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Debt Rattle March 5 2026

Mar 052026
 
 March 5, 2026  Posted by at 10:23 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,


“Flora” (Roman Goddess of Spring), Villa di Arianna, Pompei 1st Century A.D.


• Keir Starmer Takes Cowardice to New Lows (Tim O’Brien)
• Jeffrey Sachs: ‘Trump Is An Utter Disgrace To Our Nation – He Lied To Us’ (ZH)
• Iran Conflict – Oil Disruption Hits Key BRICS Members Hard (CTH)
• Fetterman Chooses Country Over Party After Iran Operation (David Manney)
• Trump: US Insurance for “All Maritime Trade Flowing Through the Gulf”
• US Sub Sinks Iranian Warship, First Such Hit Since WWII (Catherine Salgado)
• Trump Denies Israel ‘Forced His Hand.’ (Salgado)
• NY AG James Orders Hospital to Resume Gender-Transition for Minors (Turley)
• Trump’s 15% Global Tariff Will Take Effect This Week: Bessent (ET)
• Bessent Outlines U.S. Financial/Economic Stabilization Plan (CTH)
• Walz, Ellison Knew About Minnesota Fraud ‘for Years,’ House Report (DS)
• Minnesota Sues Federal Government Over Medicaid Funding Freeze (Aldgra Fredly)
• SCOTUS Decision Highlights Problems with Parents in Blue States (Turley)
• Ukraine Blocks EU Mission To Inspect Russian Oil Pipeline – FT (RT)

 


 

https://twitter.com/ivan_8848/status/2029139145168183437?s=20 https://twitter.com/GreereMedeea/status/2028870849718108499?s=20

 


 

 


 


They sold Britain. It is no longer a Christian nation. Prepare your kids.

• Keir Starmer Takes Cowardice to New Lows (Tim O’Brien)

To borrow a phrase from Foghorn Leghorn, when describing UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, that boy is softer than a pound of wet leather, and he’s about as sharp as a bowling ball. Whether you agree strategically with the preemptive strikes against Iran by the U.S. and Israel, the reactions of the other developed nations have been a study in intelligence and loyalty on the part of their leaders. My colleague Catherine Salgado addressed this in her piece that focused on the reactions of Spain and Portugal reaction to the strikes: While Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was the most explicitly condemnatory, and forbade use of joint bases for the operation, Croatian Foreign Minister Gordan Radman, French President Emmanuel Macron, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and the Slovenian government all more or less criticized the United States and Israel.


Times like this, you learn who your friends are and who isn’t bright enough to act in their countries’ best interests. Even if they’re still stinging from President Donald Trump’s tariffs—and in some cases, his public beatdowns—smart leaders know how to rise above all of that in this new context. A quick victory and resolution to the war with Iran can serve the West’s best interests on a number of levels, if handled right. Instead, we have a group of largely beta males who partly fear backlash from the Islamic populations in their countries, along with backlash from the Never Trumpers around the world. Some people will do anything to see Trump fail even if it means defending by default the evil and ruthless regime that has run Iran for the past 46 years.

Keir Starmer stands out as a beta male’s beta male. He exudes cowardice—from that chronic deer-in-the-headlights look of fear, to his voice and its trademark trepidation, to a physical presence best described in one word: gooey. When G. Michael Hopf penned his novel Those Who Remain, it seems that he knew that a day would come when Starmer & Co. would arrive on the world stage when he wrote, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.” This week, we’re at the last phase of that sentence. Weak men like Starmer do create hard times.

If the U.S. and Israel are successful, now that hostilities are under way, the world has a chance to benefit by putting an end to the proxy wars and terrorism Iran has funded and orchestrated for decades, killing thousands of Americans. If Trump does what he said he’ll do, he’ll deal a final blow to Iran’s campaign to possess nuclear arms and the weaponry to strike the West with them. In that scenario, the whole world benefits. If that’s all Trump achieves, it’s a win. Smart world leaders can see that and will want to position themselves to be in Trump’s good graces if he succeeds. Leaders who aren’t too bright, or who act out of fear, will lose if he succeeds. This is Starmer’s “courageous” stand on the matter of deciding not to support the U.S. Speaking in Parliament, he called Trump’s efforts to prevent Iran from having nukes an “unlawful action.”

https://twitter.com/g_gosden/status/2028519334612529596


In his first official statement after the strikes against Iran, Starmer practically ran to the nearest podium and microphone to make it clear that he and his government “played no role in these strikes.”

https://twitter.com/naijaamebonews/status/2027836993275576472


A real man in charge of a country like the UK would either openly support the U.S. in a situation like this or, if he disagreed with it, stay quiet while the situation is most volatile and give his ally a chance to take care of business. Instead, what Starmer did was to make sure the people he fears know that he’s not just distancing himself from the fighting, but running away from it. In doing this, he undermined the U.S, his supposed ally.He made it clear that he did not support any UK involvement in the attacks on Iran. He made it clear that his military would focus on defending itself and British installations.

He decided on Sunday, the day after hostilities started, to give the U.S. permission to use its bases for certain operations. This was a change of course after it was reported that, prior to the operation, the UK had denied America’s request to use British bases in its Operation Epic Fury. In reaction to Starmer, Trump told the news media, “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.” He said he was not happy with the Starmer, even though he eventually allowed the U.S. access to the base at Diego Garcia to mount strikes against Iranian missile facilities.

In a 24-hour period, Trump took the opportunity to let the world and Starmer know three times that Starmer’s initial rejection of American requests to use certain facilities had dealt a serious blow to U.S.-UK relations. Trump told the Sun that the “relationship is obviously not what it was,” and then he told the Telegraph that Starmer delayed giving the U.S. permission beyond what would have been reasonable. Trump suspects what everyone does at this point – that Starmer fears the Islamic community and is pandering to it, as he did here.

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Now, now, Jeff!!

• Jeffrey Sachs: ‘Trump Is An Utter Disgrace To Our Nation – He Lied To Us’ (ZH)

Columbia University economics professor Jeffrey D. Sachs appeared on Judge Napolitano’s ‘Judging Freedom’ podcast Monday, where he railed against the US-Israeli attack on Iran and the ‘CIA-led security state,’ calling President Donald Trump a ‘disgrace to our nation’ because ‘he lied to us.’



Sachs, a longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy, described the recent escalation as the continuation of a decades-old strategy he linked to Israeli and U.S. intelligence objectives dating back to 1996. “This is a long-term plan. This is a Mossad CIA plan for American control of the Middle East and Israeli military hegemony in the Middle East that has been underway since 1996,” Sachs said. “This is madness. This is murderous delusion.” The professor pointed to a series of U.S.-backed or U.S.-involved conflicts across the region, from Libya and Sudan to Somalia and the ongoing crisis in Gaza, as evidence of a consistent pattern aimed ultimately at confronting Iran.

“It has involved wars across the Middle East. It has left rivers of blood from Libya to Sudan, Somalia, the genocide in Gaza,” he said, adding that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s goal since the mid-1990s has been “the destruction of Iran.”= Sachs reserved some of his strongest language for Trump, whom he said reversed course on key foreign-policy pledges after taking office. “Trump… is an utter disgrace to our nation. Utter disgrace. He lied to us. Every word about America first… And he did exactly the opposite of what he said,” Sachs stated. The economist also criticized Washington’s approach to diplomacy more broadly, arguing that the United States has abandoned genuine negotiation in favor of coercive tactics. “The United States does not negotiate. It cheats… Now they kill you because if you negotiate, it means you’re weak,” he said.

On the domestic front, Sachs connected the country’s infrastructure challenges to the enormous costs of overseas military engagements.“Why do the roads not work and the bridges not work in the United States?… It’s because we spend trillions of dollars in war,” he said. “China just completed its 50,000th kilometer of fast rail because China doesn’t go to war.” Sachs concluded by expressing deep skepticism about the current state of American governance. “We’re in the hands of gangsters. We’re not in the hands of a constitutional system,” he said, noting that only a handful of lawmakers – citing Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) as one example – have pushed back.

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OK for now.

• Iran Conflict – Oil Disruption Hits Key BRICS Members Hard (CTH)

• First blow, the Trump tariffs hit Beijing hardest. • Second blow, the Beijing tentacle on the Panama Canal is severed. • Third blow, global tariff threats changed the risk dynamic for southeast Asia countries who acted as transnational shippers for China. • Fourth blow, cheap sanctioned oil from Venezuela was cut-off. • Now, the fifth blow; cheap, sanctioned Iranian oil is disrupted.


As noted by Politico: Following USA military strikes, “ships have begun to avoid the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Iran — a critical shipping lane for Gulf nations to export oil to Asia. China in 2025 received about half of its imported oil from the six Gulf countries that rely on the strait. Other large crude oil producers in the region — including Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates — transport almost all their crude exports through the geographic bottleneck.”


It’s not just a factor of oil flow, but also the price that China will ultimately end up having to pay. Beijing was buying oil from Venezuela, Iran and Russia at steep discounts because their purchases were skirting western sanctions. With Iranian oil production now no longer a market option, China will seek to replace their needs with more Russian alternative. However, that diversion means the oil India was purchasing from Russia will come at a higher price, and the refined final product that was exported by India will arrive to the European Union carrying an additional cost. Simultaneously, Vladimir Putin was asked about Russia’s lack of military support to Iran in response to the U.S. military action, to wit the Russian president noted the technical terms of their joint military agreements did not include Russia’s immediate involvement. In shorthand, Russia is busy and is not getting involved.

Russia was/is partially dependent on receiving military supplies from Iran in exchange for oil transfers. The military component is reported to include drones from Iran for use in the Ukraine conflict. Now that exchange profile is shuttered. Taking Iran’s malign influence off the geopolitical chessboard is beginning to surface in major challenges to the BRICS assembly (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Russia, China and India are impacted directly. The BRICS nations were skirting western oil sanctions by trading the commodity outside the petrodollar structure. However, President Trump now controls the flow of oil from Venezuela, and his administration controls the currency in which it is sold.

With Iranian oil removed from the non-petro supply chain, the only remaining non-petro oil producer is Russia – who is simultaneously hit with a loss in military hardware support. China may end up as a larger oil customer to Russia, but at what price and in what payment structure. With global oil supplies in a state of flux, and with the USA in control of the oil flow from Venezuela, North America is certainly in the best position for minimal energy disruption. Asia is heavily dependent on oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, and the majority of Europe has already shut themselves off from Russian oil production, putting themselves in a position of dependency to the global markets. The short-term ramifications of this oil disruption hit China, Southeast Asia, Japan and Europe particularly hard.

“OPEC+ countries affirmed on Sunday that they would boost oil production starting in April by 206,000 barrels daily — a modest increase intended to dampen the war’s effect on prices down the road. The majority of the increase would come from Saudi Arabia and Russia.” {SOURCE}

All of a sudden, this happens: Zelenskyy not to be trusted? “Ukraine is under pressure to let the EU inspect a damaged pipeline carrying Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia, as the two pro-Kremlin countries accuse Kyiv of overstating the impact of an attack by Moscow — despite what Ukrainian officials say is evidence of extensive destruction,” the report said. According to five diplomats and EU officials who spoke to the FT, even pro- Ukrainian governments within the European Union and the European Commission have also asked Ukraine to permit a delegation to inspect the pipeline. Two sources told the newspaper that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen requested access for EU experts during her visit to Kyiv on Feb. 24, the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The request, according to the sources, was refused.

As tensions escalated, the EU’s ambassador to Ukraine, Katarina Mathernova, reportedly asked through the presidential office for permission to inspect the damaged pipeline herself or to allow visits by other EU diplomats. Those requests were denied for security reasons, the sources said.”

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John Fetterman thinks for himself. Works for me.

