Except for timely election info, the extensive list of voting resources will now be at the end.

“There’s a reason why you separate military and police. One fights the enemy of the State. The other serves and protects the People. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the State tend to become the People.” ~ Commander Adama, “Battlestar Galactica” (“WATER”, Season 1 episode 2, at the 28 minute mark.)

“People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.”  ~ Bill Clinton, Democratic Convention Speech  nominating Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination (Wednesday, August 27, 2008) at 14m 19s.

 Welcome to Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig, now in its 14^th year on KPFT from Houston 90.1-HD2, Galveston 89.5-HD2, Livingston/Goodrich 89.9-HD2, and Huntsville 91.9-HD2. KPFT is Houston’s Community radio.

And welcome to our international listeners from China, Hong Kong, Serbia, Belgium, Canada, and elsewhere.

On this show, we discuss local, state, national, and international stories that may have slipped under your radar. At my website, THINKWINGRADIO-dot-COM, I link to all the articles I read and cite, as well as other relevant sources. Articles and commentaries often include lots of internet links for those of you who want to dig deeper. I do try to fact-check myself and include the links I use to do so.

It’s the 44^th week of Trump’s military occupation of Washington DC; and 33 weeks since those states’ governors deployed National Guard troops to Memphis, Tennessee and New Orleans, Louisiana, at Trump’s request, which is where they remain for now.  

The next gubernatorial election in Tennessee is in about 4-1/2 months. I can’t wait to see how that one turns out.

LAWFARE has a chart of where US troops are currently stationed around the US. The link is in this show post at ThinkwingRadio-dot-com.

Due to time constraints, some stories may be longer in this show post than in the broadcast show itself.

1. MIKE COMMENTARY: I have to share some thoughts I’ve had. Let’s talk about the Republican Party. TAGS: Republican Party, Claims of Election Fraud, Mike Johnson, Spencer Pratt, Los Angeles Mayor Primary,
   1. In my opinion, the Republican Party has lost its right to be considered a legitimate, loyal, democracy-supporting political party in the United States, and has lost its right to be covered as such by the media.
   2. Why, you might ask, do I believe this to be the case?
   3. Well, let’s rehash …
   4. Up until Trump, almost all claims of election or voter fraud were usually brought to the courts for adjudication.
   5. But in 2016, when Trump ran the first time, he started making noises that he would only consider the election fair if he won. During his last debate with Hillary Clinton, when FOX News’s Chris Wallace asked if he would the accept the results of the election if he lost, he said, “I will keep you in suspense.”
   6. Well, he did win, but not with a majority of the popular vote. That, he lost by about 3 million votes. But in 2016, Trump did win more than 50% of the electoral votes, and that was enough. Enough to win constitutionally, but not enough for Trump, who continued to claim that he won the popular vote, too, except for claims that “illegals” cast millions of votes against him.
   7. Then, in 2020, when asked if he would accept the results of that election, he said it would depend. According to TIME Magazine, “In a July 2020 interview on Fox News Sunday, Donald Trump told host Chris Wallace that his acceptance of the presidential election results would depend. When pressed to give a direct answer on whether he would accept the outcome, Trump famously replied, ‘I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.’”
   8. After Trump lost the election, he urged his supporters to storm the Capitol to prevent Congress from legally ratifying the results.
   9. I scrubbed through Trump’s 71-minute January 6^th ellipse speech so you don’t have to, unless you want to hear or read the whole thing. (I’m including links in this show post at ThinkwingRadio[.]com to both a full video and a transcript of his 1-hour and 11-minute speech)
   10. In his political screed, Trump throws around a lot of provocative and slanderous invective against our elections, our news media, our election integrity and more, with no proof whatsoever.
   11. In a story from ABCNews the day after the insurrection, there is a complete transcript of Trump’s remarks to the crowd on the ellipse.
   12. I’ve excerpted some of the inflammatory remarks that I consider representative of statements that might flirt with encouraging sedition, but your choices might vary.
   13. In the transcript and in these audio excerpts from the Wall Street Journal video recording, Trump said at 1m 4s [to 2m 20s], [PLAY AUDIO]“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by a bold and radical left Democrats which is what they are doing and stolen by the fake news media. That is what they have done and what they are doing. We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal. …”
   14. Then at the 14m 10s mark, Trump says: [PLAY AUDIO] “Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us. And if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our constitution. Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down– We’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol — And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. …”
   15. At the 15m 41s mark [to 16m 14s], Trump continues: [PLAY AUDIO] “We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated. Lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. Today, we will see whether Republicans stand strong for integrity of our elections. But whether or not they stand strong for our country, our country. Our country has been under siege for a long time. Far longer than this four year period.”
   16. At 27m 30s, he says, [PLAY AUDIO] “Over the past several weeks, we’ve amassed overwhelming evidence about a fake election. This is the presidential election.”
   17. At the end of the video, at the 70m 06s mark, Trump ended his ellipse rant with, [PLAY AUDIO] “So we are going to — we are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we are going to the Capitol, and we are going to try and give — the Democrats are hopeless, they are never voting for anything, not even one vote but we are going to try — give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re try–going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”
   18. A subsequent investigation by the US House presented evidence that Trump, his cronies and his supporters did in fact plot to overthrow the election. According to a write-up in CAMPAIGNLEGAL[.]ORG, “Rep. Liz Cheney, the former chair of the House Republican Conference, statedon February 23, 2021: “The president and many around him pushed this idea that the election had been stolen. And that is a dangerous claim. It wasn’t true. … There were over 60 court cases where judges, including judges appointed by President Trump and other Republican presidents, looked at the evidence in many cases and said there is not widespread fraud.”
   19. In the aftermath, according to a story in TheConversation[.]com, “Exactly 18 people were charged with seditious conspiracy for their roles in the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack. These defendants were predominantly members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys”
   20. In that same story, “seditious conspiracy” is defined as, “a serious crime of conspiring to overthrow the government or stop its normal functioning.”
