worry about them damaging your home itself. Studies have shown that vines on a building can reduce inside temperatures by 3-4C degrees (6F) or more, when you cover 40-70 percent of the walls.
According to an article in Interesting Engineering, earth-sheltered homes offer a wide range of advantages for our dystopian future, especially when it comes to disasters and heat waves. Native Americans built quite a lot of these structures across the plains, further demonstrating how much better they understood this continent and how poorly adapted our lifestyles remain.
Also, improve your insulation.
Seal any windows you don’t plan on opening up. If you can afford it, upgrade them to reduce heat gain. Look at the R value (5-7 ideal). Also inspect your walls for gaps around power outlets or other areas where your living space could be bleeding cool air to the outside. The more seals, the better.
So, that’s what I’ve got.
To survive the heatwaves and grid failures of the future, the kind that’ll send half the populations of major cities to the ER, I would start implementing these strategies and helping other people do it. If you’re building community, share this information and help your friends ruggedize their homes. Think about setting up some cooling centers, even underground ones.
What are your heatwave survival strategies?
Let me know.
Building a prosperous future demands bold ideas. These are some of the boldest
The US filmmaker John D Boswell (aka Melodysheep) is known for crafting meticulously researched CGI documentaries that, epic in both production and scope, probe the deep past and peer into the future. In his latest, Engineering Earth, Boswell surveys geoengineering projects – some quite speculative, others already underway, but all of them at least theoretically possible – to offer an audaciously hopeful vision of humanity’s trajectory. The operatic work takes viewers on a tour of strange, wondrous and beautiful potential futures, exploring concepts ranging from artificial tree forests to orbital solar power arrays accessed by space elevators, with the grand obstacles and potential risks only lightly addressed. Taken as a whole, these brief glimpses of bold, nascent ideas make a case for techno-optimism at a moment when, for many, such sentiments have fallen exceedingly out of vogue.
Video by Melodysheep
9 June 2025
That is all for this week, as we hope for the next!