• Fetterman Chooses Country Over Party After Iran Operation (David Manney)

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) backed the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran without hesitation, calling Operation Epic Fury entirely appropriate, and said eliminating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the un-alived supreme leader of Iran, removed one of the most dangerous figures in modern history.


President Donald Trump confirmed the mission targeted senior regime leadership gathered in Tehran, with early reports stating roughly 40 to 50 of the top Iranian officials were killed in the attack’s early wave. Fetterman didn’t hedge, asking why anybody would grieve leaders of a regime tied to terror networks and decades of repression. He said that Americans should recognize the strategic impact of removing the head of a government that funds violence across the world.


Fetterman’s stance again puts him at odds with several Democratic colleagues who questioned the legality and timing of the strikes. He described their reactions as bizarre. He pointed to the regime’s record, including the 1988 mass executions of political prisoners that killed an estimated 30,000 dissidents under orders tied to regime leadership, making clear the target wasn’t the Iranian people, just the regime. Vice President JD Vance stated that the administration’s objectives remain preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Fetterman said he’d oppose efforts to restrict the president’s authority under the War Powers Resolution.

Because Fetterman’s policy beliefs keep him planted firmly on the left, Fetterman won’t switch parties. But when national security comes into focus, he regularly breaks from progressive orthodoxy and takes a position rooted in deterrence and strength. In a chamber full of Congresscritters using scripted responses, his statements read as uncommon steadiness. Critics raised legal concerns, questioning whether the threshold for immediate military action had been met, while others argued Congress should’ve been consulted before the strike. Raise of hands: who envisions Schiff, Jeffries, and Swalwell would keep their pie holes shut?

Fetterman countered that Iran’s nuclear development and missile expansion represent a continuing threat, even if not tied to a single launch window, saying that waiting for perfect conditions invites greater danger.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu led his country’s role in the coordinated strike, and Fetterman defended both Netanyahu and Trump against critics who labeled the attack as reckless. Fetterman argued that removing senior regime leadership weakens proxy forces such as Hezbollah. His position exposed a visible split inside his party, particularly among lawmakers who reflexively oppose any military action.

The broader debate now turns on escalation and authority. President Trump said the objective remains stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions and restoring deterrence in the region. Lawmakers continue to argue over oversight and limits, but Fetterman’s remarks show that support for the strikes crosses party lines, even if only in narrow lanes. The result of Operation Epic Fury and how it will reshape the relations between the U.S. and Iran remains to be seen. What’s clear is that one Democrat senator chose to defend a strike he believes strengthens American and Israeli security, even when doing so separates him from much of his caucus. National security debates test whether lawmakers follow party currents or independent judgment. Fetterman, thankfully, chose judgment.

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This will solve the economy at home. You just wait.

• Trump: US Insurance for “All Maritime Trade Flowing Through the Gulf”

This is a remarkable position for President Trump to take. Optimal Solutions: (President Trump) – “Effective IMMEDIATELY, I have ordered the United States Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to provide, at a very reasonable price, political risk insurance and guarantees for the Financial Security of ALL Maritime Trade, especially Energy, traveling through the Gulf. This will be available to all Shipping Lines.


If necessary, the United States Navy will begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, as soon as possible. No matter what, the United States will ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD. The United States’ ECONOMIC and MILITARY MIGHT is the GREATEST ON EARTH — More actions to come. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP“

President Trump will use the full weight of the U.S. military to change behavior in Iran. Not just to change the regime per se’, but to change the behavior of whoever surfaces to represent the interests of the people. The change in behavior is the goal. While this forced shift is underway, the full weight of the USA will also seek to mitigate any collateral economic damage to well behaved economic partners. Forceful action, optimal stewardship.

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“.. the first kill by a U.S. submarine since World War II. “

• US Sub Sinks Iranian Warship, First Such Hit Since WWII (Catherine Salgado)

A United States submarine successfully sank an Iranian regime warship, according to a Wednesday morning update from the secretary of war.The American submarine using a torpedo to sink an Iranian ship is particularly historic because, according to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, this is the first such sinking of a ship since World War II. And just as the USA demanded unconditional surrender during World War II, Hegseth emphasized, now the U.S. is in it to win it again. The U.S.-Israeli joint Operation Epic Fury continues to claim prizes, including a warship named for the terrorist Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leader (Qasem Soleimani) whom Donald Trump eliminated during his first term and on behalf of whom the likewise assassinated Ayatollah Khamenei repeatedly vowed to assassinate President Donald Trump.


“The Iranian Navy rests at the bottom of the Persian Gulf,” Hegseth confidently announced. “[It’s] combat ineffective, decimated, destroyed, defeated, pick your adjective. In fact, last night, we sunk their prize ship, the ‘Soleimani’.” Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans and the wounding of thousands more. Not only is he dead thanks to the first Trump administration, but the second Trump administration even took out the ship named for him. As Hegseth joked, “Looks like POTUS got him twice.”

Hegseth assured America and the world that the Iranian regime’s “navy is not a factor. Pick your adjective, it is no more.” He continued, “In fact, yesterday, in the Indian Ocean, and we’ll play it on the screen there, an American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo, quiet death.” That is particularly impressive because it represents the U.S. Navy’s “first sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since World War II. Like in that war, back when we were still the War Department, we are fighting to win,” Hegseth declared.

Trump insisted on restoring the name of the War Department to the Defense Department, and from Venezuela to Iran to Ecuador, the U.S. military has been pulling off spectacular operations ever since. What’s in a name? The difference between weakness and strength, it seems. The Iranian regime had assassins in the United States attempting to kill President Trump even before he came to office again, as they seemed to understand that his return to power would spell disaster for them, as it did. But Hegseth noted, “Also, yesterday, the leader of the unit who attempted to assassinate President Trump has been hunted down and killed. Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.”

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Yeah yeah. Sure.

• Trump Denies Israel ‘Forced His Hand.’ (Salgado)

President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth summarily demolished the argument from Jew-haters that the Israeli government forced the USA into a joint strike on Iran’s regime. Despite what Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and the rest of the Jihad Squad claim, Israel didn’t strong-arm the United States into Operation Epic Fury. The Iranian terrorist regime brought it all upon themselves.The fact is that the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and co. were treating this administration the way they have treated almost every U.S. administration over decades. They defied the U.S., funded the terrorists who attacked our troops and our allies, screamed “death to America” over and over, and demanded we lie down and take it.


But this time, it didn’t turn out the way it usually does. Unlike Barack Obama or Joe Biden, who rewarded Iranian jihad, Donald Trump grew tired of being pushed around. A reporter asked Trump during a press conference if Israel “forced” his hand on the Operation Epic Fury strikes. Trump coolly replied, “No, I might have forced their hand. You see, we were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. They were going to attack. If we didn’t do it, they were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that.”

Trump’s first priority and duty is to the American people. Democrats think we should always prioritize foreign terrorists, tyrants, and dictators, and that’s why they’re furious about this. Think of how much American money went to the Ayatollah’s regime through the hands of Democrats. At a certain point, America has to face reality about Islamic dictatorships and acknowledge that Muslim sacred texts have been commanding jihad against non-Muslims for some 1,400 years, and that the endless violence and conflict is not going to stop because of diplomacy. We have been at war with Iran’s regime for half a century, and eventually one government or the other must concede defeat.

Hence Trump observed, “And we have great negotiators, great people, people that do this very successfully, and have done it all their lives — very successful — and based on the way the negotiation was going, I think they were going to attack first. And I didn’t want that to happen.” Trump therefore preempted them with Operation Epic Fury, as Hegseth confirmed. “So if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” Trump added. “But Israel was ready, and we were ready, and we’ve had a — a very, very powerful impact.”

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Letitia, where did we go wrong?

• NY AG James Orders Hospital to Resume Gender-Transition for Minors (Turley)

In a rare and controversial move, New York Attorney General Letitia James has ordered a Manhattan hospital to resume offering gender-transition treatment to transgender youth. NYU Langone had discontinued such treatments after funding threats from the Trump administration. It is now caught between the proverbial rock (HHS) and a hard place (NYAG). Last year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order entitled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” seeking to restrict gender-transition treatment for people under 19. HHS then threatened hospitals with a cut off of federal Medicaid and Medicare funding for continuing such treatment for children.


Various European countries have also halted certain procedures after countervailing studies suggesting that the risks are too high. England’s National Health Service 2024 report on the subject, known as the Cass Report, found concerning evidence of harm for minors and inconclusive benefits. James threatened “further action” if NYU Langone does not defy the Trump Administration, declaring that the cessation of its Transgender Youth Health Program violates New York anti-discrimination law by “jeopardizing access to medically necessary healthcare for some of the most vulnerable New Yorkers.” NYU Langone had previously declared that it would no longer provide certain gender-transition treatments for patients under the age of 19.

James’s move could trigger a fascinating challenge. In the Feb. 25 letter signed by the attorney general’s health care bureau chief, Darsana Srinivasan, the state said that the federal regulatory change did not affect a “medical institution’s existing duties and obligations under New York law.” That raises an interesting conflict between state and federal regulations.The letter gives the hospital until March 11 to comply and resume these treatments. Effectively, James is ordering the hospital to defy the federal government. However, the hospital, not James or the state, would bear the financial and regulatory consequences.

While James does not state how she will penalize the hospital, the letter is likely sufficient to challenge the move. The question is whether the political costs for the NYU hospital are prohibitive. There is also the question of whether the HHS has standing or interest in challenging the move as a direct threat to federal authority. The problem with a federal challenge is that nothing in the New York threat prevents the federal government from carrying out its intent to cut off funding. Hospitals would have to choose between penalties in New York or loss of funding in Washington. Nevertheless, New York’s move is a direct attack on the enforcement of federal policy by state hospitals.

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The first ever openly gay Treasury Secretary is loyal to a T. He’s also very good at what he does.

• Trump’s 15% Global Tariff Will Take Effect This Week: Bessent (ET)

President Donald Trump’s 15 percent global tariff will take effect sometime this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. Following the Supreme Court’s rebuke of the president’s signature economic policy last month, Trump imposed a 10 percent global tariff, invoking Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. A day later, Trump pledged to raise the rate to 15 percent. In an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on March 4, Bessent confirmed that the new rate would be introduced sometime this week and remain in place for 150 days. He also anticipates tariff rates would return to the levels that were in place before the high court’s decision. “It’s my strong belief that the tariff rates will be back to their old rate within five months,” Bessent said.


“They have survived more than 4000 legal challenges. They are more slow moving, but they are more robust.” Bessent’s comments come two days after a U.S. federal appeals court rejected the president’s effort to postpone legal proceedings connected to tariff refunds, sending the battle to a lower court. Estimates suggest the federal government’s tariff refunds could total $175 billion. Fiscal year-to-date, the administration’s tariffs have generated more than $150 billion, according to Treasury data as of March 2. Global energy markets have been highly volatile since the Iran War, with crude oil and natural gas prices rocketing on fears of supply disruptions.

The president calmed down the oil market on March 3. In a Truth Social post, Trump said the White House would offer naval escorts and guarantee political risk insurance for commercial oil and gas tankers traveling through the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Hormuz is a vital global chokepoint that handles approximately 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products per day. It has effectively been shuttered as insurance companies canceled coverage or dramatically raised premiums. But the administration will make additional announcements to help stabilize prices, Bessent said. n“We have a series of announcements that we’re going to be making,” Bessent stated.