   21. Since 2020 and up to the present day, almost all elected Republican officials —from Trump down to state and local Republican Party leadership — have declined to agree that the 2020 election was legitimate; that Joe Biden was a legitimately elected president, and that Donald Trump legitimately lost.
   22. That’s the setup for how things have progressed over the past 10 years.
   23. Over 20 years ago, I began saying partly as a joke that when Democrats win, Republicans say the election was rigged, and they only agree an election was fair when Democrats lose.
   24. In the latest demonstration of this mindset, Spencer Pratt has made claims that the election wasn’t fair, and Trump and some prominent Republicans have bee n repeating those claims.
   25. According to Yahoo News, when GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson, was asked on June 8 to provide evidence of voter fraud in California. He responded with this: “Look, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here.”
   26. From CalMatters[.]org, “House Speaker Mike Johnson took a swipe on Monday, saying that ‘everybody knows instinctively something is wrong.’ On Friday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli posted on X that federal prosecutors were working with the FBI on “multiple election fraud investigations,” but provided no specifics.”
   27. Here is an audio recording of Mike Johnson being interviewed about that election. [PLAY AUDIO, 1m 23s]
   28. For the record, Courts never consider instinct or feelings as admissible evidence. That sort of thing is more admissible at witch trials. SPOILER ALERT: There’s no such thing as witches.
   29. According to a story on CBC/Canada, “[Trump proclaimed on Truth Social early Monday after Nithya Raman overtook Pratt,] ‘No way this could have happened. Rigged Election!’”
   30. In other words, the go-to claim of the Republican Party can now be boiled down to. “If we win, the election was honest. If we lose, then the election was crooked.”
   31. To sum up, in my opinion, in the United States, no political party can claim legitimacy in this country if they cry “election fraud” every time they lose, and only when they lose. Thus, the mainstream media have to stop covering the Republican Party as a legitimate, loyal American political party. They no longer are.
   32. We as a nation must no longer take the Republican Party seriously. Traditional right-of-center Republicans who feel the same must start a new party. And frankly, for the good of the country, Democrats should help them to do so.
2. Now back to our regular news reading and commentary, from HOUSTONPUBLICMEDIA[.]ORG — Harris County flood control director resigns amid pressure to address looming project deadlines; By Sarah Grunau | HOUSTONPUBLICMEDIA.ORG | Posted on June 11, 2026, 2:01 PM (Last Updated: June 11, 2026, 3:26 PM). TAGS: Flooding, Harris County, Hurricane Harvey, Local News, Harris County Commissioners Court, Harris County Flood Control, Harris County Flood Control Director Tina Petersen, Harris County Flood Control District, Hurricane Harvey,
   1. Tina Petersen resigned Thursday as director of the Harris County Flood Control District — after introducing a framework plan that she said would save several flood bond projects facing a looming federal funding deadline.
   2. Petersen submitted her resignation letter to Harris County Administrator Erica Lee Carter after county commissioners heard an update on post-Hurricane Harvey flood bond projects.
   3. In her resignation letter, which was obtained by Houston Public Media, Petersen expressed gratitude for the opportunity to serve commissioners court and said she plans to continue to be available to serve the county to implement a transition plan.
   4. [Petersen wrote,] “My goal is to support this process however I can to make it as smooth as possible for Commissioners Court and for this team. … While I am confident in this organization and the work we have underway, it is clear to me that conversations about my role have become a distraction.”
   5. The Office of County Administration will work with the flood control district to support operations after Petersen’s resignation.
   6. Harris County commissioners on Thursday approved Petersen’s proposed framework to save several disaster relief projects facing an upcoming February 2027 funding deadline. The deadline jeopardizes about $245 million that the county could be forced to repay to the federal government.
   7. The framework approved by commissioners will phase post-Harvey flood bond projects over time and save millions of dollars. The projects were authorized by county voters as part of a $2.5 billion flood bond package on the November 2018 ballot, less than a year after Harvey devastated the region.
   8. Commissioner Tom Ramsey said Thursday’s discussions should’ve happened months ago.
   9. [Ramsey said,] “The framework of this plan was put together four months ago. And to have it come this late is a discouragement to me, is a concern to me. … [It] took this long to get here.”
   10. During the transition from Petersen’s leadership of the flood control district, the Office of County Administration will work closely with the remaining flood control district leadership to support ongoing operations and ensure continued progress on high-priority infrastructure and flood mitigation projects, according to a news release.
   11. In a statement after her resignation, Harris County Commissioner Lesley Briones said more flood control projects are moving forward than at any time in the county’s history.
   12. [Briones said,] “We are moving with urgency to deliver key projects in collaboration with our partners at the state and federal levels.”
   13. Petersen’s resignation came days after Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham said there’s “likely zero chance” Harris County will meet the funding deadlines to complete the post-Harvey flood bond projects. Buckingham urged County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who has been publicly critical of Petersen, to set aside differences to eliminate delays.
   14. Buckingham accused Hidalgo of creating setbacks through disagreements with flood control district leadership on project delays. Buckingham also said county commissioners created arbitrary procedures by compelling the flood control district to address the court for minor changes.
   15. Hidalgo addressed Petersen’s resignation in an interview Thursday afternoon with Houston Public Media.
   16. [Hidalgo said,] “It’s hard. Nobody has a crystal ball in this. … Can I say for a fact replacing her is going to be the solution? No. I’m making a bet on that. All I can do is do the best that I can with the information that I have, and I believe this is that.”
   17. The 2018 flood bond was passed with significant funding gaps, and the county secured another $2.7 billion in partnerships from local, state and federal funding sources to complete the projects.
   18. MIKE: I don’t have enough knowledge or expertise on this subject to offer any substantive comments, but I felt that flood concerns are so top-of-mind in Harris County these days that it deserved to be brought front and center on this show for those who had not heard the story.
