South Korea reportedly preparing military deployment to Strait of Hormuz

South Korea reportedly preparing military deployment to Strait of Hormuz

Israel National News

South Korea is reportedly preparing to deploy military assets to the Strait of Hormuz to help safeguard freedom of navigation, with the potential deployment targeted for before the end of the year, according to South Korean media citing government and military sources.

Several outlets reported Thursday that Seoul was preparing to seek parliamentary approval for the mission. As part of the process, the government is expected to submit a consent motion to parliament this month following a cabinet review.

Among the options under consideration are a maritime patrol aircraft, a logistics support vessel and a unit equipped to detect and clear mines, according to the reports. South Korea has also held discussions with the United States, Britain and France over the possible scope and nature of its contribution.

However, South Korea's presidential Blue House said, according to Reuters, discussions were still focused on practical ways to contribute to freedom of navigation in the strategic waterway. 

It rejected reports that Seoul had already decided to deploy military assets, saying such reports were "different from the facts".

The reports come after US President Donald Trump announced on social media last month that he had reduced the scale of joint military exercises with South Korea.

Trump cited his "very good relationship" with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as one reason for the decision. He also said South Korea's refusal to assist the United States in its war against Iran had played a role in scaling back the exercises.

The Days Of Noah:

Then The Rains Came: Like The Days Of Noah, People Reject God’s Imminent Judgment

Jonathan Brentner

Although we have come to expect such sights, it was still quite shocking to watch the recent celebration that ensued after the Massachusetts governor signed a law permitting the murder of children up to the time of birth. How much longer can it be until the Lord returns for us?

The barbaric atrocity of abortion is just one sign of an increasingly widespread mindset whereby the masses approve a wide range of evil behavior (see Romans 1:28-32). I have long read about the lawlessness that the antichrist will bring with him after the Rapture. However, I never imagined I would see so much of it before our departure.

As I thought about these things this morning, my attention turned to 2 Peter 3, where the apostle wrote about the scoffers who would come in the last days. In particular, I thought about what the apostle wrote about the Noahic flood: “They will say, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.’ For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly” (2 Peter 3:4-7).

I find it more than a little informative that the predicted mocking of the last days would include a purposeful forgetfulness of another time when God judged all of humanity. The Lord also linked those days to the time just before the flood of Genesis 6-8.

The Days of Noah

In Matthew 24:37-40, Jesus compared the time before His return to the “days of Noah.” The Lord’s comparison was not just with the evil of the world before the flood, but with the complete unawareness that judgment was imminent. They lived as though nothing could possibly interfere with their lives and future aspirations. Then the rains came.

Those outside the faith don’t believe that the flood recorded in Genesis ever happened. Although most Christians accept the account’s authenticity, many don’t believe the Lord will again judge humanity as He did in Noah’s day. They believe that the next event of God’s prophetic calendar is the end of the age and the Second Coming, when Jesus wraps up history and judges the living and the dead. They find alternative interpretations for the Scriptures that predict Jesus’ dramatic intervention in human history to destroy Satan’s kingdom and gloriously inaugurate His worldwide reign over all the nations.

Just as the Lord predicted through His apostle, the scoffing of the last days, in which we now live, includes a disbelief in Jesus’ warning concerning the fast-approaching time of God’s wrath that lies ahead for the entire earth and an unawareness of what lies ahead for the world.

The Rains Will Come

I imagine that the waiting was difficult for Noah and his family as they built the ark in preparation for something that had never happened before. Can you imagine the mocking they endured? The day came, however, when the rains arrived just as God said.

We live at just such a time, do we not? We know that the start of the Day of the Lord is ever so near, which will begin soon after the Rapture (1 Thessalonians 5:1-11). We recognize the many signs pointing to the start of this time of God’s wrath upon the earth and look for the Rapture to occur soon. We believe the judgments recorded in Revelation chapters 6-18 are real and imminent.

Yet we wait and wait. That’s where the message of 2 Peter 3:4-7 hits home. It’s not just a warning about the scoffers of our day; it’s an encouragement to all of us who long for Jesus’ appearing. The passage assures us that just as the rains came to the ancient world, so they will surely come to the world of our day.  The rains will come.

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Israeli FM accuses Turkish counterpart of ‘lies and blood libels’ against Israel

Israeli FM accuses Turkish counterpart of ‘lies and blood libels’ against Israel

Joshua Marks

 Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Monday accused his Turkish counterpart of spreading “lies and blood libels” against the  Jewish state after Hakan Fidan called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “criminal” who must be stopped

Speaking at a gathering on the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement in Istanbul earlier in the day, Fidan said that “this criminal, Netanyahu, who takes pleasure in shedding Palestinian blood and Muslim blood, must now be stopped.”

He also accused the Israeli premier of pursuing a “genocidal and occupying approach” and said that “the international system must fight against the threat posed by Netanyahu.”