“We began yesterday with the announcement that [Development Finance Corporation] will provide the insurance for both the crude carriers and the cargo ships operating in around the Gulf over the weekend.” He shrugged off a possible energy shock as the Middle East conflict intensified, saying that the United States and the global marketplace maintain ample supplies. “This was a well telegraphed geopolitical event. The crude market had already moved substantially over the past two months. The crude markets are very well supplied,” Bessent said. A barrel of West Texas Intermediate—the U.S. benchmark for oil prices—fell by about 0.5 percent in pre-market trading to around $74 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Brent—the international benchmark—was little changed at slightly above $81 a barrel on London’s ICE Futures exchange. “Oil prices retreated after news the U.S. will ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, easing fears of a major global supply shock,” Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist for LPL Financial, said in a note emailed to The Epoch Times. “Softer oil prices are also helping cool inflation concerns and pull interest rates lower.” Market watchers had warned that the risk of oil prices reaching $100 were high if the narrow waterway were closed for an extended period. U.S. stocks also rebounded midweek, with the leading benchmark averages in the green prior to the opening bell.

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… the 3:00 minute mark of the video

• Bessent Outlines U.S. Financial/Economic Stabilization Plan (CTH)

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appears on CNBC to discuss the Trump administration policies that were proactively deployed during Operation Epic Fury. The goal of global financial stabilization is actually part of the strategic planning within the White House, including Treasury, Energy and Interior in alignment with the State Dept., Pentagon and national security agencies. Part of that plan was the announcement for the U.S. to underwrite maritime insurance to ensure a minimal disruption to the global energy markets. Secretary Bessent discusses the insurance facet at the 3:00 minute mark of the video below.
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Wasn’t this Walz figure part of the Kamala cloud posse in the 1800s? Losers cling together, right?

• Walz, Ellison Knew About Minnesota Fraud ‘for Years,’ House Report (DS)

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was aware of the widespread welfare fraud in his state “for years” and “repeatedly failed to act,” alleges a congressional report released on Wednesday. Walz and the state’s Attorney General Keith Ellison are set to testify Wednesday about the $9 billion scandal before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The report, which also alleges that Ellison knew of the welfare fraud in Minnesota, draws from interviews with state employees and whistleblowers. “Senior officials in the governor’s office and Attorney General Ellison’s office were aware of credible fraud concerns in Minnesota’s social services programs as early as 2019 within the Department of Human Services (DHS) and by April 2020 within the Department of Education (MDE), despite later public statements by Governor Walz suggesting otherwise,” the report says.


The committee and staff conducted transcribed interviews with nine key current and former Minnesota state officials. The investigation focuses on alleged money laundering and fraud in Minnesota’s social services programs, uncovered by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota. The report, titled “The Cost of Doing Nothing,” further alleges retaliation against whistleblowers, including surveillance, and quotes some officials as not acting against suspected fraud out of fear of being labeled a racist. “As a result, potentially billions of American taxpayer dollars were allowed to flow to fraudulent actors, while vulnerable populations were harmed and whistleblowers were ignored, sidelined, and retaliated against,” the House report says.

This led to about $300 million in federal child nutrition funds and potentially $9 billion in Medicaid-related funds lost or placed at significant risk, according to the report. “Testimony obtained by the committee reveals that Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were aware of widespread fraud in social service programs, lied about their knowledge of the fraud, and retaliated against employees who dared to raise concerns,” House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said in a statement. The report also alleges whistleblower retaliation against state employees who raised red flags at the Minnesota Department of Human Services.

“Whistleblowers within the DHS have alleged that Governor Walz not only knew about this fraud, but that he retaliated against whistleblowers, ‘spen[ding] millions on surveilling staff and hiring private investigator (sic) or law firms to silence staff,’” the report says. The agency’s then-temporary commissioner confirmed to investigators that the agency “used outside entities” to investigate its own staff, according to the report. “Instead of protecting vulnerable Americans, they handed over billions in taxpayer dollars to fraudsters and threw their own state employees under the bus,” Comer added. “Governor Walz and Attorney General Ellison are appearing before the committee because the American people deserve clear answers about how this rampant fraud was allowed to flourish under their watch.”

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“The state accused the government of weaponizing the Medicaid program as ‘political punishment.’”

• Minnesota Sues Federal Government Over Medicaid Funding Freeze (Aldgra Fredly)

Minnesota filed a lawsuit on March 2 to block the federal government from withholding $243 million in Medicaid funds, saying the freeze could lead to potential cuts in medical services for low-income individuals. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) last month temporarily deferred $259 million in Medicaid funds to Minnesota over alleged fraud in the state’s program, according to the court filing. The lawsuit, filed by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and the state’s Human Services Department, asked the court to block the withholding of $243 million of those funds that were tied to 14 services the government identified as “high-risk” and subject to “noncompliance action.”


“These cuts are the latest in a long series of efforts to go around the law to punish Minnesotans — but just as we fought back and won when they illegally tried to cut funding for childcare, hungry families, and our schools, we are suing them again today to make them follow the law,” Ellison said in a statement. The suit called the funding freeze unlawful, alleging that the government used the program as “political punishment” against the state, citing its previous attempts to withhold other funding from the state, including funds tied to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). According to the lawsuit, the federal government announced in January that it would freeze more than $2 billion in annual Medicaid funding to Minnesota over allegations of noncompliance.

The state appealed but said the federal government has not clarified the alleged conduct it deemed noncompliant or how Minnesota can remedy the issue. n “Impatient that it cannot withhold the $2 billion until Minnesota is provided a hearing and other due process, the administration ‘deferred’ $243 million from the state on February 25, 2026,” it stated.The lawsuit is seeking a temporary restraining order to block the funding freeze, saying the withholding of funds would affect more than 1 million Minnesota residents enrolled in Medicaid.

“Unless the deferral is quickly reversed, the state will be irreparably harmed. The administration has already stated that the deferral will recur every quarter, crippling the state budget,” it stated. The lawsuit names the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, as well as Dr. Mehmet Oz, in his official capacity as CMS administrator, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in his official capacity as health secretary.

Read more …

Problems? You suck!

• SCOTUS Decision Highlights Problems with Parents in Blue States (Turley)

In the law, the concept of In loco parentis refers to those who act in the place of parents. The problem is when that authority is taken rather than granted. It is a growing problem in blue states as parents push back on Democratic measures stripping them of notice or consent over their children in public schools. In the last few months, Democrats have been buoyed by protests over immigration enforcement. Many politicians have fueled a wave of rage sweeping major cities before the midterm elections, denouncing law enforcement as “Gestapo” and “Nazis.”


However, a Supreme Court decision this week may lay bare an even greater threat to Democratic aspirations over parental rights. For many parents, blue states are attacking the most fundamental right of citizens in raising their own children. This week, the Supreme Court granted an emergency appeal filed on behalf of Catholic parents in California. The order in Mirabelli v. Bonta proved a decisive victory for parental rights and an equally notable defeat for California democrats.

The action, filed by the Thomas More Society, challenged a policy under a state law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2024, that prevented teachers from notifying parents of their children’s gender identity changes. The law was heralded as a protection against the “outing” of transgender students. Some of us have been following the litigation since the original filing and heralded the decision of District Court Judge Roger Benitez, who wrote a powerful opinion in support of the rights of all parents. However, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit stayed his injunction.In issuing the order on its “shadow docket,” the Court delivered a key win for parental rights that many of us have been seeking for years.

Blue state legislators and educators have been waging a war on parental rights, particularly in the area of transgender policies. Recently, in Michigan, parents sued to defend their rights after the Rockford Public School District refused to inform them of gender identity changes in their children. Last year, I wrote about a startling decision in Foote v. Feliciano in which the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled against Massachusetts parents Marissa Silvestri and Stephen Foote seeking such notice. As in the California case, they learned that school administrators did not inform them that their 11-year-old child had self-declared as “genderqueer” and that teachers and staff were using a new name and new pronouns for the student.

The First Circuit dismissed the right of parents over their own children in the case, holding that “as per our understanding of Supreme Court precedent, our pluralistic society assigns those curricular and administrative decisions to the expertise of school officials, charged with the responsibility of educating children.” Foote was a chilling decision that reflected the view of state officials that parents give up their rights over their children when enrolling them in public schools. That view was evident in the comment of State Rep. Lee Snodgrass (D-Wis.), who once tweeted: “If parents want to ‘have a say’ in their child’s education, they should home school or pay for private school tuition out of their family budget.” [..]

Read more …

4 years of nothing.

• Ukraine Blocks EU Mission To Inspect Russian Oil Pipeline – FT (RT)

Ukraine has rejected a proposed EU mission to inspect the Soviet-era pipeline that transports Russian oil through Ukrainian territory to Central Europe, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing diplomats and officials. Hungary and Slovakia have accused Ukraine of deliberately blocking the flow through the Druzhba pipeline, while Ukraine said the infrastructure was damaged by Russian strikes in January. The EU is pressuring Ukraine to restore the operation of the Soviet-era pipeline that transports Russian oil through Ukrainian territory to Central Europe, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing diplomats and officials.


Hungary and Slovakia have accused Ukraine of deliberately blocking the flow through the Druzhba pipeline, while Ukraine claimed the infrastructure was damaged by Russian strikes in January. According to FT, some pro-Ukrainian EU member states and the European Commission are now asking Kiev to allow a visit to demonstrate that it is working to restore oil flows. Last week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa personally requested access to the pipeline for inspection but were denied, FT said.One of the newspaper’s sources argued that by blocking the inspection, Ukraine scored an “own goal” and gave Hungary an excuse to veto the planned $106 billion emergency loan for Ukraine and the EU’s 20th round of sanctions against Russia.

In a post on X on Tuesday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he had sent a letter to von der Leyen calling for enforcement of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, which “obliges Ukraine to allow oil shipments to Hungary.” “As confirmed by recently published satellite evidence, there is no technical or operational reason preventing the pipeline from reverting to normal operations immediately,” Orban stated. nmOrban said that Hungary and Slovakia had proposed dispatching a “fact-finding mission” to inspect the pipeline, but their “efforts were rejected.”

In August, Hungary imposed sanctions on Ukraine’s top drone commander Robert Brovdi after attacks on sections of the Druzhba pipeline in Russia. Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has called on Hungary to stop purchasing energy from Russia. Reuters reported on Tuesday that some EU members, including France and Germany, oppose the idea of granting Ukraine fast-tracked accession to the bloc, citing “rampant corruption.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/AndrewBolis/status/2029168756661039225?s=20 https://twitter.com/Juliedonuts/status/2029187803414671858?s=20 https://twitter.com/HungaryBased/status/2028915815525781828?s=20 https://twitter.com/AstronomyVibes/status/2029110904508547240?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Home › Forums › Debt Rattle March 5 2026

Viewing 40 posts - 41 through 80 (of 81 total)
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  • March 5, 2026 at 4:59 pm #233451
    Topcat
    Participant

    The Empire of Lies and the Kurds

    Geopolitical Reality

    “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me the 8th time….”

    March 5, 2026 at 5:00 pm #233452
    those darned kids
    Participant

    good thing japan never gets into wars about oil..

    https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Japanese-Refiners-Urge-Government-to-Release-Strategic-Oil-Reserves.html

    March 5, 2026 at 5:06 pm #233453
    Topcat
    Participant

    Fighting for Trumptard, not a smart move historically.

    “The United States has a long, documented history of using Kurdish forces as strategic allies against common enemies, only to abandon them when geopolitical priorities shift.”

    What a shock the Empire of Lies phucking over an ‘ally’

    Then again the Kurds aren’t that smart

    U.S.-Kurdish betrayals include:

    1970s (Iraq): The U.S. and Iran armed Iraqi Kurds against Baghdad but abruptly cut off support in 1975 after the Shah settled territorial disputes with Iraq, leaving Kurds vulnerable.

    1991 (Iraq): After encouraging a Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein, the U.S. stood by while Iraqi forces crushed the rebellion, resulting in massive casualties and a refugee crisis.

    2017 (Iraq): The U.S. refused to back the Iraqi Kurdish independence referendum, leading to them losing control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk to the Iraqi government.