   19. MIKE: If this change of leadership helps to preserve federal funding and move the projects forward, then I hope that turns out to be the case. So, to be continued …
3. From Chron[.]com — Lina Hidalgo proposes paid mental health days for Harris County staff; By Ahmed Humble, Senior Trending Reporter | CHRON.COM | June 11, 2026. TAGS: Harris County, Harris County Workers, Mental Health, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, Paid Mental Health Leave,
   1. Harris County workers may soon receive paid leave for mental health under a proposal introduced by Judge Lina Hidalgo.
   2. According to the county agenda, commissioners are scheduled to consider the measure  Thursday. It would create paid mental health leave for full-time county employees “not already covered by an existing department policy.” Under the current policy, Harris County offers comprehensive paid leave to its employees, including vacation, standard sick leave, family sick and wellness leave, up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave, and 40 hours of infant sick leave
   3. Hidalgo has been a vocal proponent of mental health and previously proposed expanding services across Harris County. She has also not shied from her own personal experiences with clinical depression, even taking a leave of absence in August 2023. 
   4. [Hidalgo said in a statement via Houston Public Media,] “Mental illness is more prevalent than ever in our community, causing violence, self-harm, and divisiveness; and normalizing conversations about it are the first step to ensuring we have a healthy population going forward.”
   5. Her openness about mental health has also become a recurring political flashpoint. In January 2025, KPRC 2 reported on the County Judge’s absence from commissioner court meetings — which were later moved from Tuesdays to Thursdays [so as not] to not conflict with her weekly therapy sessions. 
   6. In one tense exchange during commissioner’s court in May 2025, Hidalgo and Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia clashed over a request to postpone a vote so she could be present. 
   7. [According to transcripts Garcia said at the time,] “I walk into these meetings with my day planned, and today, I already have commitments. … If we lose an hour without anything productive, it really disrupts my schedule. So, I would also like some consideration for my schedule.”
   8. [Hidalgo replied,] “I would just like to underscore that you’re joining the ranks of those who have tried to pick on me for mental health treatment. … If you want to have the vote without me, have the vote without me. I’ll remind the community that you are interfering with something that I mentioned before. People can see your behavior, and frankly, I think it’s embarrassing.” 
   9. Supporters of paid mental health leave point to research suggesting [that] paid sick leave can reduce psychological distress and improve workplace wellbeing. However, the U.S. remains one of the few countries worldwide and the only Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country that does not have a national paid sick leave policy. 
   10. [Hidalgo added in her statement to Houston Public Media,] “It also normalizes conversations about mental wellbeing, so that employees can discuss, for example, feeling anxious the way they discuss having allergies or a headache, and support each other accordingly.”
   11. 1 Commissioner Tom Ramsey, however, argues a separate paid mental health day might come with an unavoidable cost. 
   12. [He said in a social media post,] “We all support mental health. The question is whether creating yet another category of paid leave is the right solution. … We already provide paid sick days, vacation time, personal leave, holidays, and other benefits that can be used when needed. Adding separate paid mental health days would come with a significant price tag — potentially costing millions of dollars each year in wages, overtime, and staffing coverage.”
   13. [In a comment on X, Ramsey posted in part,] “We all support mental health. … At a time when budgets are stretched and resources are limited, we should focus on improving existing benefits and services rather than creating new entitlements that taxpayers will ultimately have to fund.”
   14. MIKE: In spite of decades of public health officials trying to normalize issues around mental health and discussion of it, this story shows that we still have a long way to go.
   15. MIKE: This story also shows that the challenges are not necessarily partisan. In different ways, both Republican Tom Ramsey and Democrat Adrian Garcia show a lack of sensitivity and understanding of what mental health challenges really mean, and what the experience is like. Garcia is annoyed that Hidalgo’s ongoing treatment for mental health issues interferes with his schedule and Ramsey, as always, is preoccupied with the cost.
   16. MIKE: The most common mental health challenges are anxiety disorders and depression, and because they don’t make a person look sick or injured, they’re the kinds of health issues that people are most likely to dismiss as “being nothing”, or all of it — ironically — just being in your mind. Many times, people tell depressives to “just cheer up”. And trust me, nothing is more infuriating than that.
   17. MIKE: I didn’t have a word for it at the time, but I’ve probably been a depressive since I was at least 10 years old. I wasn’t properly diagnosed until I was 40. In my case, it’s a condition called dysthymia. HopkinsMedicine[.]org — which is among the links I’ve included in this show post at ThinkwingRadio[.]com — describes dysthymia as, “a mild, but long-lasting form of depression. It’s also called persistent depressive disorder. People with this condition may also have bouts of major depression at times.” I’ve been diagnosed with the same condition 3 times over the last 35 years, so it seems like a good diagnosis.
   18. MIKE: In my case, I’ve been fortunate. For most of that time, I’ve had insurance coverage for treatment and therapy, because finding an effective medication for the condition is only one part of the process. The meds can help with the neurochemical issues, but then you have to fight to change decades of habits of thought, and that’s an ongoing process.
   19. MIKE: This gives me some empathy for what Lina Hidalgo may be experiencing, and I have some feeling for how dismissive people can be that depression is a real thing and not just “all in your head”, which is the most ironic dismissive phrase.
   20. MIKE: So to return to the point, should Harris County health benefits include time off that is specifically allocated for treatment of depression and anxiety? Probably. Will it cost extra money? Well, everything costs extra money.
   21. MIKE: But this discussion in County Commissioners Court is important not only for county employees, but also for the message it can send to private employers whose people should perhaps also have this kind of benefit available to them in their time-off allowances and health plans.
   22. MIKE: We’ll have to wait and see if the commissioners approve some form of this benefit.
4. Next, from TEXASTRIBUNE[.]ORG — Gov. Dan Patrick says James Talarico will “go to hell” for his view of the Bible; by Alejandro Serrano | TEXASTRIBUNE.ORG | June 12, 2026, 4:05 p.m. Central/June 12, 2026, 7:33 p.m. Central. TAGS: Dan Patrick, James Talarico, Republican Party of Texas, Teas Senate Race, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton,
   1. Gov. Dan Patrick on Friday said Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate Rep. James Talarico will “go to hell” for his interpretations of the Bible, as Talarico has made his Christian faith a cornerstone of his campaign.
