Rene Magritte Memory 1944
https://twitter.com/John_F_kJr/status/2086757534241542406?s=20
"Starlink will actually move the GDP of countries. Internet connectivity might be certainly a candidate for one of the things that would do more to lift people out of poverty than anything else."
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) August 10, 2026
— Elon Musk pic.twitter.com/ecFnpfeCU7
Dr. Luc Montagnier, Nobel Laureate, final interview before being FOUND DEAD 6 days later.
— Teddy – PolyBackTest.com (@Bitcoin_Teddy) August 9, 2026
"I am here to expose Fauci's gain-of-function – COVID was the job of a professional…it's NOT natural. Sequences like HIV have been added…in order to make a vaccine." pic.twitter.com/zwV1xHoFbg
I start to wonder what at least some folk at Zero Hedge are thinking.
Trump Finally Responds? Belatedly? What, Iran now should decide when Trump speaks?
This has been going since March! For all I know, “finally” is still too soon. The US has wrapped itself around Iran like a boa constrictor. And now it slowly squeezes.
• Trump Finally Responds To Iran’s Demands, Says US Is Owed Compensation (ZH)
President Trump on Monday has very belatedly responded to the Iranians after they issued new demands over the weekend, or conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, after declaring a ban on all US and Israeli-linked vessels. Noting that the Iranians are now asking for war compensation, Trump is seeking to turn it around and now demands compensation from Iran “for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts, for which they are famous…”. He also asserted that American families of fallen soldiers should be paid.Read more …
Interestingly and tellingly, unlike many prior Truth Social posts related to Iran, Trump did not issue any new threats or ultimatums saying what he will ‘do’ to the country if it doesn’t comply. This perhaps reveals he’s out of answers or new strategy, and doesn’t wish to escalate militarily. The statement comes on the heels of the president telling Axios on Sunday that the US is now “low-keying” it and primarily turning back to prolonged economic warfare to strangle the Iranian economy.
Trump “Low-Keying It” As Iran Doubles Down on Demands
After President Trump said Sunday that the US is now “low-keying it” with Iran and only “semi-negotiating” following a top Iranian security official having laid out multiple stringent conditions for the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, oil is edging higher on Monday.“We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” Trump told Axios reporter Barak Ravid in comments we analyzed earlier, signaling his return to an economic warfare focus. President Trump has fewer and fewer options and is being squeezed, with any opportunity to declare ‘victory’ and make swift exit more elusive than ever, given Washington would have to make huge compromises, including lifting sanctions and paying war compensation to Tehran.
“The Supreme National Security Council will not retreat from these demands, whether in war or in negotiations,” the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr has said, in effect doubling down, according to Iran’s Mehr news agency.
“Iran’s ultimate fate now rests with the Trump administration, which apparently has not yet decided what, exactly, that fate is.::”
• The Long View of Iran (Victor Davis Hanson)
One day, the United States seems ready to unleash a Curtis LeMay-style devastating bombing campaign of Iran. The next, it appears trapped in endless haggling with Iranian dissimulators. Of the roughly 150 days since the first strike, about 90 have passed without major military operations. Iran believes time is on its side. The Strait of Hormuz remains disrupted, gas prices are too high, and antiwar House Democrats seem poised to win the midterms and bring Trump’s war to a halt.] Trump, by contrast, believes Iran can talk all it wants while sanctions, embargoes, and military pressure steadily weaken the regime.Read more …
The war has become so politicized in an election year that several basic realities have gone largely unnoticed by the media. First, the cycle of bombing, pausing, negotiating, and bombing again may seem endless. But the confusion obscures the continuing effects of the embargoes, sanctions, blockade, and financial isolation imposed on Iran. Together, they are costing the theocracy more than $400 million a day in lost revenue, money that it can ill afford to lose. By haggling, Iran believes it can run out the clock until the midterms, but it may be only prolonging its own miserable situation.Second, so far the bombing has not descended into a ground war. There are no embedded reporters and few Western journalists in Iran. So the world knows little about the true extent of the damage to the Iranian regime and its military-industrial-nuclear complex.Nor do we know the mood of the once-restive Iranian street. But whether or not there are future allied military attacks, tensions will only increase as Iran runs out of money and basic goods. Whatever the outcome of negotiations or further combat operations, the Iranian military and economy have already been wrecked and will take years to rebuild.
Third, however the war ends, Iran will remain at a terrible disadvantage for years in dealing with the neighbors it has so gratuitously attacked. The regime currently has no effective combat aircraft or air defenses—and no allies. In contrast, the Gulf states can field more than 700 combat aircraft, including F-15s, F-16s, F/A-18s, Rafales, Mirages, and Tornados. Israel has another 300, including late-model F-35s, F-16s, and F-15s. U.S. bases in the Middle East are home to some 300 more, including F-22s, F-35s, F-18s, F-16s, and F-15s—not counting carrier-based aircraft. In sum, the United States and its allies have some 1,300 late-model combat aircraft in the region. They should therefore be able to hit Iran hard for years to come if it resumes drone and missile attacks against its rivals.
Fourth, Iran’s problems will not end when the United States declares victory and sends most of its forces home. The regime has lost a half-century and half a trillion dollars in military and nuclear investment. Until the United States lifts its sanctions and embargoes, Iran cannot rearm. And if it eventually does rearm and again tries to supply its Arab terrorist clients in its “ring of fire” around Israel, its destitute people will grow furious at a disgraced and humiliated regime for diverting the nation’s wealth abroad.