    2019 (Syria): President Trump ordered the withdrawal of U.S. troops, abandoning the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) who had been key allies against ISIS, clearing the way for a Turkish military incursion.

    2025-2026 (Syria): Continued concerns regarding U.S. stability in the region and the vulnerability of Kurds in Northeast Syria to Turkish and Syrian government actions

    March 5, 2026 at 5:07 pm #233454
    chooch
    Participant

    In Markets We Trust.

    https://x.com/TheMuslim786/status/2029434445594542197?s=20

    March 5, 2026 at 5:08 pm #233455
    chooch
    Participant

    March 5, 2026 at 5:09 pm #233456
    chooch
    Participant

    March 5, 2026 at 5:11 pm #233457
    those darned kids
    Participant

    “Well, Jim, Gold and Silver are not up, so it’s obvious that schools and hospitals and fire stations and radio stations and community centers and police stations are not being targeted in double tap [how perverse – ed] operations, leaving headless corpses on the street for parents to pick up and take home.

    Now, here’s Jenny with our WDNL trafficcopter All Is Perfect TrafficCast, brought to you by your 401-k…”

    March 5, 2026 at 5:42 pm #233459
    those darned kids
    Participant

    get ready for the ayatollah kid rock:

    “President Trump told Axios in an interview Thursday that he needs to be personally involved in selecting Iran’s next leader — just as he was in Venezuela.”

    March 5, 2026 at 6:03 pm #233460
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Still…
    We can look forward to:
    Israel being obliterated by Iran
    Death of the petrodollar
    Iran, Russia and China crushing NATO allowing the world to live in peace

    March 5, 2026 at 6:15 pm #233468
    zerosum
    Participant

    Copilot:

    The themes you’ve grouped together — radiation, nukes, power plants, Israel, refugees — point to a cluster of current concerns: nuclear facilities being struck in conflict, the risk of radiological release, and the humanitarian consequences for civilians. I can walk you through what is actually happening, what is being warned about, and what is not supported by evidence.

    Nuclear facilities and recent strikes
    International reporting notes that Israel has struck Iranian nuclear‑related sites, and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has warned that such attacks carry a risk of radiological or chemical contamination if sensitive facilities are damaged. This warning was issued after Israel bombed Iran’s primary uranium‑enrichment facility, with the IAEA urging all parties to avoid escalation.
    This does not mean a nuclear explosion is possible — enrichment plants cannot detonate like weapons — but damage can release contaminated materials into the environment.

    Israel’s own nuclear infrastructure
    Israel’s nuclear research centers, including the Negev Nuclear Research Center, are well‑known internationally, though Israel maintains a policy of ambiguity about its nuclear capabilities. These facilities are not commercial power plants and are not designed like civilian reactors.
    There is no verified reporting that these sites have been destroyed or seriously damaged. Viral claims that Iranian missiles “destroyed Israel’s nuclear power plants” have been fact‑checked and found to be false.

    Radiation risks in conflict zones
    Radiation concerns in wartime usually fall into three categories:
    – Damage to enrichment or research facilities, which can release contaminated dust or chemicals.
    – Damage to spent‑fuel storage, which poses a more serious radiological hazard.
    – Damage to medical or industrial radioactive sources, which can cause localized contamination.
    The IAEA’s recent warnings relate specifically to the first category — contamination risk, not nuclear detonation.

    Refugees and displacement
    When nuclear‑related sites are struck, even without confirmed contamination, civilians often flee pre‑emptively. Fear of radiation — even when the actual risk is low — can drive large‑scale displacement.
    This pattern has been seen in:
    – Conflicts involving nuclear research sites
    – Areas near damaged industrial facilities
    – Regions where governments cannot provide clear, trusted information
    If a radiological incident were confirmed, displacement would be even more severe, as people tend to evacuate far beyond official safety zones.

    How these threads connect
    Putting the pieces together:
    – Israel has struck Iranian nuclear‑related facilities, prompting international warnings about contamination risk.
    – False claims have circulated about Israel’s own nuclear sites being destroyed.
    – Radiation fears, even without confirmed release, can trigger refugee flows and humanitarian pressure.
    – Actual nuclear explosions are not on the table — enrichment plants cannot detonate like weapons.
    The real risk is radiological contamination, panic‑driven displacement, and further escalation if nuclear‑related sites continue to be targeted.

    March 5, 2026 at 6:16 pm #233469
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Executive Order Now Lets Bankers Empty Their Private Equity Garbage Into the Retirement Accounts of Everyday Americans-The Problem With Blue Owl
    Stan SzymanskiFebruary 25, 2026
    Image Credit: vecteezy.com

    By Stan Szymanski

    Yesterday, Boaz Weinstein of Saba Capital Management, said the weight of the impact of Blue Owl Capital Inc.’s (OWL) private credit funds illiquidity may be an early indicator of vulnerability and weakness in the significant $1.8T market:

    …’“All you need is the snowball to start going down the hill and it started. Blue Owl is right in the middle of that,” Weinstein said at an industry conference in Miami Beach, Florida, Bloomberg reported. “I think we are in the super-early innings of the wheels coming off the car.” (Seeking Alpha 2/24/26)

    Weinsteins’ comments come after Blue Owl permanently blocked withdrawals from a $1.6 Billion private credit vehicle and sold $1.4B in loans to pension funds. Blue Owl also sold loans to its own insurance company, feeding new worries about risks concerning liquidity in this part of the ‘alternatives’ market.

    People might tend to think that ‘Private Equity’ is just for the wealthy that frequent the Hamptons on vacation. This type of ‘alternative’ investment has recently become much more mainstream than most people realize.

    Just last year, President Trump signed an executive order opening the door for providers of 401(k) (and IRA) retirement plans to offer private equity investments to this large and lucrative market:

    …’Private asset managers have been tantalized for years about the $29 trillion in Americans’ retirement accounts. Donald Trump just made it easier for them to get a slice.’…(Forbes 8/8/25)

    In ‘Private Equity Firms Celebrate Trump’s Executive Order Giving Them The Keys To Retirement’ Forbes staff writer Hank Tucker points out that…

    __________________________

    Please consider a donation to Encouraging Angels today. We need your support

    —————————————-

    …’The order also covers other alternative asset classes like real estate and cryptocurrencies. It doesn’t put any policy into effect immediately and simply asks Chavez-DeRemer to clarify this guidance within 180 days, but it didn’t take that long for Chavez DeRemer to hint that her conclusion will be in favor of private equity.’…(Forbes)

    Who thinks that we are on the edge of a great real estate boom? Not so much? The coming ‘Apocolypse ‘of Commercial Real Estate have been documented during the past five years. As far as cryptocurrency is concerned, Bitcoin rallied over $3,000 in the last 24 hours and is still significantly below 70K ($67,467 at last look)-down roughly 47% off its high of just 5 months ago.

    So both real estate and cryptocurrency highlighted in the Forbes article above as an opportunity for the masses, to me, looks like nothing more than the bankers dumping their garbage (Private Equity which is now ‘not so’ Private Equity) into the wallet of many unsuspecting American retirement plan owners.

    One of the other things pointed out about Trump’s Executive Order concerning Private Equity is that the Order requested 180 days for Chavez-DeRemer (who is Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States Secretary of Labor, serving in President Donald Trump’s second administration) to provide clarity concerning the order. That was early August 2025. That means that the six months has just passed and that most likely the door has now been opened private equity investment products.

    Two days ago, the Blue Owl situation has shown just how illiquid Private Equity products can be. Whether the Blue Owl products are now in mainstream retirement accounts, I do not know. This is potentially just the tip of the iceberg. If it was in an individual retirement account, that would be a problem. My concern is that the retirement plans of real hard working Americans will serve as a clearinghouse and a source of liquidity for the bankers while the average person is unknowingly holding assets that may not be able to be sold for a plug nickel in an open and free market. If the bankers private asset products are garbage-how good can their overall liquidity situation be and is this indicative of bigger systemic failures?

    If it were me, I would consider contacting my 401(k)/403(b) et. al. administrator and tell them that I don’t want to be the recipient of Wall Streets’ problems in my portfolio.
    https://www.encouragingangels.org/new-blog/2026/2/25/executive-order-now-lets-bankers-empty-their-private-equity-garbage-into-the-retirement-accounts-of-everyday-americans

    March 5, 2026 at 6:33 pm #233470
    Doc Robinson
    Participant

    From the Tehran Times, in the past hour.

    BREAKING
    The aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln was hit by IRGC Navy missiles

    Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, operating 340 kilometers from Iran’s maritime borders near the Strait of Hormuz, was targeted by missiles of IRGC Navy, according to a spokesperson for the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters.

    The carrier, accompanied by its destroyers, reportedly withdrew at high speed and has since moved more than 1,000 kilometers away from the area.

    https://xcancel.com/Tehrantimes79

    March 5, 2026 at 8:30 pm #233505
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Larry Johnson: Ground Troops, False Flags & Weapons Shortages

    March 5, 2026 at 9:18 pm #233506
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    This Fanatic Clique will destroy the West first, then the World. I didn’t believe it either at first

    March 5, 2026 at 9:59 pm #233507
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Epstein Litmus Test: Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Cenk Uygur Fail, by Marco de Wit – The Unz Review
    https://www.unz.com/article/epstein-litmus-test-tucker-carlson-alex-jones-and-cenk-uygur-fail/

    March 5, 2026 at 10:01 pm #233508
    kultsommer
    Participant

    Thorns in the side….

    March 5, 2026 at 10:22 pm #233509
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    America Is WINNING” — But Iran Just Hit Amazon, Qatar & US Embassy Back

    March 5, 2026 at 10:53 pm #233510
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Evidence of the DEATH of Hundreds of US Troops emerged┃IRAN’s newest KHEIBAR missiles struck ISRAEL

    March 5, 2026 at 11:09 pm #233511
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Gilbert Doctorow: Attack on Iran Hardens Russia’s Stance on Ukraine

    March 5, 2026 at 11:46 pm #233512
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Iran Tightens Hormuz Blockade. US Strikes Intensify. Kurds IN, Ukraine OUT. EU Economic Collapse

    March 5, 2026 at 11:48 pm #233513
    zerosum
    Participant

    for your entertainment
    Copilot:

    Old Mother Hubbard (No Oil in the Gulf)
    Old Mother Hubbard
    Went to the cupboard
    To fetch her poor dog a bite;
    But the shelves were bare,
    And the tickers declared
    That “the Gulf has gone dark overnight.”
    She opened the feed,
    Saw tankers at speed
    All halted in lines on the sea.
    “No oil today,”
    The analysts say,
    “And futures are spiking by three.”
    The dog gave a stare,
    “They struck Qom’s square?
    And the clerics were mid‑succession?”
    Mother replied,
    “When power’s denied,
    Markets respond with aggression.”
    She scrolled through the thread,
    Saw leaders who said
    They’d “stabilize flows in due time.”
    But pipelines were stalled,
    Refineries called,
    And traders were reading the signs.
    Refugees streamed
    Through borders that seemed
    Too narrow for all of their fear.
    “Some flee the blast,
    Some flee forecasts,
    And some flee what’s coming next year.”
    The dog shook his head,
    “A leader is dead,
    And the region is holding its breath.”
    Mother said low,
    “When oil doesn’t flow,
    The world starts predicting its death.”
    They sat in the gloom,
    In their quiet small room,
    While the headlines kept shifting askew.
    “Cupboard is empty,”
    She said, “but there’s plenty
    Of chaos to last till the next breakthrough.”
    ————–

    March 5, 2026 at 11:52 pm #233514
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    How a Strike in Tehran Triggered Panic in Zhongnanhai

    March 5, 2026 at 11:55 pm #233515
    John Day
    Participant

    Musical Chairs For Keeps https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/musical-chairs-for-keeps

    I was up at 4AM again, thinking this through (sorry). It is less organized than some days; oh well.
    The moment of global real-economy inflection from growth to contraction is here, and this is what it looks like.
    Gail Tverberg presents bar graphs correlating periods of plentiful and scarce energy resources with good and bad economic times and world wars.
    In the last dozen years there has been very little spare energy above that needed to maintain economic status quo. This year will likely be a big negative red bar.
    If this is happening, anyway, it is the time to strike against adversaries to impose the global losses upon them, not oneself or even “allies”.