   2. Speaking at the Republican Party of Texas’ convention in Houston, Patrick accused Talarico, an Austin state representative, of introducing faith into the contentious Senate race, expected to be expensive and brutal as Democrats seek to capitalize on anti-Trump sentiment to claim the minority party’s first statewide victory in more than three decades.
   3. [Patrick said to an uproar of applause,] “It’s James Talarico who decided to bring the Bible into this election. And let me tell you, that’s not a Bible I’ve ever read. I’ve never seen so much blasphemy from anyone running for office. … Let me tell you what, I’m going to pray for that guy, because when he loses the Senate race, if he campaigns against God as he’s been doing, he’s going to Hell, for sure. That’s what we’re up against. That’s the darkness. That’s the light. That’s why we must be one.”
   4. In a statement Friday evening, Talarico responded saying that Patrick had “sold out the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable to enrich his donors” for decades.
   5. [Talarico wrote in a social media post,] “Love feels like blasphemy when you worship power.”
   6. Attorney General Ken Paxton, Talarico’s general election opponent, also spoke at the convention.
   7. A GOP leader, Patrick has also been a staunch advocate for Christian values — often championing proposed legislation as the presiding officer of the Texas Senate that historically failed in the Texas House until recent victories, like requiring the display of Ten Commandments in public schools.
   8. President Trump also tapped Patrick, a close ally, to lead the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission tasked with drafting policy proposals regarding religious freedom.
   9. MIKE: So, the Prophet Patrick hath spoken, Republican Christian dogma has been declared, and heavenly judgment has been pronounced. Or is it Hellish judgment?
   10. MIKE: I went in search for the correct word to describe Lt. Governor Patrick’s certainty of God’s will.
   11. MIKE: I got the following possibilities:
   12. MIKE: Hubris — An ancient Greek concept referring to dangerous overconfidence, often leading mortals to claim divine-level knowledge, authority, or insight.
   13. MIKE: Theocentrism — Used in a negative context, this describes treating one’s own human perspective as the absolute center of God’s universe or will.
   14. MIKE: Theomachy [PRON.: thee-OM-uh-kee] — Technically meaning “fighting against God,” it is sometimes used to describe the arrogant act of attempting to force God’s hand or bend the divine will to one’s own plans.
   15. MIKE: Theophagic/Theocratic Overreach — A broader academic phrase used when individuals or groups overstep human boundaries to implement a perceived divine mandate on earth.
   16. MIKE: Clericalism/Spiritual Arrogance — Often used to describe individuals who position themselves as the sole, unquestionable mouthpiece for God’s desires.
   17. MIKE: You can choose if you feel any or all of them may apply.
   18. MIKE: I’m not a Christian and I’m not a religious man, but it seems to me in my simple mind that it says a lot when someone presumes to know God’s will and God’s values.
   19. MIKE: Frankly, this kind of irrational fervor for religious righteousness as one man or group sees it is exactly why the Founders wrote into the First Amendment that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” At the time that clause was written, the religious wars in Europe were still in very recent history, and the Framers wanted no part of that here.
   20. MIKE: This is another way in which the Republican Party has, in my humble opinion, become an un-American party. While claiming to be Constitutionalists, they are ignoring one of the most important tenets of the Constitution in service to their growing Christian Nationalism.
   21. MIKE: Dan Patrick will have to answer to his conscience and his God at some point in his life, and if there is a God, he will be judged then.
5. From WIRED[.]COM — The Pentagon Knew Enemies Could Track Troops’ Phones for Years. Now They Are; By Dell Cameron | WIRED.COM | May 28, 2026 12:59 PM. TAGS: Security, Pentagon, American Troop Locations, Cell Phone Tracking,
   1. For nearly a decade, the Pentagon was warned — by its own contractors, analysts, and intelligence agencies — that anyone with a credit card could buy a map of where American troops sleep, work, and store nuclear weapons. Now the bill has come due in a war zone.
   2. A newly disclosed letter shows the warnings went unheeded: US Central Command now confirms it has received “multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil US personnel in theater”—the first official acknowledgment that the data-broker economy is being used to hunt American forces in the Middle East.
   3. The targeting was first reported by Reuters, which obtained the Centcom letter. But the confirmation lands atop a record that is longer and more damning than the single document suggests.
   4. For the better part of a decade, US lawmakers have heard the same alarms about the dangers of commercially available location data that the Pentagon did — from the same intelligence assessments, from witnesses, from their own colleagues. Yet comprehensive privacy legislation has repeatedly stalled in Washington, and the one narrow fix that did pass — a requirement that data shared with military contractors not be resold — left the broader industry untouched.
   5. One of the earliest warnings came in 2016. At the Joint Special Operations Command compound at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a government technologist briefing senior officers demonstrated how commercial location data — bought, not hacked — could track phones from Fort Bragg and MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, the home stations of America’s most elite units, through Turkey and into northern Syria, where they clustered at a covert forward operating base. The same data was available to any advertiser or foreign intelligence service.
   6. Even as the Pentagon was warned that the location-data marketplace was placing its own people in danger, parts of the department were eager to become its customers. The Defense Intelligence Agency disclosed to Congress in 2021 that it uses commercially purchased phone location data — including on Americans — without a warrant, taking the position that none is required. Months earlier, Motherboard reported that the US military was buying location data harvested from popular consumer apps.
   7. In 2023, the Army paid to have the threat spelled out. Researchers at Duke University — working under a grant from the US Military Academy at West Point — set out to buy data on American service members the way a foreign adversary might. They scraped hundreds of data broker websites and found thousands of listings advertising data on military personnel, including datasets titled “Military Families Mailing List” and “Hard Core Military Families.”
