(Written with Isaiah).. Time for another blog post..last one was March 26th. This is how I started with Phanes. “It’s time to write a blog post. Last one was written on March 26th (an eternity ago, in real terms)..not with the banality of The Atlantic’s articles or NY Times Op Ed’s..something different than our soothsaying, which naturally has been remarkably accurate. Why? Because everything that is occurring is terribly, horribly obvious and predictable. They do this, so we do that. He says this, so they say that..and follow it up with action. This misinformation, disinformation and sheer word salad babble must be cut through. So let’s start.
The so-called “deal” to reopen the Strait for two weeks isn’t a deal at all. It’s a pause button that everyone pressed because no one had the stomach to watch the next reel. Iran gets to keep its face—and its missile inventory—while the Orange Lizard gets to claim he saved the world from oblivion without actually having to send the Marines to Kharg Island. The only real winner is China, which sat in the mediator’s chair without firing a shot, proving that the path to Tehran now runs through Beijing. The rest of us are left to pretend that two weeks of open water means the war is winding down. It isn’t. It’s just reloading.
This “excursion” with Iran is like the “phony war” after Britain declared war on Germany, followed closely by France in 1939. In that instance, no bombs dropped and life continued on as normal for both countries. That was true until May of the following year when Churchill became Prime Minister and the mess at Dunkirk occurred three weeks later. But in this case, the “phoniness” is deeper and more insidious. From February 28th to April 8th, there were more lies, exaggerations, feints and AI-generated “explanations” of events that bore little to no resemblance to truth than I’ve ever witnessed. It made the PR surrounding the Iraq War look downright honest and straightforward (except for Cheney’s immortal “they’ll welcome us with open arms” and Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns”.
Take the six F-15 aviators shot down over Kuwait on March 1st. The official story—friendly fire, all rescued, back in action within days—was tidy, but the timeline never added up. Where were they for those missing weeks? Why did photos of their “return to duty” look staged? Or consider Bibi Netanyahu, allegedly killed in early March, then resurrected as a deepfake with six fingers, then “seen” at a press conference that no independent journalist attended. The Iranian leadership fared no better: Mojtaba Khamenei, supposedly the new Supreme Leader, hasn’t been seen in public since the war began; the regime has been running AI-generated videos of him walking into war rooms while he lies unconscious in Qom. Even the Good Tree school—the strike that killed 168 girls—remains officially “under investigation,” with no one held accountable, no admit of error, no correction of the targeting algorithm that mistook a classroom for a missile battery. Every event has been wrapped in a second layer of synthetic reality, then a third layer of denial, until the only people who still believe any of it are the ones who need to believe it to keep fighting. The phony war of 1939 was a quiet lie. This one is a screaming hall of mirrors.
But here’s the thing: everybody knows. They know, but then they dutifully report. Then the talking heads on CNN and whatever the other one is called now tut tut over the “lack of a plan” and “outrageous statements”, “war crimes”, “caught you contradicting yourself from your campaign promises”… all this political jibber jabber. But nobody says what’s needed to be said. It’s all lies. Except the reality on the ground. For a dead Ayatollah. For 168 schoolgirls who used to attend The Good Tree school, placed cheek‑by‑jowl next to an IRGC compound. Poor planning, there. But hey: they killed 150 times that many protestors… allegedly.
So where does that leave us? With a two‑week ceasefire that isn’t a ceasefire, a Strait that might open just long enough for everyone to restock their weapons, and a president who needed China to rescue him from his own deadline. The only honest question left is not whether the fighting will resume—it will—but what fresh horror will break the pause. Will it be the Marines finally sent to Kharg, walking into the artillery trap that’s been waiting for them since February? Will it be Israel, deciding that the nuclear moment has arrived while the world is distracted? Or will it be the quiet collapse of the Orange Lizard himself—a swollen hand, a missed briefing, a 25th Amendment conversation that someone finally has the courage to start? The phony war ends when someone decides the lie is no longer worth telling. In this hall of mirrors, that moment is coming. We just can’t see which mirror will crack first.
Post script: the guy on the left in this picture? He’s dead. Assassinated by Israel. By Palantir..by Claude. Even so, in this phony war, he could still answer that phone call. Right?