    Gail Tverberg, A New Explanation for Tariffs and Bombings – The underlying problems are energy-related
    A few years ago, I analyzed the growth of world energy consumption, breaking it down into (a) the growth in energy consumption needed to support the growth in world population, and (b) the growth in energy consumption available to support higher standards of living. This analysis covered the period 1820 to 2020. I found that periods of low growth tended to coincide with wars, depressions, and collapses. This is not surprising in a world economy governed by the laws of physics. Every part of the economy requires adequate energy of appropriate kinds…
    ​..In the game of musical chairs, players walk around a group of chairs until the music stops. At the end of each round, one chair is removed, leaving one fewer chair than the number of players. In the next round, the remaining players all scramble for the chairs available, which often leads to small fights over who gets a chair. This not-enough-to-go-around problem explains the poor relations we see today among countries and political parties. It is also the underlying reason for the interest in imposing tariffs and in bombing other countries.​ https://gailtverberg.substack.com/p/a-new-explanation-for-tariffs-and

    Reinsurance for maritime war risk is broken, as AIG broke insurance in 2008. The capital pool was depleted in the Red Sea by Yemen. Now there is a huge shock at the Strait of Hormuz. Risk cannot even be priced. Insurance cannot even be quoted until massive reorganization is done, which will take a long time. The Strait of Hormuz will remain closed to western shipping with standard insurance until this is fixed, long after peace breaks out.There goes 20% of the world’s oil nd natural gas, and 40% of the world’s fertilizer, just before spring planting. The Gulf states now lack food, water and money, also. (Bad for $US)
    ​ Shanaka Perera, The Invisible Siege: How Insurance Markets, Not Missiles, Closed the Strait of Hormuz – And Why the Disruption Will Last Four to Sixteen Months Longer Than Any Model on Wall Street Currently Prices https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-invisible-siege-how-insurance

    It spreads- Shanaka Perera: War risk insurance just repriced the entire Indian Ocean.
    Before the IRIS Dena went down off Sri Lanka, a $100 million tanker transiting the Persian Gulf was paying $400,000 for a single voyage in war risk premiums. That is what 0.125% of hull value looks like when the market is nervous.
    Within 48 hours of the conflict starting, that number went to 1% of hull value. Eight times higher. For one voyage. One way. Now a US submarine has sunk a warship in the Indian Ocean, 40 nautical miles off Sri Lanka, in waters that carry the Mumbai to Singapore corridor, the Kochi to Europe lane, and 88% of India’s crude oil imports.
    Insurers do not price what happened. They price what might happen next. And what happened next was a US Navy submarine finding an Iranian warship in the middle of the Indian Ocean and putting a torpedo through it.
    That vessel had attended a multilateral naval ceremony in Visakhapatnam three days earlier. It was transiting home through what every shipping analyst classified as a non-war zone. There is no non-war zone anymore. https://xcancel.com/shanaka86/status/2029428378173071769

    Gold & Geopolitics: March, 4: paint by missiles The most expensive colouring book in history
    More radars gone. More drones hunted. More Hezbollah rockets. More missiles. More timelines extended. More narrative control…
    ..Hegseth said eight weeks now. Four days became four weeks became eight weeks. At this rate we hit “whatever it takes” by Friday…
    ​..Two radars destroyed in Bahrain. Three radomes at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. One THAAD radar in the UAE. Another in Jordan. The billion-dollar early warning system in Qatar I wrote about on day one. And satellite imagery confirmed yet another THAAD kill in Saudi Arabia today. Two more overnight – Abu Dhabi and a Jordanian airbase.
    ​ Running tally: over $3.4 billion in ground-based sensors. *Poof*​ The IRGC said they did all of this. All confirmed now. By satellite. By the New York Times. By everyone except CENTCOM…
    ​..Once the ground radars go dark, you go after the airborne eyes. The surveillance drones that loiter over Iran feeding targeting data to strike packages. Yesterday I wrote about the Hermes 900s and Herons being picked off. Today the count is 26 drones claimed downed. But the more interesting story is the one the IRGC captured intact. Armed. Not shot down. Landed under Iranian control with its weapons and electronics. That is not a kill. That is a gift basket with a bow on it.
    ​ Radars blind. Drones hunted. And the targets themselves?​ Oh. This is where it gets good.
    ​ The IDF released strike footage today. “Destroyed Iranian Mi-17 helicopter.” “Destroyed F-14 fighter jets.” Mehrabad Airport. Beautiful precision hits. Million-dollar munitions finding their marks on camera.
    ​ 2D ones. On asphalt. With heat signature painted on for good measure. The “helicopter” rotors didn’t move on impact. The “F-14s” sat perfectly still through direct hits. Iran had moved its entire air force underground before the first bomb fell, then drew pictures of the planes on the tarmac and let the world’s most expensive targeting systems have at it.
    ​ Banksy would have signed it.​ https://no01.substack.com/p/march-4-paint-by-missiles

    March 5, 2026 at 11:56 pm #233516
    John Day
    Participant

    ​ Shanaka Perera (again) Iran just fired a ballistic missile toward Turkey. Then Iran said it did not.
    Both of those statements are now the center of the most dangerous legal question in international security: whether NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause, the provision that says an attack on one member is an attack on all, has just been triggered for the first time in the alliance’s 77-year history.
    Here is the sequence of events. A ballistic missile launched from Iranian territory crossed Iraq, crossed Syria, crossed into the Mediterranean, and was destroyed by NATO air defenses before reaching Turkish airspace. Turkey confirmed it. Reuters confirmed it. NATO confirmed it.
    Iran’s armed forces then issued a statement denying they fired anything toward Turkey. Anonymous Turkish officials separately suggested the missile may have been aimed at a British RAF base in Cyprus, not Turkish soil, implying the trajectory over Turkey was incidental rather than intentional. Pete Hegseth, asked directly whether this triggered Article 5, declined to say yes. Now understand what this silence means. Article 5 has a threshold: armed attack against one member is considered an attack against all. A ballistic missile from a state actor that crosses NATO airspace and requires NATO air defense activation to destroy is not a grey area in the text of the treaty. It is the scenario the treaty was written for. But Article 5 is not automatic. It requires political consensus among 32 member states. And the US, the only member whose military posture makes the clause meaningful, just declined to confirm it applies.
    Iran’s denial is not about truth. It is a lifeline being offered to NATO. If Iran admits the launch, NATO must respond or concede the clause is meaningless. If Iran denies it, NATO can accept the denial, classify the missile as a navigation error or misidentification, and avoid the most consequential alliance decision since its founding.
    The question is not whether Iran fired the missile. The question is whether 32 governments are prepared to treat this war as their war.
    Hegseth’s silence was the answer. Iran read it. And it will remember it. https://xcancel.com/shanaka86/status/2029454471760396568

    ​ Excerpts from Gold & Geopolitics Daily digest: 2026-03-05
    QatarEnergy Force Majeure declared – Iranian drones hit Ras Laffan and Mesaieed, taking 20% of global LNG supply offline…
    ​..China halts all diesel and gasoline exports – Sinopec and PetroChina ordered to stop. Beijing has ~10 days of domestic buffer before industrial operations face real constraints…
    ​..US interceptors depleting – key radars destroyed – Qatar now firing PAC-2 missiles manufactured in 2000…
    ​..Hormuz tanker traffic down 90-94%. All 12 P&I clubs (covering 90% of global ocean-going tonnage) cancelled war risk coverage effective March 5 midnight. No commercially insured vessel can legally transit…
    ..Trump announced Navy escorts. Iran answered by asking what those escorts guarantee when you can’t protect a $1.1B radar inside your own most fortified base…
    ​..Goldman forecasts Hormuz flows restart in 5 days, fully normalized by mid-April. The market is pricing this. Shanaka disagrees: 72 hours to close, 6-18 months for full insurance reinstatement. Red Sea took 26 months and never triggered full P&I withdrawal…
    ​..132 container ships with 458,000 TEU capacity trapped inside the Gulf. Maersk suspended all bookings for UAE, Saudi, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Iraq. Five of the world’s top carriers simultaneously stopped moving Gulf cargo.​..
    ​..Gold overtook US Treasuries as largest reserve asset held by foreign central banks in Q3 2025. 23% of global reserves vs Treasuries at 22%. Shanaka’s de-dollarization analysis: the Iran war is not creating de-dollarization, it is revealing how far it had already progressed.
    ​ Venezuela deal: Trump brokered 1,000kg gold purchase from Minerven via Trafigura for US refineries, ~$150M+. Burgum flew to Caracas personally. Shanaka frames this as quiet resource repositioning across the Global South while the news cycle watches Tehran burn.​ https://no1sdailydigest.substack.com/p/daily-digest-2026-03-05

    ​A remarkably clear 10 minutes with a big map: How the Strait of Hormuz Will Start World War 3 | Prof Jiang Explains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOmmHOqMGvo

    Moon of Alabama, War On Iran – Hormuz Escorts, Kurds, Time-frame
    A few of the many interesting current developments of the war on Iran that stand out.
    Trump has announced that the U.S. will escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz…
    ​..The Iranian landscape along the coast is largely mountainous. There are many shelters to hide anti-ship missiles or drones. Ships passing the Strait can be seen by the naked eye (or through infrared devices during night time.) A swarm of medium range drones would overwhelm the air-defenses of any Navy escort trying to help tankers to pass through the strait. And that is before Iran decides to drop mines into the strait’s waters.
    ​ Hoping for escorts to help one to pass the Strait is like hiring body guards when your enemy is known to be a long range snipers. A hopeless endeavor.
    I am sure that the Navy will find ways to let Trump know how futile the escorts would be.
    ​ Iran has known for a long time that its biggest advantage in a war is the economic damage it can cause. Two of the global long range air carriers, the Emirates and Qatar airlines, can no longer fly to their main hubs in the Gulf states. Sea freight will also soon be down to a trickle:
    ​ Maersk said on Wednesday it is temporarily suspending most cargo bookings in and out of the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia until further notice.
    ​ The Jeddah and King Abdullah ports in Saudi Arabia and the Salalah port in Oman remained operational while the shipping group is also still accepting cargo to and from Jordan and Lebanon.
    ​ The White House seems to have given little though about the global economic and other damage that its war against Iran would cause.​ This can also be seen in the ever extending time-frame for its campaign. What started with a ‘days’, ‘a week’, ‘four weeks’ long campaign has now again doubled​. https://www.moonofalabama.org/2026/03/war-on-iran-hormuz-escorts-kurds-time-frame.html