   8. The researchers started buying. For as little as 12 cents a record, with almost no vetting, they purchased names, home addresses, health conditions, and financial details on active-duty troops. Posing as a buyer operating through a Singapore-based domain, they also obtained the same kind of data geofenced to Fort Bragg, Quantico, and other installations. One broker offered to skip its identity check if they paid by wire.
   9. A year later, WIRED found the same kind of data flowing through Google’s own advertising platform. Working with data obtained by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties — whose investigator had gained access to a US broker’s audience lists by standing up a fake analytics firm — WIRED identified marketing “segments” on Google’s Display & Video 360 that singled out US government employees deemed “decisionmakers” working “specifically in the field of national security,” alongside lists targeting people who work for companies licensed to build missiles, space-launch vehicles, and the cryptographic systems that protect classified data.
   10. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties investigator said he expected to have his cover story tested. [He told WIRED at the time,] “When I signed up, there was no questions asked whatsoever. … I could have been anybody.”
   11. A previous investigation by WIRED had already shown what that exposure looked like in practice: In late 2024, working with the German outlets Bayerischer Rundfunk and Netzpolitik.org, reporters obtained a “free sample” of location data from a Florida broker — 3.6 billion coordinates tied to roughly 11 million phones in Germany over a two-month span.
   12. Inside it were the daily movements of American military and intelligence personnel stationed in the country: 12,313 devices that passed through at least 11 US installations, from the Army’s European headquarters at Wiesbaden to the schools where service members’ children are taught. Reporters traced devices inside Büchel Air Base, where US nuclear weapons are believed to be stored in hardened bunkers, and watched others zigzag through an armored-vehicle course at Grafenwöhr — one of the bases that a pair of alleged saboteurs had been arrested for scouting months prior.
   13. Asked about the tracking, a Pentagon spokesperson told WIRED at the time that the department was aware that geolocation services could put personnel at risk and urged service members to remember their training and follow operational security protocols — the same individual-responsibility framing that the Army’s own commissioned research had already shown was insufficient.
   14. The warnings also came from inside the Army’s own research arm. In a May 2025 technical report, the Army Cyber Institute at West Point found that more than a fifth of the most-visited web domains on the service’s stateside unclassified networks were commercial trackers — and that the fixes required “minimal funding or resources.” Among its recommendations: Restrict the installation of Google’s Chrome browser on Army workstations, noting it was the only major browser that had declined to block the third-party cookies used to follow users across the web. A year later, a bipartisan group of lawmakers writing to the Pentagon are now asking for the same thing.
   15. The letter, independently obtained by WIRED and signed by 14 members of both parties, lays out the case against the Pentagon in detail. The department, they wrote, has known about the threat for more than a decade and “failed to adopt commonsense cyber defenses” recommended by its own government’s experts. It presses the department’s chief information officer, Kirsten Davies, to do the things that have been on the table for years: Disable the advertising ID on military phones, pull Chrome from government devices in favor of privacy-focused browsers, and enroll service members in state data-broker opt-out systems.
   16. Pointedly, the lawmakers press the Pentagon over what it had done about the Army Cyber Institute’s recommendations — and how it had used a 2017 law, already on the books, authorizing cyber protection for personnel in positions “highly vulnerable” to attack. The most damning detail is a matter of timing: Centcom had confirmed that it had only rolled out the ability to switch off location sharing on government smartphones this month — roughly 10 years after the first warning.
   17. Earlier this month, the Army told soldiers to start using their own personal phones for government work — the same phones that broadcast advertising IDs and feed location to the very brokers at the heart of the threat. The Army says its own access stops at a walled-off work app, leaving a soldier’s texts, photos, and browsing private. But data brokers face no such walls, as its own researchers have already pointed out.
   18. Sean Vitka, executive director of Demand Progress, a privacy group that has lobbied Congress to rein in the data trade, tells WIRED that the House passed significant legislation two years ago that would have barred the government from subsidizing the industry, only for a handful of surveillance-minded lawmakers in both parties to block it — and for Senate leadership to decline to bring it to a vote, even after the last election.
   19. [Vitka says,] “Despite the bad-faith claims of policymakers who consistently wield their power to undermine privacy, surveillance is not inherently good for security. … And the public can now see disturbing evidence proving privacy is not only a core human right but also critical to keeping people safe.”
   20. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to questions for this story.
   21. MIKE: If this was a known issue from the last 10 years, then it’s bridged the Biden administration and both Trump regimes, making the problem non-partisan. Plus, for years now, the Ukrainians have been using the cell phones of Russian soldiers and military personnel to spy in them and, sometimes, to locate them for assassination, so this is not a new thing, and it demonstrates the ways that this sort of cell phone data can be used by adversaries during wartime.
   22. MIKE: I’m seeing this as part of a broader spectrum of problems in our military leadership, and perhaps our civilian leadership as well. Namely, as examples, a reluctance to take some known electronic threats seriously; an unwillingness to take asymmetric warfare threats seriously enough; a disinclination to adopt the technologies of asymmetric warfare that can make our own military both cheaper and more effective; and more.
   23. MIKE: I think we need someone like Billy Mitchell in the Pentagon and in civilian leadership. Mitchell was a farsighted military strategist who in the 1920s foresaw and tried to demonstrate the disproportionate value of air power against armies and navies, and could have predicted the kind of attack the US suffered at Pearl Harbor.
   24. MIKE: The Germans in the 1930s developed a new kind of warfare called the Blitzkrieg, and within 3 years had conquered Europe, even if only temporarily.