Fifth, several unforeseen developments ahead of the impending midterms—more favorable gerrymandering in red states than in blue ones, the Supreme Court’s ruling against racial redistricting, a substantial Republican fundraising advantage, and the capture of the Democratic Party by near-lunatic radical socialists—may offer Republicans a narrow path to retaining control of Congress. That possibility has added urgency to the administration’s choice: negotiate one final time or use overwhelming force to inflict still greater damage on the Iranian economy.
Sixth, air supremacy and the normal rotation of U.S. naval forces through the Middle East, together with help from the Gulf states and naval contingents from European and Asian oil-importing nations, could keep the strait open if they decide to do so. And they may need to do so for only another year or two, by which time the strait may become far less important to oil exports.
Iran’s efforts to close the strait have already accelerated the expansion of existing pipelines and the construction of new ones that will bypass the strait and connect the oil fields directly to the Gulf of Oman, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean.
Bottom line?
Iran is losing whether it is being bombed, sanctioned, or embargoed—or all three. Its ultimate fate now rests with the Trump administration, which apparently has not yet decided what, exactly, that fate is.
Navarone.
“.. It relies on identifying exactly where a massive structure is already under unbearable strain, then applying one small, precisely placed charge to a load-bearing point..”
• Iran: The Small Explosion Theory in Practice (Eric Florack)
Hanson correctly points out that Hormuz may only need about a year, maybe two, of continued naval support before other avenues of oil delivery come fully online and existing pipelines finish their expansion, bypassing whatever leverage Iran imagines it still holds over the strait. In Hanson’s own words: Iran’s blockade attempts have “already accelerated the expansion of existing pipelines and the construction of new ones that will bypass the strait and connect the oil fields directly to the Gulf of Oman, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean.”Read more …
Read that twice. Iran tried to weaponize a chokepoint, and the practical result is the rest of the region building its way around that chokepoint, permanently. That’s not a threat Iran is managing. That’s a threat Iran is actively engineering itself out of, even if it steadfastly refuses to see it. “Iran is losing whether it is being bombed, sanctioned, or embargoed—or all three.” Its ultimate fate, he adds, now rests entirely with an administration that hasn’t yet decided exactly how far to push the advantage it’s already sitting on.I said the same thing a few days ago with prose that I unashamedly admit had less horsepower behind it. Glad to see a man who’s spent a career studying how wars actually end backing the math up. In short, “See, I told ya so.” One more thing worth adding, since it came up in the comments on my original piece, and I think it’s worth pulling into this column instead of leaving it buried down there. A reader’s exchange got me thinking about the 1978 war film Force 10 From Navarone, and I’d suggest it’s a better model for what Trump’s actually doing than anyone’s given him credit for.
Without spoiling the whole plot for anyone who hasn’t seen it: The mission at the center of that film doesn’t rely on brute-force demolition. It relies on identifying exactly where a massive structure is already under unbearable strain, then applying one small, precisely placed charge to a load-bearing point — letting the structure’s own weight finish the job the explosives merely started. That’s the strategy playing out against Iran right now, whether the administration ever says so out loud or not. Much as it would make some folks feel good to crush the mullahs instantly. Much as a formal surrender with all the trimmings would be desirable, the fact is, it’s simply superfluous.
In the simplest of terms, you don’t need to flatten a regime that’s already buckling under half a trillion dollars in squandered investment, a devastated air force, a strait it can’t actually hold closed, and $400 million a day bleeding out of its own treasury. You just need to find the load-bearing point and apply pressure precisely there. The conditions for collapse are already built into the structure. The small explosion — a strike here, a sanction there, an embargo tightened at exactly the right moment — is just the trigger. Everything after that is physics, and time, not politics. You just need to sit back and await developments.
So, as I said a couple days ago, Trump has already won.
By Bas van Geffen, senior macro strategist at Rabobank
Because we really need a bank boy’s opinion of the war?!
Talks between Iran and Oman on the reopening of Hormuz are reportedly inching ahead, as Iran continues to give the US the silent treatment. Negotiators said that a deal to establish a safe shipping route was close, but Iran may now be exploring just how much it can extract from the US in return. Last week, Iran had already said that any deal with Oman would be contingent on the US lifting its blockade of Iranian ports. On Friday, a US official told Reuters that the administration agreed to this. The US blockade would end once a deal is announced that “restores commercial shipping without impediments.”Read more …
But give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. Tehran added new demands over the weekend, saying that the Strait of Hormuz will not reopen unless the US meets “a number of requirements.” These demands largely seem to refer to the original memorandum of understanding. Iran’s additional demands include the US ending all hostilities and withdrawing its troops from the area. Iran also wants Washington to pay billions in war damages and lift sanctions on the country.Or do the additional demands reflect division between Iranian camps, and varying levels of distrust of the US? The strait remains a key point of geopolitical leverage – at least until planned alternatives for oil exports are all fully operational. Meanwhile, the US president appears to be divided on the war as well. The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that Trump had been willing to walk away without any agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme, claiming victory if the strait reopens. However, Iran’s additional demands may have torpedoed that plan.
Netanyahu rejecting the Board of Peace plan for Gaza is a further complicating factor. The Israeli prime minister indicated that he will not withdraw troops until Hamas fully disarms.So, yesterday, Trump told Axios that he was “low-keying it,” waiting for the economic damage to build: “We are only semi-negotiating. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.” Yet, the longer this persists, the more economic damage could build in the US and other parts of the world as well.