    ​ ​ Or the White House gave some thought. Energy Expert Warns UBS Just How Many Weeks A Hormuz Shutdown Would Send Markets “Out Of Control”
    Energy economist Anas Alhajji warned on a webinar with top UBS analysts that “if this is going to last for four weeks, that’s where things will be completely out of control.”
    ​ Bhanu Baweja, Chief Strategist at UBS, asked Alhajji on the webinar: “How many days would the Strait of Hormuz need to remain shut for us to see a non-linear move in oil, with prices rising to $100 or $120 per barrel? Is there a timeline you can give us?”
    ​ Alhajji responded, “Our main scenario is that if this lasts four weeks, things will be completely out of control. And when I say out of control, I mean that even if China starts releasing oil from its inventories, the problem is that my guess is China would also restrict exports, which means that oil would remain in China. We were counting on that oil being in the market, and now it is not going to be in the market.”
    ​ He continued, “The impact of the U.S. SPR is limited. Saudi Arabia is completely out of the picture. All of that spare capacity in OPEC is out of the picture. So what do we do? We are then left relying on demand destruction to curb prices. And because of the panic buying, prices would go above $100 easily in this scenario.”
    ​ Alhajji warned about panic hoarding in the oil market. He said he questioned back in January why the Trump administration was hoarding Venezuela’s oil after the Maduro raid, instead of bringing it to market.
    Alhajji then emphasized, “I’m not talking about conspiracy theories. We were criticizing the Trump administration, companies, and trading houses that bought Venezuelan oil, and asking why they weren’t able to sell it to end users and why they were hoarding it. Now we know.” He was implying that this hoarding was in preparation for Operation Epic Fury.​ https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/energy-expert-warns-ubs-just-how-many-weeks-hormuz-shutdown-would-send-markets-out-control

    March 5, 2026 at 11:58 pm #233517
    John Day
    Participant

    Oil Is “Beginning To Flow” From Venezuela, Trump Says​
    “Delcy Rodríguez, who is the President of Venezuela, is doing a great job, and working with U.S. Representatives very well,” Trump wrote.​ https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/oil-beginning-flow-venezuela-trump-says

    ​ At the farthest end of the Gulf from Hormuz; Bahamas flagged British boat. Tanker Hit By “Large Explosion” In Waters Off Kuwait, Causing Oil Spill
    ​The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO), a British naval authority responsible for monitoring shipping safety in high-risk areas, said it received a report that around 1040pm UTC, a “large explosion” took place on a tanker 30 nautical miles south east off Mubarak Al Kebeer, on the coast of Kuwait. “There is oil in the water coming from a cargo tank”, which could have a disastrous environmental impact, especially if its reaches the desalinization plants that keep much of the Gulf population alive.​ https://www.zerohedge.com/military/tanker-hit-large-explosion-waters-kuwait-causing-oil-spill

    ​ How many Americans KIA, General? More or less than a thousand? Kharg Island Back In Focus As Seizure Talk Enters Mainstream Media Debate
    Seizing Iran’s main crude export hub has entered the discussion in corporate media.
    ​ Former U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine Gen. Keith Kellogg joined Fox News and discussed the seizure of the single biggest energy and financing choke point of Iran: Kharg Island.
    ​ “What I would hope they would do is really go and take Kharg Island. If you take out that island, that’s 80% to 90% of the petroleum usage the Iranians have,” Kellogg told the Fox host.
    ​ He continued: “You basically shut them off economically. They cannot support China. They cannot support Russia. Sooner or later, the other side is going to realize this is bad news.”​ https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/will-president-trump-destroy-or-seize-irans-oil-export-island

    ​ The strait is not “closed”, just selectively permissive: Concerns raised on the Strait of Hormuz with the IRGC announcing ban on US Israel and European vessels – Newsquawk US Opening News
    ​ Deputy Commander of the Iranian Army Central Command said Iran has not closed the Strait of Hormuz; IRGC struck a US oil tanker while announcing US, Israeli and European vessels are not allowed through the strait.​ https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/concerns-raised-strait-hormuz-irgc-announcing-ban-us-israel-and-european-vessels-newsquawk

    China Reportedly In Talks With Iran For Safe Passage Through Hormuz, As WH Scrambles To Contain Rising Energy Prices​ https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/massive-wave-iranian-missiles-pummeled-israel-overnight-trump-hopes-quick-victory

    March 5, 2026 at 11:58 pm #233518
    John Day
    Participant

    [​Hey, That’s Not Fair] Iran Says Strait Of Hormuz Open As China-Linked Ship Transits Maritime Chokepoint​ https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/iran-says-strait-hormuz-open-china-linked-ship-transits-maritime-chokepoint

    ​Hey, where’d those “bandits” come from? Qatari F-15s intercepted two Iranian Su-24 bombers flying low to evade radar in first air combat https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/how-iranian-bombers-were-shot-down-minutes-from-middle-east-s-largest-us-air-base-in-qatar-1.500464454

    Oil Tops $80 As Iran War Spillover Effects Compound, Hopes Of Quick US Victory Fade​ https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/massive-wave-iranian-missiles-pummeled-israel-overnight-trump-hopes-quick-victory

    Massive Wave Of Iranian Missiles Pummeled Israel Overnight, As Trump Hopes Of ‘Quick Victory’ Fading​ https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/massive-wave-iranian-missiles-pummeled-israel-overnight-trump-hopes-quick-victory

    ​ That “help” we promised… Israel Targets Iran’s Protest-Crackdown Forces With New Airstrikes
    Israeli airstrikes on Wednesday targeted figures and facilities tied to domestic repression, including members of the Basij paramilitary and senior intelligence officials, the Israeli military said. Israel and the U.S. have also hit internal-security institutions such as the Tehran headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which plays a central role in protecting the regime.​ https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/israel-targets-irans-protest-crackdown-forces-new-airstrikes

    March 6, 2026 at 12:00 am #233519
    John Day
    Participant

    ​John Helmer, BLACK VALENTINE FROM GRU TO THE IRANIAN SECURITY SERVICES
    “Israeli intelligence had information from signals intelligence, such as the hacked traffic cameras and deeply penetrated mobile phone networks. One of the people said it showed that the meeting with Khamenei was on schedule, with senior officials heading to the location. But the Americans had something even more concrete — a human source, both people familiar with the situation said. The CIA declined to comment.”​ https://johnhelmer.net/black-valentine-from-gru-to-the-iranian-security-services/