   25. MIKE: It’s a truism that generals are always planning to fight the last war.
   26. MIKE: Perhaps we need more generals who are aggressively planning and preparing to fight the next one.
6. The next story is an opinion piece sent to me by Andrew Ferguson. It’s from PHILLIPSPOBRIEN[.]SUBSTACK[.]COM — War Crimes Seem To Be Official US Policy Now — We Will Rue The Day; By Phillips P. OBrien | PHILLIPSPOBRIEN.SUBSTACK.COM | Jun 11, 2026. TAGS: Iran, United States, War Crimes, US government,
   1. [S]omething happened on the evening of June 9 that needs to be understood and, hopefully, deplored by all Americans. The USA seems to have deliberately and with foresight, committed a war crime as an act of policy. If this is right, and all evidence seems to say it is, committing acts of terror is now an acceptable method of war in the judgement of the US government and, by extension, the American people.
   2. [The author thinks] it might be best to break down what happened here through a series of questions.
   3. [So] What happened?
   4. On the evening of June 9, the USA, with what seems to be intent, attacked two reservoirs and a water treatment facility in southern Iran. Almost immediately afterwards, water was cut off to about 20,000 Iranian civilians who live around the southern Iranian town of Sirik.
   5. Why was this most likely a deliberate attack? Well, there seems to have been nothing nearby of military value and the destruction was precise. The New York Times has already run an investigation on it.
   6. Here is how the story begins.
   7. Strikes early Wednesday destroyed what appears to be a drinking-water facility on Iran’s southern coast, near the Strait of Hormuz, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Around the time of the strikes, the U.S. Central Command said in a post on X that it had conducted attacks near the strait “with precision munitions from U.S. Air Force and Navy fighter jets.”
   8. Iranian state media reported that the U.S. had hit water storage buildings and a local official said that water was cut off to more than 20,000 people living in a town and villages nearby. Temperatures in the area have reached above 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week.
   9. Earlier attacks that hit civilians might have been mistakes, such as the attack on the girls’ school which started the campaign, but it is hard to see this as a mistake. The target was too specialized, too localized and the effect seems calibrated (see the section on why it might have been committed below).
   10. Is It A War Crime?
   11. Without a doubt. Attacking other infrastructure was probably a war crime as well (think bridges or power plants) but there can at least be arguments made that these are dual use facilities. Militaries use bridges, military production uses generated electricity. If the US destroyed all the bridges in Iran or shut off all the power, as Trump has threatened numerous times, [The author] would definitely consider it a war crime. However, lawyers could try and argue that because of military use, these are allowable targets.
   12. However, a reservoir serving a civilian community is unarguably a crime. The military will get its water somehow, the civilians will suffer. And note, this is one of the hottest and driest places on the globe. Academic data for the Sirik region confirms that summer temperatures routinely peak between 45°C and 48.5°C during the warmest months. That is over 115 degrees Fahrenheit. That is comparable to Death Valley in California.
   13. A human being cannot live long in such a climate without water — so either the locals will die of dehydration or, more likely, some will drink contaminated water and die from that.
   14. Either way, the US has attacked, seemingly deliberately, a facility vital to the maintenance of human life that has no discernible military utility. So yes, it is a war crime.
   15. … What makes this even more perverse is that this war crime was deliberately committed because Donald Trump is getting frustrated that the Iranian government is not doing what he wants them to do and that the Iranian military attacked a legitimate military target: a US Apache helicopter that was enforcing a blockade (an act of war remember) against Iran.
   16. These reasons are not being hidden; indeed the White House basically laid them out to Axios in a detailed story. Here was how that story started:
   17. The trigger for President Trump’s strikes on Iran was the downing of a U.S. helicopter, but behind the scenes Trump had been growing more and more frustrated over nearly two weeks of waiting for an Iranian response to his latest offer that still has not arrived.
   18. This is typical Trump/organized crime-style behavior. He attacks a small civilian facility as a threat and warning to Iran that he might go on and commit even greater war crimes if they do not do what he wants. As if on cue, a few hours after these attacks, while speaking to Fox News reporters, Trump went ahead and said he might start mass attacks on Iran’s bridges and electricity power generation. He also tweeted out that if Iran did not do what he wants it to do, that it would have to “pay the price” of their defiance.
   19. So it is a historic war crime committed because the President of the USA can think of nothing better to do.
   20. What Will The Impact Be?
   21. It will almost certainly not get Iran to bend the knee. Trump can boast all he wants, as he did above, about the Iranian military being destroyed, but the reality is that he is still very worried about Iranian capacity. How do we know that? Well, many of the US strikes against Iran were done on June 9 and then again [on the 10^th] with (fast depleting) stocks of Tomahawk missiles or by aircraft that can fire at safe distances. CNN is stating that preliminary reports from [the 10^th] were that at least 49 Tomahawks were fired.
   22. In other words, Trump is rapidly running down US stocks in these attacks — they are not sustainable.
   23. So unless Trump actually goes for massive escalation, this is just more of what went on before, with a shorter window for action and more degradation of US strength. It is unlikely to force Iran to back down; more than likely it leads to a hardening of their position.
   24. And, btw, it further leaves China in strategic control of the Western Pacific as it weakens the USA. Pure strategic brilliance.
   25. As for the Iranian people, [The author is] no expert. However the few sources [the author knows] of who do have information within Iran are in despair at this kind of war crime. What one wrote was that attacks like this are “pushing Iranians predisposed to the west towards the (IRGC) regime”.
   26. So these are not just strategically stupid and immoral war crimes, they are probably counterproductive.
   27. What Iranian will now say that [they] really want to side with the USA after they cut off water to 20,000 civilians?
   28. [In Conclusion,] this very much looks like a deliberate war crime that was made as a threat to commit even more horrible war crimes. It will almost certainly not work, though it might lead to thousands of Iranian civilian deaths.
   29. It is an attack that [the author fears that] the USA will regret for a long time. It is no different than an Al-Qaeda style attack: a deliberate targeting of civilians to create terror to get political results. If the USA gets attacked in return, it will only be served what seems to be official American policy on a cold plate.
   30. This is no small matter. The lack of reporting or push back against this operation shows how much the country has been damaged by the present administration and how difficult it will be to recover. War crimes are now an open and deliberate tool of US policy.