Energy markets started the week off cautiously after all this. Brent futures are marginally higher, but traders seem reluctant to take big positions given all this on-again, off-again news. Equity markets seem to have shrugged off the weekend news flow entirely, perhaps partly aided by US economic data. Following Friday’s employment report, the case for a Fed hike is weakening, but it is certainly not yet done for. The headline payrolls number disappointed, with a -23,000 jobs print and a 37,000 downward revision to the June estimate. In contrast, unemployment declined from 4.2% to 4.1%, but the underlying data indicate that this was due to a big fall in labour supply that outpaced the decline in household employment.
Our US strategist noted earlier that employment growth has been slowing for several months, and Friday’s report confirmed that downside risks to the labor market have not disappeared entirely since the three insurance cuts last year. This could strengthen the argument of the Fed’s doves. Yet, the employment report also allows the hawks to argue that the labor market is mostly suffering from supply constraints, even if they are a little less confident in their case than before.
In short, the labor market data may have removed some urgency, reducing the odds of a September hike. However, incoming inflation data remain key.
One Air Force One is not enough.
• WaPo: Trump Took Secret Flight Out of Turkey Following NATO Summit (CTH)
Keep in mind the Washington Post receives all of their exclusives from the CIA leak network. For some insufferable reason, the Washington Post (CIA) is publishing a story about President Trump’s security protocols following the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey last month. As the story is told, President Trump went into the legacy Airforce One, however, he quietly exited the plane via a catering truck set up on the opposite side of the plane and then he boarded an Air Force C-32 support plane for the flight out of Turkey destined to Britain’s Mildenhall air base.
At the time of the travel there was a credible threat from Iran toward the President. Apparently, extra precautions were taken, and the Washington Post (CIA) needs to tell people about them.[…] In Ankara, Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras. He was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane — an Air Force C-32A — via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, according to the U.S. official and corroborating material reviewed by The Post. That made Air Force One a “decoy” with media and some White House staff aboard, the official said.
[…] A credible threat to Trump involving Iran set the “deception operation” in motion, the U.S. official said. The New York Times and CBS News reported last month that intelligence officials flagged a specific threat of an attack on the president or his jet, triggering additional precautions.
There are decades-old concerns in the U.S. government of Iranian terrorism plots against American officials, including Trump. Those fears have escalated recently as a result of Washington’s role in the killing of Iranian military and political leaders.
The media who are attempting to undermine the security of President Trump are not quite sure how he reentered the legacy Airforce One in order to be photographed departing it in Great Britain. However, as soon as they discover that trick, they will be sure to write about it so that our enemies are aware should the opportunity surface again.
”:Last week, Enriquez pleaded guilty to three counts of transmitting threats through interstate communications and awaits sentencing. He faces up to five years in prison for each count.”:
• Why You Don’t Threaten the Secretary of State (Sarah Anderson)
Jon Christopher Enriquez of Miami is 47 years old — old enough to know better. But on May 27, he still decided that it was a good idea to go onto social media and share just how unhappy he is with Marco Rubio and the Donald Trump administration’s Cuba policy… by offering up some death threats aimed at the secretary of state and Kristi Noem, who is currently serving as a special envoy to the Shield of the Americas. Here are some of the lovely things he posted on X:Read more …
“@SecRubio @StateDept Silence Yourself. Before you start thinking that America owns Cuba and start talking trash and calling Cuba a failure, the Criminal Court of the Armed Forces is going to begin the investigation of you as a failure to your nation. The 2 Falcon jets were replaced by Gulfstreams. Rubio, Noem … You have been found guilty of 18 USC Section 2384: Seditious Conspiracy. Both of you will be executed at 16:30. Best wishes to your future endeavors. @realDonaldTrump”“@SecRubio I guess the only way that you are going to shut your mouth is through DEATH”
“Rubio AND Noem are to be executed at 16:00. Rubio Y Noem seran ejecutados a las 16:00. Adios, muchacho/a. @Telemundo atencion Chola Grande! Senora Presidente Mexico!”
I mean, he did it in English and Spanish and had a timeline and everything, and based on the fact that he’s defending the Cuban regime and trying to get Mexico’s socialist narco-president Claudia Sheinbaum’s attention, it sounds like he’s either mentally ill or your typical leftist. (Am I being redundant?)
According to court documents, the guy had a history of making threats to others online. This time, he just happened to choose public officials, which just happens to be a federal crime.
“Threatening to execute public officials is not political speech, it is a federal crime,” said U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida. “Enriquez used a public platform to issue repeated, specific threats against Secretary Rubio and Special Envoy Noem. Today’s guilty plea makes clear that those who attempt to terrorize public servants or intimidate them through threats of violence will be swiftly identified, prosecuted, and held accountable.”
The State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security led the investigation, “identified the threats, observed the escalation, and worked to bring the individual responsible into custody, drawing on support from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the City of Miami Police Department, and the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office. Diplomatic Security coordinated closely with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida throughout the investigation and prosecution.”
Last week, Enriquez pleaded guilty to three counts of transmitting threats through interstate communications and awaits sentencing. He faces up to five years in prison for each count. Let’s hope he gets all of it.