    ​Escape Key, Maxwell
    ​The story most people know goes like this: Jeffrey Epstein was a criminal who ran a sex trafficking operation, and Ghislaine Maxwell helped him do it. Her conviction in 2021 made that the official version.​ But the documents that have since been released tell a different story — one that starts with her father.​
    ​ Robert Maxwell was born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch in Czechoslovakia. He became a British Member of Parliament, a media mogul, and the head of more than four hundred companies. He was also one of the most well-documented spies of the twentieth century.
    ​ When he was buried in Jerusalem on 10 November 1991, six heads of Israeli intelligence — serving and former — attended the funeral. The Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, said something no one has fully explained: Maxwell ‘has done more for Israel than can today be said’…​
    ..Multiple former Israeli intelligence officers have said publicly that he worked for Mossad. Ari Ben-Menashe, a former officer in Israeli military intelligence, has described how Maxwell distributed PROMIS, a piece of software, to more than twenty countries. The programme had been stolen from the US Department of Justice and modified with a hidden backdoor, allowing Israeli intelligence to secretly monitor every government database it was installed on. Ben-Menashe has also described how Maxwell used sexual blackmail — including material involving underage girls — to control politicians and other powerful figures.
    ​ Robert Maxwell had personal access to Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street, Ronald Reagan’s White House, and the Kremlin — all at the same time. His biographers described him as ‘Israel’s unofficial ambassador to the Soviet Bloc‘…
    ​..His publishing empire mattered just as much as his intelligence work. The two were closely connected.
    ​ Maxwell’s publishing company, Pergamon Press, was one of the most influential academic publishers in the world. He acquired it in 1951 and built it from forty journals into more than four hundred by the early 1990s.
    ​ Pergamon published important early works in three fields that would later come together…​
    ..Put together, these three fields amount to a complete toolkit for managing large organisations. General systems theory models every person and institution as a connected node in a network. Through surveillance, input-output analysis tracks everything that flows between them in real time. Cybernetics treats those flows as feedback loops and manipulates them to steer the system towards a target. Combine the three and you have adaptive management…
    ​..Pergamon also published Computers & Operations Research from its founding in 1974 and held top-tier rankings in the field that RAND had developed in the 1950s and that Robert McNamara operationalised across the entire US federal government as PPBS — the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System — by 1965.
    ​ Starting with the Department of Defense in 1961, PPBS restructured government spending around measurable performance against externally defined objectives: funding became conditional on compliance.
    ​ JFK stood up to this trajectory, LBJ accelerated it…
    ​..In 1971, the British cybernetician Stafford Beer was hired by Chile’s socialist government under Salvador Allende to build Project Cybersyn, a system for running the entire national economy in real time. Data from factories across the country was sent to a central control room, where the government could see what was happening and adjust the flow of resources continuously — like a thermostat, but for an economy.
    ​ It was the first time anyone had tried to govern a country using the principles of cybernetics, and within this admittedly limited trial, it was successful at routing around a major Chilean trucker blockade. The Pinochet military coup of 1973, however, destroyed it…
    ​..General systems theory, input-output analysis, and cybernetics are the intellectual ancestors of artificial intelligence…
    ​..General systems theory, input-output analysis, and cybernetics are framework-agnostic — they describe how to manage any complex system, regardless of who sits at the controls or what ideology they claim to serve. The same toolkit that ran a socialist economy in Chile could, in principle, run a global financial system from Basel. All it needed was a different implementation layer and a purpose that no one could reasonably oppose.
    ​ That is what Maxwell’s publishing catalogue amounted to. Not a collection of academic books, but the complete intellectual infrastructure for a governance system that could operate without elections, without legislation, and without the consent of the people living inside it…
    ​..Robert Maxwell didn’t just publish books about cybernetic control. He ran an intelligence operation whose structure — compartmentalised agents producing predictable outputs, surveillance through PROMIS, steering through ideology, bribery and blackmail — matched the architecture his press was publishing.
    ​ And before he died, he introduced his daughter Ghislaine to the man who would carry the operation forward…
    ​..The relationship between Robert Maxwell and the Rothschild banking family started as a fight. Over the next twenty years, it turned into a financial partnership that would last longer than Maxwell himself…​
    ..In November 1991, Maxwell was found dead in the Atlantic Ocean near his yacht. The official verdict was accidental drowning, but investigators noted unexplained bruises on his body. It was recovered nearly a hundred miles from the vessel. Ghislaine, however, was less than convinced. In a 1997 interview — her first since her father’s death — she said plainly: ‘I think he was murdered’.
    ​ According to multiple intelligence sources, including the authors of Robert Maxwell: Israel’s Superspy, Maxwell had told his Israeli handlers that unless they gave him the money to save his collapsing business empire, he would go public with everything he knew about Mossad’s operations…
    ​..In 1991 — the year Robert Maxwell died — New York businesswoman Lynn Forester gave Ghislaine Maxwell the use of one of her Manhattan properties. Forester would later marry Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and become Lynn Forester de Rothschild…
    ​..Epstein’s connection to the Maxwell family goes back much further than most people realise — as far as a decade before Robert Maxwell died. According to a verified shareholder complaint filed in federal court in New York in 2023, Maxwell introduced his daughter Ghislaine to Epstein in the 1980s​… Ari Ben-Menashe put it plainly: ‘Robert Maxwell saw in Jeffrey Epstein a potential husband for his daughter and a potential business partner for himself.‘…​
    ..In July 1991, billionaire Ohio businessman Leslie Wexner gave Epstein full legal power of attorney over his entire fortune. This was the only confirmed billionaire client Epstein ever had. Four months later, Robert Maxwell was dead.
    ​ The timing is noteworthy. Epstein’s independent financial base was locked in at almost exactly the moment Robert Maxwell passed away. But the usual version of the story gets the sequence wrong. Epstein was already inside the Maxwell world in the 1980s, and had already been introduced to Ghislaine — all before the Wexner deal gave him his cover as a legitimate wealth manager…
    ​..In September 2025, Bloomberg News published a report based on more than 18,000 emails from Epstein’s personal Yahoo account. The emails show something the public story got backwards: it was Ghislaine Maxwell who gave the orders, not Epstein.
    ​ Maxwell built the lists of important social contacts. Epstein edited individual names on them. When Google co-founder Sergey Brin visited the Caribbean, it was Maxwell who told Epstein how to act: ‘be v nice to her not stupid — she is key‘. When the Governor of New Mexico needed a private jet, his office called Maxwell, not Epstein…
    ​..Ghislaine stepped into an operational role the moment her father died. According to journalist John Jackson — who claimed to have witnessed it himself — she boarded her father’s yacht — the Lady Ghislaine — with her mother Elisabeth shortly after he drowned, walked into his private office, and shredded documents…
    ..Artificial intelligence, complexity theory, encryption, and new financial systems — every component these essays have traced across separate researchers, institutions, and decades appeared on that single ‘Mindshift’ agenda, on Epstein’s island, organised by Isabel Maxwell’s partner…
    ​..Robert Maxwell introduced him. Christine established the institutional bridge through SFI. Isabel carried the connection to the World Economic Forum; her partner organised his scientific gatherings and brought the family to the island. Kevin sourced deals and managed damage control. Elisabeth was supposedly on the yacht the day the documents were shredded — and on Little St James twelve years later. Six members of one family in Epstein’s vicinity. And Ghislaine introduced him to the elite, and managed him.
    ​ Her trial in 2021 turned the real hierarchy upside down. The court convicted Maxwell as Epstein’s junior partner, and the entire legal process treated her as his subordinate — as though he had been in charge and she had been helping him…​
    ..In 2016, Epstein sent an email to the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. In it, he wrote: ‘as you probably know I represent the Rothschilds‘. ‘Represent‘; speaking on behalf of. An emissary, not a principal.
    ​ The DOJ documents — covered in detail in the first three essays of this series — show two separate chains of command running into Epstein.
    ​ The first was financial, and it ran through the Rothschild family. Ariane de Rothschild signed a $25 million contract with Epstein’s company, Southern Trust. There was a three-tier reporting chain — from Jacob Rothschild, through Ariane, down to Epstein. Confidential internal family correspondence was routinely forwarded to him. He was treated as someone inside the operation, not outside it.
    ​ The second chain was intelligence, and it ran through Ehud Barak — the former Israeli Prime Minister and former Defence Minister, who at various points had held direct authority over all three of Israel’s intelligence agencies: Mossad, Aman, and Shin Bet. The archive contains records of operational protocols, private aviation arrangements, and cover names used for physical deliveries connected to Barak.
    ​ Two chains of command — one controlling money, the other controlling intelligence — both leading to a college dropout from Brooklyn. Coincidence is one explanation, but not a very convincing one. The simpler explanation is that Epstein was placed at the junction of two structures that had been built by the previous generation — by Robert Maxwell — who paired his daughter with the successor before he died.
    ​ Both chains served the same programme: the cybernetic governance system whose theoretical foundations Maxwell published through Pergamon, whose practical components Epstein’s funded researchers were building, and whose stated purpose, in Epstein’s own emails, was the enforcement of ‘social good‘…
    ​..On 15 March 2018 — fifteen months before he was arrested — Epstein sent a passage about Robert Maxwell to someone whose name has been redacted from the files. It read:
    ​ Maxwell passed on all the secrets he learned to Mossad in Tel Aviv. In turn, they tolerated his excesses, vanities and insatiable appetite for a luxurious lifestyle and women.
    It continued:
    ​ He told his controllers who they should target and how they should do it. He appointed himself as Israel’s unofficial ambassador to the Soviet Bloc.
    And then:
    ​ He told them that unless they gave him £400million to save his crumbling empire, he would expose all he had done for them. In that time, he had free access to Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street, to Ronald Reagan’s White House, to the Kremlin and to the corridors of power throughout Europe.
    ​ Epstein, in other words, was reading about exactly the pattern that would later end his own life: an intelligence agent who knew too much and tried to use that knowledge as leverage…
    ​..The moment you create a system that labels something ‘green‘, everything not labelled green automatically becomes ‘brown‘. Epstein was involved in both sides. The impact investing prototype attracted money towards approved goals. The digital currency system he proposed to Lawrence Summers in 2016 — with its built-in tracking, traceability, and programmable rules — provided the tool that could automatically withdraw money from everything else…​
    ..Beginning in 2014, a series of forums on ‘stranded assets’ had been hosted at Waddesdon Manor — a Rothschild family estate. The work from those forums fed into the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, or TCFD, which was chaired by Michael Bloomberg. The TCFD’s recommendations then fed into the Network for Greening the Financial System, or NGFS — a group of 134 central banks and financial regulators — which used the findings to set new capital requirements through the BIS under rules known as Basel 3.1…
    ​..The digital currency that Epstein described to Summers — trackable, programmable, built to enforce rules automatically, and wrapped in the language of ‘transparent charity related stuff‘ — is the final stage of that process. It puts the clearinghouse inside the money itself. Every transaction is checked for compliance at the moment it happens, automatically, with no banker and no meeting required.
    ​ At every stage of this history, the system has got bigger and harder to see. In the nineteenth century, a single banker sat at a table and controlled one deal between two governments. A programmable digital currency would control every transaction in an entire economy. Epstein operated at the point where the system was shifting from one to the other — from human middlemen to automated enforcement. He was the last human link in a chain that was being replaced by machines. His job was to carry the plans for impact investing, digital currency, AI research, and climate-based financial rules between the people designing them and the institutions that would put them into practice.
    ​ By August 2019, that job was done. The plans had been taken up by organisations that no longer needed a person to pass them along.
    ​ The system does not need a switchboard operator once the wiring is in the walls…The whole system needs just one thing to run: a definition of what counts as ‘good’. Right now, the NGFS models are built around climate risk. But the machinery doesn’t care what the goal is. Swap in a different objective — public health, protecting wildlife, reducing poverty, any of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals — and the same system produces the same outputs: scenarios, classifications, rules about who gets capital and who doesn’t, and automatic enforcement.
    ​ Epstein’s emails contain the language for exactly this kind of input.
    ​ In his email to Summers, he called it ‘transparent charity related stuff‘. In a pitch to Richard Branson, he used the phrase ‘social good currency‘.
    Speaking to Boris Nikolic, he suggested ‘social good bonds’ and a ‘charitable currency unit‘…
    ..The power to decide where money goes — which is, in the end, the most important function of any government’s economic policy — has moved from elected institutions to a technical infrastructure run by bodies that do not publish who their members are or what rules they operate under…
    ..In November 2025, President Trump signed an executive order launching the Genesis Mission — described as the biggest mobilisation of federal scientific resources since the Apollo programme. The order tells the Department of Energy to build a single AI platform, train it on government data, and use AI agents to tackle national problems. The list of problems it works on gets updated every year to reflect whatever the current administration wants to prioritise…
    ..This is what ESG really means. Environmental, Social, and Governance are not just categories on a form. They are the channels through which ethical goals enter the machine and come out the other side as financial rules…
    ..The Fabian Blueprint: The design is 180 years old. The technology to actually build it is new. Hess provided the philosophy. A generation later, Theodor Herzl proved it could actually be built…
    ​..If you read Altneuland not as a novel but as a blueprint, it describes a governance system built around a central clearinghouse: one body that controls all the flows, sets all the rules, and locks out anyone who refuses to comply…
    ..The template needed three things: a financial vehicle, a network of diplomatic connections, and an ethical mission that made the whole project politically untouchable…
    ​..This three-part template is the operating manual for what this essay has documented. Forester’s Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican is the ethical mission — inclusive, sustainable, and impossible to argue against. The BIS/NGFS pipeline is the financial vehicle — routing capital through scenarios, taxonomies, and programmable currency. The Epstein network was the diplomatic relay — carrying plans and specifications between the people who wrote the rules and the institutions that enforced them, protected by an intelligence operation and funded through the Rothschild banking line.
    ​ The result is governance without a state — or more precisely, governance that works through existing states without belonging to any of them, justified by an ethic that nobody can oppose without looking as though they are opposing ‘good’ itself.
    ​ This approach has a name. It is called functionalism…​
    ..Robert Maxwell was the main publisher of books that laid out how to govern large systems using information instead of force — general systems theory, input-output analysis, and cybernetics. He ran an intelligence operation whose structure matched the architecture his press was publishing. Before he died, he introduced his daughter Ghislaine to the man who would carry the operation forward. She embedded him within the social fabric, carrying on the operation her father had set in motion. Lynn Forester — embedded in the Clinton administration and later married into the Rothschild family — provided the bridge between the two worlds.
    ​ Jeffrey Epstein — a man with no qualifications, no institutional position, and no public profile — was placed at the centre, where his very blankness drew attention away from the structure behind him. David Rockefeller personally put him on the board of Rockefeller University and invited him onto the Trilateral Commission. And the Rothschild banking house — which fought Robert Maxwell in 1969, brought him back into the fold through New York in the 1980s, partnered with him by 1991, and absorbed the network through Forester after his death — provided financial scaffolding.
    ​ The operation was never really Epstein’s. Whether it was designed this way or simply evolved, the system could survive the loss of any single part — including him. But it was never really Maxwell’s either.
    ​ The thing that connects every thread in this story — the publishing programme, the intelligence operation, the banking architecture, artificial intelligence, the centralised ‘social good’, the research funding, and the institutional machinery now running through the BIS and the NGFS — is systems theory itself.
    ​ General systems theory. Input-output analysis. Cybernetics. The idea that you can manage any complex system through feedback and control, including humanity.
    ​ That idea, incidentally, through Zev Naveh has a name. It’s the ‘Total Human Ecosystem’ — humanity as a managed specie, subject to permanent surveillance and enforcement, not least programmable CBDCs.​ https://escapekey.substack.com/p/maxwell

    Trump just said that if your cost of living goes up because he bombed Iran, it’s worth it cause Israel is safe.​ https://x.com/BackupJeffx/status/2029058542733283405

    ​ “A sitting US Senator just broke the hand of a Marine.” [short video]
    Marine Corps veteran​ [wearing dress-bues] interrupts the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, protesting the war with Iran and calling it an “Israeli war,” saying Americans “do not want to fight for Israel.” He is quickly grabbed by Senator Tim Sheehy and several security officers for “heckling.” The veteran continues shouting as they attempt to remove him. In the struggle near the exit, Senator Sheehy appears to have broken his arm.​ https://xcancel.com/shanaka86/status/2029400021825671348

    ​ Iran Signals ‘Prolonged War’ As US Strikes Go Deeper, Reports Of Kurdish Border Offensive
    Houthis in Yemen are planning to attack vital targets inside Saudi Arabia using drones, as they have done in the past, and therefore, according to those sources, security around the king, Salman, and the Saudi crown prince, bin Salman, has been increased.
    ​ Kurdish Forces in Iraq have launched a ground military offensive into Iran against Iranian govt: i24News (unconfirmed)
    ​ Netanyahu asked the White House if the Trump administration was secretly talking with Iran about a ceasefire after Israeli intelligence suspected possible communications. The White House denied any talks and said the U.S. had ignored messages sent by Iran through regional intermediaries: Axios
    ​ Iran will target Israeli embassies if its embassy is hit: IRNA
    ​Iranian intelligence sends word to US on potential talks to end war, but US officials say no active negotiations: CNN reports
    ​ Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian says no choice but to fight​ https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/hegseth-declares-winning-iran-while-us-comms-infrastructure-takes-severe-hits-tehran

    March 6, 2026 at 12:01 am #233520
    John Day
    Participant

    Futures Jump On Reports About Iran’s Willingness To Give Up Uranium Stockpile​ https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/futs-jump-old-news-recirculated-about-irans-willingness-give-uranium-stockpile