Responding in a post on X, Sa’ar wrote that Fidan “continues … to spread lies and blood libels against Israel,” in the service of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Rejecting Fidan’s genocide accusation, Sa’ar said that “it is the Turkish regime that hosts and supports the Hamas terrorist organization, which committed a genocidal massacre against Israelis on Oct. 7,” referring to the Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

“Erdoğan’s regime invades other countries, suppresses and imprisons opposition leaders, and arrests judges and journalists — with yet another journalist arrested just today,” Sa’ar continued.

“To divert attention from all of this, it resorts to the oldest trick in the antisemitic playbook: making false accusations against  Jews and the Jewish state,” he wrote.

The remarks marked the latest escalation in an ongoing war of words between Jerusalem and Ankara. 

Jerusalem on Saturday condemned Erdoğan for antisemitic incitement after he branded Zionism a “genocidal ideology,” invoked the Holocaust in attacks on the Jewish state and urged Muslim countries to unite against Israel.

On Friday, Erdoğan said that Israel’s government was attempting to destabilize the region and claimed that “the genocidal ideology known as Zionism targets everyone who defends humanitarian values.”

Referring to Nazi Germany and the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, Erdoğan said that civilians had paid the price for international inaction against “Hitler, Pol Pot and other crazed oppressors.”

“Millions of people from various origins and faiths were subjected to genocide in Hitler’s concentration camps and Pol Pot’s killing fields,” he said. “Humanity, unfortunately, just stood idly by and watched what unfolded. The same mistake is being repeated today in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon,” he continued. “The world is failing to adequately react to the genocidal network’s lawless policies that recognize no principles, values and limits.”

The Turkish leader also urged Muslim countries not to rely on outside powers.

“I believe that it must now be understood that we as Muslims cannot achieve anything by pinning our hopes on others,” said Erdoğan. “We have to be strong and deterrent, defending our rights together and building peace and security in our region together.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in response on Saturday that Erdoğan was seeking “new heights of wild incitement against the Jewish state in an attempt to divert attention from his actions against his own people and across the region.

The ministry accused the Turkish leader of imprisoning political opponents, supporting the Hamas terrorist organization and invading neighboring countries.

“Like the worst antisemites in history, Erdoğan seeks to deflect attention from his own disgraceful actions by spreading false blood libels,” the ministry said.

The Shocking Truth About Water-Guzzling Hyperscale Data Centers

The Shocking Truth About Water-Guzzling Hyperscale Data Centers

Mike Adams

We are witnessing one of the most breathtaking acts of public deception in modern history, and it centers on the simple claim that artificial intelligence data centers don't consume water. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently stood before the public and declared that data centers don't use water. This is not just inaccurate; it is a dangerous, deliberate lie designed to obscure the true environmental catastrophe of the AI buildout.

As I detailed in my own coverage of the data center boom, these facilities are not the clean, ethereal 'clouds' the industry wants you to believe -- they are industrial parasites that consume the very resources we need to survive.

What makes Lutnick's claim so infuriating is its sheer audacity. Just a year ago, he was singing a completely different tune, acknowledging that these facilities demand immense volumes of water to cool their machinery. The contradiction isn't a slip of the tongue; it is a calculated pivot designed to fast-track a corporate takeover of our energy grid and water supply.

Lutnick and Trump, among others, are running a top-down misinformation campaign, and those of us who have been sounding the alarm about Big Tech's predatory expansion are now being proven right. The stakes have never been higher, as local communities are forced to sacrifice their most vital resources at the altar of Silicon Valley's delusions of grandeur.

The Direct Impact: Billions of Gallons Vanishing Into Cooling Towers

Let’s move beyond political spin and look at the hard, unassailable numbers that the Commerce Secretary refuses to acknowledge. The water consumption figures released by the tech giants themselves reveal a shocking reality. Google admitted to consuming 7.7 billion gallons in 2024, while Amazon's AWS division guzzled another 2.5 billion gallons. To put that in perspective, a typical data center will use about 300,000 gallons of water per day, but hyperscale facilities -- the ones being rushed into construction across the country -- can drain upwards of 5 million gallons daily (each). This isn't subtle resource management; it is encroaching on limited local water resources, given that roughly 40% of new data centers are being built in high stress or extreme stress water resource regions.

The bulk of this water vanishes into massive open-loop evaporative cooling systems, where it is simply vented off into the atmosphere to dissipate heat. This means the water is permanently lost from the local hydrological cycle, torn away from the aquifers and rivers that communities, farmers, and ecosystems depend on. As I've investigated in the data center wars, this consumption is not merely hypothetical; it is accelerating the transformation of fertile lands into parched deserts.

When water options are being taken away from citizens to supply the whims of server farms, we are crossing a moral boundary that no technological advancement can justify. The water they take today is the water our children will need to drink tomorrow. But it won't be there for them. Entire regions of the USA will collapse from groundwater depletion within one generation.

While the water flowing directly into cooling towers is staggering, it represents only a fraction of the true water consumption incurred by the AI industry. The hidden drain is the water required to generate the colossal amounts of electricity these facilities demand. In 2023, the power plants serving U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 211 billion gallons of water to cool their own operations. That is over ten times the volume of the direct cooling water mentioned earlier -- water that is being burned off in thermoelectric power generation (mostly using hydrocarbons) just to keep the algorithms running.