   31. Where this is going is pretty bleak.
   32. MIKE: I’ve remarked before that I think it’s past time to refer to the US at this time in history as MAGA America. That would denote a certain kind of regime in power that is not “normal”. It would be equivalent to the distinction that we gave to Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, or Stalinist Russia, as just three examples.
   33. MIKE: The US must not commit war crimes. Not just because they’re against international law, but because they are morally ethically wrong.
   34. MIKE: It’s also a bad idea not least because what we do will be justifiable to be done back to us.
   35. MIKE: I have increasingly come to the opinion that the US should seriously consider joining the international court in The Hague, or at least having a vigorous pubic debate about it. I am familiar with some of the reasons that the US and other major powers don’t belong to it, but I’m beginning to feel that the time for the US to join may have come.
   36. MIKE: Why, you might ask? Because if we can’t keep our own governance house in order, then maybe we need some outside help.
   37. MIKE: This is another reason why, post-Trump, post-MAGA, there must be trials.
   38. MIKE: I’ve heard that the small town of Nuremberg, PA could use its own courthouse. If we build one for them, it would be a symbolically important place to have the trials that have been earned by Trump and his complicit loyalists for their crimes against this country and against humanity.
   39. MIKE: Just saying.
7. From REUTERS[.]COM — Exclusive: Ukraine’s drone commander wants to cut Crimea off from Russia; By Olena Harmash and Sergiy Karazy | REUTERS.COM | June 11, 2026@8:03 AM CDT/Updated 12 hours ago. TAGS: Ukrainian Drone Strikes, Russian Assets, Ukraine, Russia, Drone Forces,
   1. Deep in an underground bunker, … the commander of Ukraine’s drone forces is poring over terabytes of information to ​map out his next campaign: cutting Crimea off from Russia.
   2. Ukraine’s escalating drone strikes across Russian-occupied parts of the country have disrupted military logistics and fuel supplies, prompting authorities last month to introduce fuel rationing in ‌Crimea.
   3. Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, said the campaign has reduced the traffic using the Novorossiya highway — a critical Russian military supply route through occupied southern Ukraine to Crimea — by more than two thirds over the past month.
   4. Within another month, Ukraine would have total control over the road, said Brovdi, who is best known by his call sign “Madyar”, a nod to his ethnic Hungarian roots.
   5. [In his cramped cubicle inside the bunker, … Brovdi told Reuters,] “We will isolate Crimea in the near future.”
   6. Russia seized the Crimea peninsula and ​swathes of eastern Ukraine in 2014.
   7. Brovdi described striking vehicles on the exposed highway as “as easy as shooting partridges in an open field.”
   8. Russia’s defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment for this story. President Vladimir Putin ​acknowledged last week Ukraine’s drone attacks were causing damage but posed no threat to Russia’s economy.
   9. Military analysts say Ukraine’s campaign of mid-range strikes inside Russian-controlled territory has cut supplies to its front ⁠line — bringing their advance to a near standstill last month — and weakened its air defences, opening the way for longer-range strikes that have destroyed oil infrastructure and arms manufacturing deep inside Russia.
   10. Brovdi said one of his strategic aims was to force Moscow to ​pull back troops rather than push forward. “We will create conditions that will make it extremely difficult for any military personnel or those working in the defence industry to remain in Crimea, in the temporarily occupied territories, or use the access routes to them.”
   11. … Over more than four years of the war, Brovdi has transformed himself from a wealthy grain trader into one of Ukraine’s most effective military commanders. Since he took command of Ukraine’s drone forces last June, the 50-year-old has aggressively scaled up their operations.
   12. The number of mid-range combat sorties increased 28-fold over the year, while deep strikes into Russian territory increased almost four-fold over the same period, the drone forces commander said.
   13. In the first five months of this year, the units destroyed 174 Russian air defence complexes worth about $5.4 billion, Brovdi said, clearing their way to other ​targets.
   14. By systematically targeting Russia’s military manpower, oil facilities, and weapons production, Brovdi hopes to inflict losses painful enough to undermine Moscow’s ability – and willingness – to continue the war.
   15. [Said Brovdi,] “We’re opening the door to vast spaces where the pain of the war, which is ​felt in nearly every Ukrainian town, should be felt, including in the consciousness of residents.”
   16. [Brovdi] added that Ukraine has not, and will not, strike directly at civilians and civilian targets. Russia in recent weeks has accused ‌Kyiv of killing dozens ⁠of civilians in occupied Ukraine.
   17. Michael Kofman, senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment, said advances in drone technology made it feasible for Ukraine to cut off Crimea over time. But achieving the broader strategic aim of rolling back Russian forces would still require a coordinated ground offensive.
   18. Kofman added that Russia’s own elite drone unit, known as Rubicon, was working hard to neutralise Ukraine’s current advantage in mid-range drones.
   19. … Convicted in absentia in Russia on terrorism charges in March, Brovdi is one of Moscow’s highest-value targets. His air war is conducted from a deep underground location close to the frontline. The Reuters team was taken to meet Brovdi in a van with blacked-out windows and led downstairs.
   20. Rows of sleeping pods line a corridor that ​opens into a room filled with dozens of screens displaying ​real-time battlefield data. Brightly coloured paintings by leading Ukrainian ⁠artists — some from Brovdi’s private collection — hang alongside captured Russian drones.
   21. Brovdi, who comes from western Ukraine, joined the military as a volunteer at the start of Russia’s invasion in 2022. He created his “Madyar’s Birds” unit, now Ukraine’s most powerful drone brigade, from scratch.
   22. Every strike is filmed, verified and logged. Monitors on a wall display a detailed scorecard, updated in real time. Between 10 and 12 ​terabytes of information are archived daily for use by future artificial intelligence models.
   23. Brovdi, who peppered his comments with black humour, framed the war in business terms, [saying,] “This is our accounting from ​previous business projects, which we adapted ⁠just for military purposes: changed grain carriers, wagons and grain to types of weapons, ammunition, and our clientele is a little different.”