    ​ This would be very convenient: Western Official Claims Iran Has Just ‘Days Left’ For Depleting Missile Arsenal
    Among the most crucial open questions in the ongoing Operation Epic Fury – or perhaps the most pressing issue – is which warring side will outlast the other in terms of maintaining missile and interceptor numbers, and for the US side this means enough to achieve the (somewhat ambiguous) military objectives.
    ​ Speculation and estimates are flying wildly in international press reports, also with Iran now claiming it has only thus far expended its older and aging stockpile, but stands ready to use its newer, more advanced ballistic projectiles. But amid the fog of war in these opening days of conflict, and competing narratives, there’s also concern at the Pentagon over just how long this ‘air war’ will last.​ War Secretary Pete Hegseth earlier Wednesday suggested that the campaign could extend to eight weeks.​ https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/western-official-claims-iran-has-just-days-left-depleting-missile-arsenal

    ​This may be more apparent than real: Simplicius, US Set to Escalate War into Ground Phase with Kurdish Vanguard https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/us-set-to-escalate-war-into-ground

    John Helmer, HOW RUSSIA COUNTS THE BENEFITS AND THE RISKS OF THE IRAN WAR
    However, if the situation goes beyond a manageable risk and turns into a global collapse, this conflict will be unprofitable for everyone, including Russia. “The line runs where price increases cease to be a “premium” and turn into a shock to demand and the financial system. The conditional $100-$120 for Brent with a short-term surge in prices is often perceived by the market as a bearable price of risk, and this supports the incomes of exporters. But the longer this level remains, the more likely it is that global inflation will start to accelerate, followed by a slowdown in the global economy, and then fewer barrels will be bought,” explains Chernov.
    ​ “When the price of oil goes to $200, the market is usually already in panic mode or there is physical disruption of supplies for months. In such a scenario, the world quickly goes into an economic crisis or recession. This is also a risk for Russia through falling external demand for raw materials, through exchange rate volatility, through higher import and logistics costs, as well as through rising global rates and risk premiums. That is, the high price of oil ceases to be a net plus if it means a global recession and disruption of supply chains,” says Chernov.​ https://johnhelmer.net/how-russia-counts-the-benefits-and-the-risks-of-the-iran-war/#more-93565

    Shanaka Perera again: JUST IN: While missiles were flying over Tel Aviv, Trump was quietly brokering a gold deal in Caracas.
    Venezuela’s state-owned Minerven just signed a contract to ship up to 1,000 kilograms of gold to US refineries. Trafigura is the intermediary. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum flew to Venezuela personally to shepherd it through. The deal is worth over $150 million.
    This is the third extraction deal the Trump administration has brokered since ousting Maduro in January. Gold. Oil. Now gold again. Look at what happened this week while the world watched the Gulf burn. Japan and India signed a rare earth deal in Rajasthan. India opened the Andaman Basin to oil exploration. The US and Ecuador conducted a joint military operation. And now Venezuela is shipping gold to US refineries under a government-arranged contract. One pattern. Four moves. Three continents. Seven days.
    The Trump doctrine is not just a military campaign against Iran. It is a simultaneous resource-securing operation running across the entire Global South while the news cycle is consumed by explosions and intercepts.
    This is the part the market consistently underprices. Every nation that was in Russia or China’s resource orbit is being approached, pressured, or flipped right now. Venezuela had the largest oil reserves on earth and was China’s strategic foothold in the Western hemisphere six months ago. Today it is shipping gold to US refineries. The Iran war is the headline. The resource repositioning is the strategy. And it was always going to look exactly like this: loud in the Middle East, quiet everywhere else, moving fast while no one is watching. The Silent Coup runs on multiple continents simultaneously. https://xcancel.com/shanaka86/status/2029413971938476196

    March 6, 2026 at 12:01 am #233521
    John Day
    Participant

    Macron Declares Attacks On Iran Violate International Law, Spanish MEP Calls For Spain To Leave NATO​ https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/macron-declares-attacks-iran-violate-international-law-spanish-mep-calls-spain-leave

    Meryl Nass MD, Senators confirm what we already knew: voting along party lines, they revealed they do not want to bear any responsibility for voting either in favor or against a war of choice. 53-47 – Only Rand Paul and John Fetterman voted with the other party. https://merylnass.substack.com/p/senators-confirm-what-we-already

    House Votes Down Iran War Powers Measure, Soon On Heels Of Similar Senate Res. Defeat​ https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/wall-street-desperately-seeks-details-trumps-plan-unclog-chokepoint

    Democrats in Full PANIC MODE as 92% of Biden’s Orders Terminated by EMERGENCY DECREE Over Illegal Autopen Use ​ https://amg-news.com/its-official-democrats-in-full-panic-mode-as-92-of-bidens-orders-terminated-by-emergency-decree-over-illegal-autopen-use-march-3-2026/

    “You Are Not Choosing To Die, You Are Choosing To Arrive”: Google’s Gemini Accused Of ‘Coaching’ Florida Man To Suicide​ https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/you-are-not-choosing-die-you-are-choosing-arrive-googles-gemini-accused-coaching-florida-man

    March 6, 2026 at 12:02 am #233522
    John Day
    Participant

    Meryl Nass MD presents: Chemically created Food Addiction: The push to turn Big Food into Big Tobacco/ Stat News
    Tobacco companies shaped ultra-processed foods. Now critics trying to reform the food landscape are working from the anti-tobacco playbook​ https://merylnass.substack.com/p/chemically-created-food-addiction

    ​ New Poll: a Supermajority of Americans Support Medical Freedom
    Zogby Strategies sampled 1,000 registered voters—93.6% of whom were definitely or very likely to vote—with a partisan split of 37% Republican, 36% Democrat, and 27% Independent. The margin of error is ±3.2 percentage points for the full sample…
    ​..A total of 87.9% of respondents believe that a patient must retain his or her full right to refuse any medical treatment. Nearly 60% responded that they agreed strongly with this position. Regarding informed consent narrowly focused on vaccines, 80.4% of those surveyed believe that any adult has the right to refuse vaccination. 70.6% expressed a view that one’s refusal to be vaccinated should never result in any form of discrimination – such as employment or access to public accommodation including, but not limited to, retail stores, restaurants, hotels, entertainment venues, or public transportation.​ https://www.themahareport.com/p/new-poll-a-supermajority-of-americans

    March 6, 2026 at 12:34 am #233523
    zerosum
    Participant

    Copilot clarifies the errors of the news media

    You’re right to call this out, and the distinction matters.
    The way you phrased it is accurate: the targets were U.S. assets, even when those assets were located on the territory of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, or the UAE. Saying “Iran struck Bahrain” or “Iran struck the UAE” without specifying what was targeted can create the wrong impression.
    Here is the clearer, fact‑based framing that aligns with how regional governments and international reporting describe the events.

    What Iran actually targeted
    Across the strikes in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE, the pattern is consistent:
    – Iran targeted U.S. military facilities, U.S. logistics hubs, or U.S. command nodes that happen to be hosted on the territory of those states.
    – The strikes were not aimed at the governments of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, or the UAE.
    – The intention was to hit U.S. presence, not to open a front against Arab states.
    This distinction is reflected in regional statements, which condemn the attacks because they occurred on their soil, not because Iran declared war on them.

    Why the distinction matters politically
    Arab governments are extremely sensitive to the idea that they might be “in a war with Iran.” Their public messaging reflects three priorities:
    – Avoid escalation
    They do not want to be dragged into a regional war.
    – Protect sovereignty
    They condemn any strike on their soil, regardless of the target.
    – Avoid being seen as U.S. proxies
    Domestic opinion in many Gulf states is wary of appearing to host foreign wars.
    So their statements are calibrated:
    They condemn the attack as a violation of their territory, but they do not frame it as Iran attacking them as states.

    How Iran frames it
    Iran’s official messaging is also consistent:
    – It says it is striking U.S. military infrastructure, not Arab governments.
    – It emphasizes that the U.S. uses Gulf territory to launch or support operations.
    – It avoids opening a direct front with Gulf states, which would be strategically disastrous.
    This is why Tehran’s statements repeatedly stress that the targets were “American bases” or “American command centers.”

    How the Gulf states interpret it
    Gulf capitals see it as:
    – A dangerous violation of their territory
    – A signal that hosting U.S. forces carries risk
    – But not a declaration of war against them
    This is why none of them have declared war, mobilized for war, or signaled intent to join a coalition against Iran.
    Their position is:
    “We condemn the attack, but we will not enter a war.”

    The strategic reality
    The region is not dividing into “Arabs vs. Iran.”
    Instead, it is dividing into:
    – Iran vs. the U.S., with the battlefield overlapping Gulf territory
    – Arab states trying to avoid being dragged in
    – Israel pursuing its own objectives
    – Turkey balancing between blocs
    – Non‑state actors aligned with Iran acting independently
    This is a multi‑layered conflict, not a binary one.

    March 6, 2026 at 1:30 am #233524
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Iran ‘Crushes All US-Backed Iraqi Kurdish Units’ After They Breach Border
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7Wnx_j_kV4

    March 6, 2026 at 2:00 am #233525
    zerosum
    Participant

    Iran’s strategy – that they are removing one airbase after another to push the starting point further and further.
    Once Israels airfields are gone, what is next? Cyprus?
    They already got the message.
    Greece?

    March 6, 2026 at 2:17 am #233526
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Iran Launches Massive Missile Attack on $20B U.S. Aircraft Carrier — U.S. Navy Responds

    March 6, 2026 at 2:45 am #233527
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    WARRIOR UPDATE WITH SCOTT RITTER – GROUND WAR COMING? – RETIRED MARINE BEATEN BY CONGRESSMAN

    March 6, 2026 at 2:55 am #233528
    WES
    Participant

    Kurds:

    All the so called stories about Kurds being armed in Iran and Iraq are completely false.
    The Kurds aren’t doing anything.

    March 6, 2026 at 3:07 am #233529
    zerosum
    Participant

    https://news-pravda.com/world/2026/03/05/2129312.html
    ️Starvation Looms for the Wealthiest Persian Gulf Nations

    Recent analysis from Kepler satellite data indicates that, should the Strait of Hormuz blockade persist, the economies of the Gulf states would experience an unparalleled breakdown in their supply chains.
    ———–
    https://news-pravda.com/world/2026/03/06/2131103.html
    A Chinese historian who predicted a war with Iran has issued a new warning.: “The Gulf states have water left for two weeks.”
    ———–
    https://news-pravda.com/world/2026/03/05/2130771.html
    American aircraft bombed the painted Iranian planes again
    See picture at the link
    ———=

    March 6, 2026 at 3:23 am #233530
    zerosum
    Participant

    info for preppers
    https://substack.com/home/post/p-189923832%C2%A0
    Systemic Risk: A 12-Order Cascading Analysis of a Zero-Flow Strait of Hormuz Closure

    Craig Tindale

    March 6, 2026 at 3:31 am #233531
    zerosum
    Participant

    Evidence is now emerging that the strike on the Anglo-Saxon air base at Akrotiri in Cyprus hit a hangar housing a US Air Force Lockheed U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. This aircraft, known in the US as the Dragon Lady, has recently been frequently launched from Akrotiri to conduct reconnaissance missions near the Iranian border.

    The picture shows these aircraft at the Akrotiri base.

    The Americans have not commented on the loss or damage of the U-2 at this time.

    However, it can be assumed that some damage was inflicted on the airbase. Otherwise, why would European NATO members rush to “the defense of Cyprus”?

    Posted by: CrazyCanuck | Mar 5 2026 15:03 utc | 1042

    March 6, 2026 at 3:55 am #233532
    zerosum
    Participant

    The reports of what Iran can hit, destroy in Israel are next to zero.
    There is zero evidence that Netanyahu should hide in Germany.

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