In May, a Miami man posted threats on X threatening harm to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoy Kristi Noem. DSS special agents identified him, and this week he pleaded guilty in federal court. https://t.co/48m724EK1h
— Diplomatic Security Service (@StateDeptDSS) August 6, 2026
“Kill them. Murder them. Let the streets soak in their red capitalist blood.” —Hasan Piker
• The Democrats’ Ghost Dance (James Howard Kunstler)
The dapper Hasan Piker, dressed for success
You can’t overstate the power of ideas, especially bad ideas, and super-especially bad ideas that are really just manifestations of emotional states such as envy, vengefulness, enmity, sloth, and greed. Did somebody say communism? A lot of people are saying it lately. This garbage barge of management nostrums for the ills of advanced industrial society has steamed back into New York Harbor and is busy now dispatching its agents across the land.Read more …
It’s yet another youth movement in an America which cultivates them at regular intervals associated with Fourth Turnings. I happened to be in college during the last one, the hippie rebellion of the late 1960s. It was mostly adolescent sexual energy tinged with resentment over the military draft and the war that went with it, plus a lot of marketing opportunities for music and clothing.The US economy back then was still a roaring industrial engine. The comforts of that bygone time are legendary. You could easily support a family on an assembly-line job. College was cheap as hell — my State U charged about $500-a-year for tuition and room-and-board. (Imagine that!) You could hide-out from the draft there, too. The new birth-control pill turned campus life into a non-stop orgy with classes for R & R. Is it any wonder that the hippies morphed so easily into hedge funders?
This time around it’s pretty ugly for the youth demographic. College for them turned out to be a life-altering swindle, burdening the young with unpayable loans that can’t even be escaped via bankruptcy. Even the sex angle was ruined by vindictive feminism and the trans fad. Work is scarce and it’s nearly impossible to make a living at it, that is, pay for food and a roof over your head (and, ugh, those loan repayments!). Plus, work is mostly found only in meaningless service to despotic corporations. The most enterprising might land a job in an NGO, but the work there is “activism,” which is pretend work, productive of nothing but the acting-out of grievances.
These grievances, it has been noted by many high-toned observers like VDH, are real enough to provoke a desperate reach for remedies, and communism is a ready-made portfolio for all that. In the 1960s, we still had the reverberations of the civil rights crusade setting a basic moral tone for hippiedom. But fifty years later, that has all mutated into a race-and-gender hustle that adds so much piquancy to the recycled communist agenda. (Note that a hustle is a low-grade racket, and a racket is an effort to get something for nothing.) So, today’s communist program is not just a war against the injustices of capital, but a jihad against the Western Civ horse that capital rode in on, and most particularly the white horseman up in the saddle.
Hasan Piker, the present guru and demigod of the movement, put it pretty plainly in a Twitch-stream a few years back when he was rising to stardom on Uncle Cenk Uygur’s Young Turk Network. “We want more immigrants to come into your countries and then they’re gonna fuck your sisters and then your daughters — we’re here to destroy the White race, bitch.” Piker is also a leading amplifier of Jew-hatred and other calumnies such as the USA “deserved” the 9/11 attacks. Apropos of our action in Iran, Piker quipped, American soldiers should be shot at like cattle (link).
Piker is rumored to have earned over $6-million on Twitch. He’s quite tall (6’4”) ripped, and a snappy dresser, often sporting old-fashioned sport-jackets with a necktie (dress for success?) and is probably catnip to the cat ladies of Gen Z, who comprise the bulk of the activist corps of the rising Gen Z Democratic Socialists — as the communists have styled themselves to avoid stimulating any action around the Communist Control Act of 1954 (50 U.S.C. §§ 841–844), which categorizes the Communist Party per se as “an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States.”
Altogether, Hasan Piker and the Democratic Socialists pose quite a vexing problem for the pathetic, old, square, bloviating chuds in the Democratic Party of the Chuck Schumer / Cory Booker ilk. Other bloggers (e.g., Jeff Childers at Coffee & Covid) have observed that Democratic Socialism is the monster that the Dems have been working on sedulously for more than a decade in their Frankenstein lab of Gramscian cultural overthrow. The monster has escaped and is now out on the highways and in the hedges terrorizing the public.
You are surely aware that the entire regular agenda of the Democratic Party has for some time been patently insane. They are still wasting the nation’s patience with debates over the self-evident idiocy of men in women’s sports, resistance to the deportation of illegal immigrants, and their obviously evil opposition to voter ID. Communism is just the icing on that fruitcake. The recent primary election victories of such prodigies as Abdul El-Sayed, Melat Kiros, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, along with the ongoing capers of Mayor Zohran Mamdani pretending to govern New York City, must be giving the old guard the vapors.
And yet, the most pathetic actual commie among them, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the Jewish, Israel-hating alte kocker, abides and even thrives in his new role as Godfather to this hatch of larval communist youth. This is Bernie’s revenge on the party that robbed him of two presidential nominations. He’s doing what all good Jacobins do — what they live for! He has sentenced his old comrades of the DNC to death. He’s stuffing his old enemies into the tumbrel and carting them off to the public square for execution. They can see it coming and it’s giving them the heebie-jeebies. And finally, of course, the Mamdanis and El-Sayeds and their spawn will come for Bernie, too, leaving only AOC in the ensanguinated ruins to become America’s Eva Perón. Wait for that!
Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com.
“..what we are doing is the US is using dollars from the Fed to prop up the yen. So, the Japanese do not have to raise interest rates. So, the carry trade does not unwind. So, the markets don’t collapse ..”