To ignore this connection is either a display of profound ignorance or a calculated act of fraud. Anyone assessing the environmental footprint of AI must account for the water used by coal, nuclear, and especially natural gas plants (gas turbines) that power these facilities. I reported on a new natural gas-powered AI data center in Pennsylvania, which shows that many of these gas turbines also require water for injection and cooling, further compounding the issue.

When we see that every gigawatt of AI "innovation" relies on the evaporation of precious water, the promise of a "cloud" becomes a tornado of resource extraction, leaving behind dry wells and broken communities in its wake.

Industry defenders often retreat to a familiar talking point: that newer "closed-loop" systems don't actually consume water. But this is a myth designed to obscure a toxic secret. Even in closed-loop systems, water must be periodically purged to manage the "cycles of concentration." As water pulls elements from circulation pipes and fittings, the dissolved minerals and chemicals become more and more concentrated. To keep the system from scaling up and corroding, that deadly brine -- called blowdown -- must be discharged and replaced with fresh water.

This blowdown is not clean water. It is a chemical cocktail laced with corrosion inhibitors, heavy metals, nitrites, and in many cases, PFAS "forever chemicals" that are used to protect the sensitive equipment. These poisons are routinely dumped into municipal sewers, local rivers, and even aquifers. As I have written before regarding data centers and the toxic alliance fueling a public health crisis, there is virtually no federal oversight or requirement for transparency on these discharges. This lack of regulation makes hyperscale data centers a major point-source polluter, free to contaminate the waterways of rural America without consequence.

We are allowing these corporations to turn our public water supplies into private toxic waste dumps, and the silence from the EPA is deafening.

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America’s Fading Hegemony and the New World Order

America’s Fading Hegemony and the New World Order

Doug Casey

The U.S. today is a very different country than it was in 1946. At the end of World War 2, it was by far the most financially, economically, industrially, and militarily powerful country in the world. It was a culturally, religiously, and ethnically aligned, and a genuine middle-class society. Now none of those things are true.

The U.S. has devolved into a bankrupt multicultural domestic empire. The Government’s $40 trillion—and rapidly growing—debt can never be paid off. The dollar is an irredeemable fiat unit. US welfare benefits are drawing immigrants who are at odds in every way to the existing population. It’s no longer the country which promotes individualism, free minds and free markets. Rather, it’s been captured by a gigantic regulatory bureaucracy which requires permission for most everything, while taking roughly 40% of the GDP directly and indirectly. The military is well-equipped, at gigantic expense, to fight 20th C wars, but totally ill-equipped to fight the kind of wars the US is provoking everywhere.

I’d say the US decline has more-or-less mirrored that of Rome. If you use that analogy, we’re moving into a time similar to Rome’s mid-3rd century—a time of foreign wars, civil wars, wholesale bankruptcy, and societal chaos.

The bright side is that certain areas of technology are still advancing rapidly—at the moment. But we’re at the peak of the biggest financial bubble in history, and it’s tech-driven. When it pops, the consequences will be widespread and serious. AI data centers will remain, but mostly used to monitor the population.

So, yes, the era of US hegemony is coming to an end.

Large-scale formal war has been a feature of human existence for at least 5,000 years, starting with the rise of cities. As humans have become vastly richer, wars have become vastly more deadly. Everybody seems aware of that except for the posturing non-entities who run NATO and the EU.

When Einstein was asked what weapons he thought World War 3 would be fought with, he said he didn’t know. He was only sure that World War 4 would be fought with sticks and stones.

Everyone is justifiably afraid of nuclear weapons. But in today’s world, where computers control everything, a cyber war could be nearly as deadly. And a biological war could be deadlier than either. I’ve discussed those possibilities in the past. Recently it’s occurred to me that mass migration could be as destructive as any of the other three alternatives. Don’t believe me? I urge you to read Jean Raspail’s “The Camp of the Saints.” It’s ultra non PC, funny, scary, well-written, and accurate.

And there are other varieties of war lurking. AI, drones, and robots together mean the world of the Terminator has arrived. As Gilda Radner’s Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say: “It’s just one damn thing after another. It’s always something.”

What should you do about it? We can’t control what today’s MegaStates, or the Deep States behind them, will do. Being politically involved in “our democracy,” hoping to make a change by voting, is someplace between laughably counterproductive and criminally stupid.

Instead, do your best to insulate yourself from these things. I’ve got a lot more general thoughts on my YouTube channel, and specific suggestions at Contrarian Insider and CrisisInvesting.com.

Editor’s Note: The decline of US power has serious implications for the dollar, financial markets, and the wealth of ordinary investors.

A government carrying roughly $40 trillion in debt has fewer good options when the next major crisis arrives. History shows that heavily indebted governments often turn to currency debasement, financial repression, capital controls, and other measures that shift the cost of the crisis onto savers and investors.

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