   24. With data analysis, Brovdi aims to remove “the human factor” from warfare: “a person can be tired, can be biased, can make mistakes.”
   25. After his unit racked up one of the military’s highest kill rates, Brovdi became a key figure in Kyiv’s strategy to target drone power at individual Russian soldiers to compensate for Ukraine’s own manpower shortages.
   26. In the first five months of 2026, drone forces killed more than 50,900 Russian ⁠servicemen and hit ​over 176,500 enemy targets. The average daily kill rate was 337 Russian soldiers and 1,169 enemy targets, data shared by Brovdi said.
   27. Brovdi’s data also put ​the average cost of killing one Russian soldier at around $918 over the past year.
   28. Reuters could not independently verify the figures.
   29. Drone units, which make up 2.5% of Ukraine’s armed forces, accounted for roughly a third of Russian losses over the past 12 months, according to their data.
   30. [Brovdi said that] The plan is to increase the drone forces ​to 5% of the army. “By scaling up the use of unmanned aerial vehicles — not just within the drone units, but across the army as a whole — we are significantly increasing the number of targets destroyed.”
   31. MIKE: Geopolitically, tactically and strategically, I found this story generally interesting, but the one sentence that stopped me cold for a moment as I was reading was this one: “Brovdi’s data … put ​the average cost of killing one Russian soldier at around $918 …”
   32. MIKE: The following discussion will get very cold-blooded, and some listeners may find it more offensive than interesting, but it is “military math”, and it is real, nonetheless.
   33. MIKE: Almost since the start of the Russia-Ukraine War — possibly before almost anyone started publicly discussing the implications of drones in 21^st century warfare — I’ve talked about how drones were changing the calculus not only of military tactics, but the entire notion of what kinds of military equipment are not only useful in modern warfare, but what will be survivable in modern warfare.
   34. MIKE: An example of a transformative military technology that changed the very nature of what constitutes useful and survivable equipment in warfare was the advent of American steam driven ironclad warships during the US Civil War. Those ironclads made all the navies in the world virtually obsolete by 1865.
   35. MIKE: Likewise, the invention of the hand-cranked Gatling gun, and ultimately the truly automatic machineguns that require only a single trigger pull, changed the very nature of ground warfare, making soldiering even less glorious and far more horrific.
   36. MIKE: There are many other examples of transformative military technologies in history, but there have been relatively few that required wholesale reconsideration not only of how to fight a war, but what to fight a war with.
   37. MIKE: Over the past year or so, I’ve also talked about how robots — of which drones are only one type — will make warfare increasingly inhospitable to humans on the battlefield, almost to the point of making human participation nearly unsurvivable.
   38. MIKE: According to one web site, “During World War II, it was estimated that 45,000 rounds of small arms ammunition was fired to kill one enemy soldier. In Vietnam the American military establishment consumed an estimated 50,000 rounds of ammunition for every enemy killed.”
   39. MIKE: A truism of military planning and acquisition is that you want it to be cheaper to destroy an enemy target than to build or train that target.
   40. MIKE: It is estimated that the US military pays somewhere between 40-90 cents per round of ammunition, depending on the type. So even at the low end, killing an enemy soldier with a bullet can cost from $4,000 to upwards of $45,000 or more to kill an enemy soldier. That’s compared against it costing “the U.S. military roughly $55,000 to $90,000 [1, 2] to take a recruit from a civilian to a qualified soldier ready for their first operational assignment.”
   41. MIKE: One presumes that the cost of training a soldier from a peer military competitor like Russia or China is similar.
   42. MIKE: Now, to get back to the point, consider the cost of killing an enemy soldier dropping from the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to less than one thousand dollars. Another way of looking at that is for the cost of about 2500 rounds of ammunition, you can target and kill an enemy soldier.
   43. MIKE: That means that for the cost of about 10 thousand bullets — barely enough to kill an enemy soldier if you’re lucky — you can build at least 4 drones and kill 4 soldiers.
   44. MIKE: And that’s just for relatively simple airborne quadcopter drones.
   45. MIKE: Naval drones are basically like smart torpedoes, but they don’t require risking a multi-billion-dollar manned submarine to launch them. They can travel up to 1000 miles on their own. They can cost from about $220 thousand to maybe a million dollars, or so.
   46. MIKE: For that kind of cost, the Ukrainians have sunk Russian ships costing at least hundreds of millions of dollars. The Ukrainians have used these so-called UUVs, or “Uncrewed Underwater Vehicles”, to damage or sink super-expensive Russian naval vessels. This has forced the Russians to move their ships back to the eastern Black Sea, forcing them out of range of Ukrainian land targets.
   47. MIKE: It’s not only the cost differential. It’s also the time it takes to build something like a tank or ship compared to the time it takes to build the drones to destroy them. A tank or ship can take months or years to build. A drone can take as little as from a few hours to a few days.
   48. MIKE: This discussion just scratches the surface. I’m just a mildly interested lay person when it comes to this stuff, but it may give you an idea of the kinds of transformations taking place in military planning and acquisition.
   49. MIKE: And perhaps more importantly for the humans who enlist or are conscripted to fight these wars, these are dramatic changes in the battlefield survivability they might hope for.
   50. MIKE: There is perhaps one tiny bright spot in this discussion.
   51. MIKE: When the Ukrainians use so-called “First Person View”, or FPV, aerial drones, the remote pilot can see the enemy soldier they are targeting, which is what makes them so lethal.
   52. MIKE: There have been numerous reported instances where the targeted soldier became aware of the drone, threw down his weapons and put up his hands in surrender. The Ukrainians have then sent a drone with surrender instructions to that soldier, allowing him to survive and be captured.
   53. MIKE: This is a merciful option not always afforded to enemy soldiers in the field because opposing soldiers don’t always feel they have the safe luxury of a choice.
   54. MIKE: So in a real sense, these drones can have the power of both life and death, depending on how they are used and who is using them.

 There’s always more to discuss, but that’s all we have time for today.