• Yen Carry Trade Blow Up Like All-Out Nuclear War – Jim Rickards (USAW)
Eight-time, best-selling financial author Jim Rickards is warning of a financial calamity already underway that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is trying to contain. It is the Japanese yen carry trade where the US Treasury is propping up the yen’s value. Is the yen carry trade coming to a halt and can it blow up things? Rickards says, “The answer is yes and yes. . .. Somebody wrote me and asked if the yen carry trade is a big deal? I wrote them back and said there is nothing bigger. This is actually the biggest story in the world.”Read more …
In simple terms, the problem is people have been borrowing at 0% in yen to do deals around the world. Everything was fine until interest rates in Japan started going up after more than two decades. Rickards says, “This is the engine of global economic growth. It has been powering the US economy and the global economy for over 30 years. What could go wrong? The thing that could go wrong the fastest is if Japanese interest rates went up. . .. The bank of Japan says it is going to keep raising interest rates. It’s not going to the moon, but 3% for yen (and Japanese) interest rates is like going to the moon when it’s been 0% for 20 years. So, now, the yen carry trade is unwinding. . .. The original borrower borrows dollars to pay back the yen loan, swaps the yen and pays back the yen loan. What if you can’t borrow?What if the bank says sorry, no soup for you. . .. Now, what do you do if you want to get out of the yen carry trade? You have to sell assets. So, you are going to sit there and make a lot less money or even lose money, or you are going to dump assets to get dollars to pay back the yen loan. They are both bad for the markets. It you have to sell assets, guess what? The price goes down, and other people have to sell assets. The next thing you know it’s a stampede, and everyone is running for the exit. This is not a few investment banks on Wall Street or a few hedge funds. This is the whole world getting out of the leveraged exchange rate engine that has been running the world for 30 years. That is the financial equivalent of all out nuclear war.”
Rickards goes on to explain, “Japan is the number one holder of US Treasuries. They have been selling Treasuries to get dollars to buy yen to prop up the yen. What happens when you sell Treasuries? US interest rates go up. Do you think the Trump Administration or Secretary of the Treasury want US interest rates to go up? . . .. Treasury Secretary Bessent called Japan and said hold on to your Treasuries. We will give you all the dollars you need with a swap line with the Federal Reserve. So, what we are doing is the US is using dollars from the Fed to prop up the yen. So, the Japanese do not have to raise interest rates. So, the carry trade does not unwind. So, the markets don’t collapse. . .. It is extremely dangerous . . .. You are trying to defend an exchange rate that probably can’t be defended, and it is just a matter of time before it breaks.”
Back in 2016, long before the central banks were buying gold hand over fist, Rickards told people to buy gold in his best-selling book “The New Case for Gold.” Back then, gold was a little more than $1,300 per ounce. With the price down to around $4,300 per ounce today, that looks like it was very good investment advice. We are nowhere near the high for gold, and Rickards predicts, “I think it’s going to the moon. When I say the moon, I mean $10,000 per ounce. We have had our correction. . .. We are now heading back up again, and it’s going to happen very quickly.”
On the midterms in November and Trump stopping the voter fraud by Democrats, Rickards says, “Things are going to get rough. It’s already in the works. You can see it coming. Look at “Act Blue.” Turns out it was a total fraud. They were taking foreign money, which is illegal. They were raising billions of dollars, but they were doing it completely illegally. They are under investigation, and their board has resigned and ran for the hills. . .. You take Act Blue and Southern Poverty Law Center off line and that is what the Trump Administration has done, that is billions of dollars the Democrats cannot get their hands on. . .. In the midterms, the Republicans will spend $500 million and have an army of 500 lawyers fanning out all over the country. They are not going to wait until after the election to stop fraud.”
The Trump Administration will also stop the mail-in ballot fraud through the US Postal Service. . .. The US Postal service is going to save the day by tracking every single piece of mail (and mail- in ballot.)
“The Fed’s legal mandate is clear. It must focus on stable prices and maximum employment ..”
• The Fed Is Failing Its Mandate, But It Could Change Soon (Daniel Lacalle)
The Federal Reserve’s legal mandate is clear. It must focus on stable prices and maximum employment. In the past five years, the Fed has failed on both. Inflation remains materially above the 2 percent target, reaching a decade-high 25% cumulative inflation in the 2021-2025 period, while restrictive monetary conditions have been limited to rate hikes, which weigh most heavily on the small and medium-sized firms that generate most of net employment growth.Read more …
This failure was not merely a matter of missing a forecast but a policy framework that became narrative-driven rather than data-dependent. The Fed spent much of 2025 moving between concerns about inflation from tariffs based on ideology and a growing admission of weakness in the labor market. However, it continued to treat interest rates as its overwhelmingly dominant instrument. That is a poor policy mix when the problem of persistent inflation was caused by excessive government spending. Kritzman, at MIT Sloan, concluded that “mathematically, the overwhelming driver of that burst of inflation in 2022 was federal spending, not the supply chain.” However, the Fed’s policy was directed at penalizing the private sector while incentivizing large government deficit spending.
The Fed defines price stability as inflation running at 2 percent, measured by the PCE price index. That goal was still unmet at the end of 2025. Headline PCE inflation rose 2.9 percent year over year in December, while core PCE inflation was 3.0 percent. Both headline and core inflation increased 0.4 percent in that month alone. This is not price stability. It is persistent erosion of household purchasing power. A family does not suffer the inflation target in a Federal Open Market Committee statement but significantly higher price increases than those reflected in CPI at the supermarket, the gas station, rent payment, and utility bills.
The fact that inflation has slowed from its 2022 peak does not mean the inflation problem has gone away. Prices remain permanently higher after years of monetary and fiscal excess, and the cumulative loss of purchasing power remains embedded in household budgets. The Fed’s narrative during 2025 frequently focused on temporary factors, inexistent tariff effects, labor-market rebalancing, and the expected path of core inflation. Some of those factors mattered. But the larger error was to ignore the monetary and fiscal origins of the inflation shock.
Inflation did not appear suddenly. It was the consequence of an extraordinary expansion of money, liquidity, and deficit-financed spending in 2021 through 2024. The United States ran enormous fiscal deficits even after the pandemic emergency had passed. Government spending grew aggressively, while the central bank’s earlier asset-purchase programs absorbed a large volume of government and mortgage debt. The result was a policy mix in which fiscal expansion was incentivized and monetary discipline was inexistent. The Fed was not a brake on fiscal excess. It was an enabler.
Quantitative easing and the expansion of the central-bank balance sheet created the perception that all public deficits could be financed at artificially low cost without consequences. That illusion encouraged Yellen and Biden to treat debt issuance as painless and made it easier to sustain spending levels that exceeded the productive capacity of the economy. Yellen’s reckless decision to refinance most maturities with short-term bonds proves this. She was clearly expecting more easing in 2025 after the unnecessary rate cuts announced in the middle of the election campaign.
Money supply growth, deficit spending, and ultra-low policy rates were not small mistakes or isolated events created by an emergency. Together they created too much unproductive demand relative to available supply. When supply chains normalized and energy prices fell, some disinflation followed, but the excess monetary and fiscal impulse had already lifted the general price level and distorted the allocation of capital. Furthermore, the overall inflation continued to rise even when energy prices fell below 2022 levels and supply chain costs dropped to pre-COVID-era prices, proving that monetary and fiscal excess, not a supply shock, was the main cause.
The government’s and Fed’s responses made the error worse. Instead of controlling spending and understanding the fiscal source of persistent inflation, using the balance sheet more forcefully, the government increased public spending by 2 trillion above the emergency levels of the COVID-era, and the Fed placed the burden of restrictive policy on private sector borrowers. Families with credit cards, first-time homebuyers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs became the transmission mechanism of monetary policy.
Small firms are the backbone of the U.S. labor market. Businesses with fewer than 250 employees account for more than 51 percent of net job creation and generate 58 percent of net private-sector employment growth from the first quarter of 2023 through the end of 2025. Small businesses do not finance investments like large listed corporations, issuing bonds, syndicated loans, or share issuances. Small businesses need bank credit, using variable-rate loans, personal guarantees, commercial-property lending, and retained earnings.
The Fed’s restrictive policy hits the productive economy hardest. A large company with a strong balance sheet can delay expansion. A small business with a refinancing need will stop hiring, cut inventories, postpone equipment purchases, or close altogether. NFIB data shows that the average short-term loan rate paid by small-business borrowers was 8.4 percent in December 2025. Only 25 percent of owners reported borrowing regularly, a historically low share.
By keeping liquidity elevated, enabling government excess, and hiking rates, the Fed has made borrowing costs prohibitive and often nonexistent for small businesses (SMEs). For many banks it became safer and more profitable to hoard government debt than to lend to families and businesses.
“They’re now working through more than 34,000 text messages and 533 voicemails..”
• The Most Bizarre Thing About Fauci’s Phone So Far (Matt Margolis)
Anthony Fauci’s COVID-era iPhone is now in the hands of Senate investigators, and the very first detail to emerge from it is stranger than anything Democrats spent years trying to explain away. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, revealed that despite using the device for roughly eight years, Fauci had only three contacts saved on it. Three.Read more …
Johnson shared that detail Friday night on NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich Tonight, which journalist Catherine Herridge guest-hosted that evening. She had also watched Fauci invoke the Fifth Amendment 111 times during a combative July congressional hearing. “I can’t and my staff can’t guarantee that everything was preserved. What is odd is most of those text messages are associated with a phone number. He only had three contacts, which is pretty odd,” Johnson said.
"There's a lot of information on there. Over 34,000 texts, I think 522 voicemail messages… there's a lot to go through."
— Katie Pavlich Tonight (@KatiePavlichNN) August 8, 2026
WATCH: @SenRonJohnson joins @C__Herridge to share his initial findings after he received a copy of the data from Dr. Anthony Fauci's COVID-era cell phone. pic.twitter.com/JIRe6Zjs4NAs we already know, the Fifth Amendment right can’t protect Fauci because his pardon from Joe Biden’s autopen negated that right. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress. The decision on whether to pursue criminal charges now sits with the Justice Department. A copy of Fauci’s phone landed with Johnson’s subcommittee last week as well, and investigators have already extracted its contents. They’re now working through more than 34,000 text messages and 533 voicemails, with Johnson saying the material spans roughly from 2014 through Fauci’s departure from the National Institutes of Health in December 2022.
Johnson also discussed the discovery Thursday with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, and his answers made clear the investigation is still in its early stages. “We’re downloading the phone right now,” Johnson told Ingraham when she asked what investigators had learned so far. He noted that what his team has reviewed predates the pandemic, calling that a good sign for how the download is being handled.
Johnson said investigators plan to cross-reference the phone’s contents against material Fauci previously turned over in response to FOIA requests, checking whether he handed over everything he was supposed to. That comparison carries extra weight given what’s already known about Fauci’s inner circle. “We know, obviously, his henchman, David Morens, showed him how to delete emails, or remove them, and so, it might be a treasure trove,” Johnson said. He added that Fauci’s own diaries had already proven revealing. “I think the diaries certainly were,” Johnson said. “They showed Fauci for the complete phony that he was.”
Will we get to see the contents like we saw the diary? Not so fast. Don’t expect Johnson to release everything at once. “This is not going to be a document dump. I also need to preserve documents for our investigation. We are interviewing other people that he may be texting. And if you’re going to get truthful answers out of people, you can’t necessarily show them all your investigatory material, as well,” Johnson said.He did promise the public won’t be kept in the dark forever. “So, again, I’m not going to hold this close to the vest when there are things that the public needs to see. I’m hoping to work very closely with Senator Rand Paul and his staff and release these things jointly,” Johnson said.
LAURA INGRAHAM: “Senator, you have the phone with you.”
— Overton (@overton_news) August 6, 2026
“Can we look through it on live TV?”
SENATOR JOHNSON: “No, we’re downloading the phone right now.”
LAURA INGRAHAM: “What can you tell us about what you have learned thus far?”
SENATOR JOHNSON: “From the phone, not much… pic.twitter.com/xr28Wooh5YOne thing is for sure. It’s strange that the architect of our nation’s COVID response, and who communicated constantly enough to rack up tens of thousands of texts and hundreds of voicemails, somehow only bothered to save three phone numbers. Who were these three? If there were more, can the rest be recovered? If others were deleted, why were they deleted?
The walls are closing in on Dr. Fauci, that’s for sure.
There’s things to do…
• Sam Alito is Locked and Loaded . . . and He is Not Going Anywhere (Turley)
Justice Samuel Alito is not done yet. A month after National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg announced that Sam Alito was retiring (a story NPR later had to retract), the 76-year-old jurist told the Wall Street Journal in an interview, “Obviously, I’m here for another term. ”Looking at the docket for the coming term, it is easy to see why. Even after overturning Roe v. Wade and other historic opinions, Alito still has unfinished business. An example can be found in two cases involving bans on semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 that are now awaiting argument in the October term.Read more …
Many of us have been frustrated by the Court’s failure to address these laws barring AR-15s and other weapons. Just last year, the Supreme Court declined review of such a Maryland law. Alito and Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch indicated that they wanted to hear the case, falling just one vote short of granting certiorari. Notably, the required fourth vote could have come from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who called the Fourth Circuit’s ruling in Snopes v. Brown “questionable” and added that the Court “should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon, in the next Term or two.” Now, it will.Democrats are moving in various states to ban the nation’s most popular rifle (the AR-15) and its most popular handgun (the semiautomatic 9mm). Some of us view these laws as presumptively unconstitutional. In 2008, the court declared in its opinion in Heller that gun ownership is an individual right. The court emphasized how these weapons were in common use and not the type of dangerous or unusual weapon that would fall outside of the Second Amendment. Handguns, the opinion reads, “are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.”
In 2022, the Court held in the Bruen case that the government bears the burden of demonstrating that any restriction upon the right to keep and bear arms “is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” The bans on Glock handguns and semiautomatic rifles are efforts to achieve indirectly what the Supreme Court barred directly. In Virginia, Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) immediately moved against gun rights after her election. Ironically, her election not only spurred a massive surge in gun purchases, but she then supplied the lead line of briefs challenging the law. Spanberger admitted that the state law she signed would ban commonly used hunting guns.
In what is known as the court’s “clean-up conference,” the justices granted review in Illinois and Connecticut cases challenging bans on semiautomatic rifles. In Viramontes v. Cook County, the Seventh Circuit relied on an earlier ruling that gun owners had failed to show “that the covered firearms materially differed from machine guns and military-grade weaponry, which the Supreme Court instructed can be banned under the Second Amendment.” In Grant v. Higgins, the Second Circuit upheld a similar ban after agreeing with the state that the law imposes “a burden comparable to historical antecedents that regulated other unusually dangerous weapons unsuitable for and disproportionate to the objective of individual self-defense.”
Notably, in the Illinois case, Cook County argued that these are not just unusually dangerous weapons, but that the challengers cannot offer “even a single instance in which assault weapons were ever used in lawful self-defense.” That is a highly dubious claim. Since 1990, there have been an estimated 32,091,000 Modern Sporting Rifles in circulation. These are semiautomatic models, which means they fire a single bullet and then automatically load another cartridge into the chamber. The AR-15 is the most popular model, and there are estimates that it has as many as 25 million owners.
The popularity of the AR-15 is due to the fact that it is modular, with some models allowing one to swap out barrels, bolts and high-capacity magazines, or add a variety of accessories. It is also not the most powerful gun; many guns have equal or greater calibers. There is roughly the same number of Glock pistols in circulation. That means perhaps 40 million Americans currently possess weapons that Democrats are trying to ban as unusually dangerous and completely unprotected.
With the granting of these cases, Virginia’s ban on new sales of the AR-15 rifle and other guns will have to await the final decisions. These gun bans are not the only cases involving politically popular, legally dubious legislation. The first case to be argued will be Suncor Energy v. Commissioners of Boulder County, a challenge to state laws imposing damages on fossil fuel companies for climate change. With a docket like that, one can see why Alito is not going anywhere.
FAZ correspondent Michael Martens, whose grandfather was a Wehrmacht officer, posed the question at a press conference held by Zelensky and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic
• ‘How Can We Help You Kill More Russians?’ German Reporter Asks Zelensky (RT)
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic at a joint press conference with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky, Belgrade, Serbia, August 8, 2026.
A German journalist asked Vladimir Zelensky at a press conference in Belgrade how Europeans could help Kiev “kill more Russians,” prompting Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic to raise his eyebrows in apparent disbelief.The provocative question came from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung correspondent Michael Martens during a joint press conference following Zelensky’s talks with Vucic on Saturday.“Can you tell us Europeans what can we concretely do to help you to kill more Russians?” Martens asked. He hastily added he meant “more Russian soldiers, of course,” before asking whether the two leaders had discussed military cooperation. Footage shows Vucic raising his eyebrows in apparent disbelief as he hears the question.Read more …
Clips of the exchange quickly went viral on social media, triggering a wave of angry reactions. Some users denounced the wording as offensive and accused Martens of “incitement to hatred.” Others branded him a “Nazi,” noting that his grandfather served as an officer on a Wehrmacht command staff during World War II – a fact that Martens himself has acknowledged. Martens later doubled down on X, insisting there was nothing “scandalous” or “shocking” about his wording and expressing surprise at the backlash. “It is not scandalous to ask the Ukrainian President how Europe can help Ukraine to kill more Russians. That is what is needed,” he wrote. “Outside Barbieworld, this is how wars are fought.”Although Martens’ question was directed at Zelensky, Vucic answered first. “We did not discuss military cooperation today,” the Serbian president said. “What happens when the war ends is another matter. And speaking about killing, I hope all killing will end.” Zelensky, meanwhile, used the question to reiterate his demands that Kiev’s Western backers send more money and slap more sanctions on Moscow. Serbia remains one of the few European countries to maintain close ties with Moscow since the Ukraine conflict escalated in 2022. As an EU candidate state, however, it has faced pressure from Brussels to distance itself from Russia.
Last month, Vucic accused the EU of trying to “govern Serbia by email” and dictate its foreign relations. Ahead of his meeting with Zelensky, he reiterated that Belgrade will follow its own course and not join sanctions against Russia. Martens’ question comes amid growing Russophobia in the West, ranging from anti-Russian rhetoric by politicians, journalists and other public figures to restrictions on Russian media, culture, and language and the destruction of Soviet memorials.
Just this week, Polish President Karol Nawrocki made his own remarks about killing Russians, telling a rally in Warsaw that helping Ukraine do so was in Poland’s strategic interest. “Wherever the Moskal is being fought, Poland helps,” he said, using a historic derogatory term for Russians. Commenting on the remark, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called such outbursts “clinical Russophobia,” while lamenting that this had become “the norm” for many in the West.
“The Liberals Good Intentions Brought Bad Results”.
87-year old Paul Craig Roberts reminisces..
• End Times for White Ethnicities (Paul Craig Roberts)
Liberalism has completely failed, bringing down society along with itself. The country I live in today bears no resemblance to the one I grew up in. A homogeneous population with a common set of beliefs has been turned into a tower of babel in which there are no common interests. Christianity, the basis for moral behavior, has been marginalized. Crime has exploded. Truth has been supplanted by narratives that serve special interests and the further breakup of society. Feminism has destroyed the relationship between men and women, further weakening family and society. Business serves profit at all costs.Read more …
Constitutional rights are set aside for the purpose of creating race-based privileges for favored groups. The purpose of education has changed from enculturation to destruction of the belief system. Perversity has been normalized while normality is ostracized. This is the complete destruction of a civilization. White ethnic countries are being overrun without resistance by peoples of color. White females are unprotected by their governments from rape by immigrant-invaders throughout Europe, especially in the UK and Sweden. Dark skin color suffices without achievement for appointment as professor at Cambridge University and most other universities. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, public loudspeakers call for Muslim prayer six times a day, including at 3:30 a.m.Muslim communities are appearing all over the US with demands for Sharia law. This is not assimilation. It is the fall of a civilization from the destruction of its belief system. Today’s youth having never experienced America do not know what has been lost. The MAGA hope of renewal has been defeated. Trump and the Republicans fight for Israel, not for America. Democrats fight for immigrant-invaders. No party fights for America. Why? Is the answer that no one any longer believes in America?
My opposition to immigrant-invaders is not racist. Like Mohammad Ali I have no opposition to Hispanics, Muslims, Asians. I stand in defense of Western Civilization. The calls for Sharia Law from Muslim communities springing up in the US, the calls over public loudspeakers in Minneapolis for Muslim prayer six times a day are the opposite of assimilation into American beliefs and mores. They are an attack on a civilization, a civilization that is rapidly collapsing from the white liberal destruction of its belief system. Immigrant-invaders are turning our country into theirs. Hispanics have even established Spanish as a second official language.
Americans have two kinds of “people of color” problems. One is the inflow of displaced persons from Washington’s wars for Greater Israel in the Middle East and North Africa and from Hispanics who have made Spanish a second language for America. The other is America’s own blacks, many half white, descendants of slaves provided as a labor force by the black King of Dahomey so that the fertile land in the New World would have labor to work it. The slaves were no worse treated and owed no more of their labor time to their owners than “free” American owe their multiple tax authorities today.
In my youth black American families were as respectable as white families. It was Democrat US Senator and Harvard University Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan who provided the evidence that it was the white liberals’ welfare policies for blacks that destroyed the black family and produced single mothers and fatherless children.
Blacks were a part of the society I grew up in. The middle class and upper class relied on them. I did not go to school with them because in the South where I lived schools were neighborhood based. If you lived in a middle class neighborhood, you went to school with your own kind, not with rich kids or poor kids, of which there were plenty of white ones.
As I have reported many times, separate water fountains, separate toilet facilities, had a history in the fear of infectious diseases dating from pre-antibiotic times which, rightly or wrongly, were associated with lower income people. People actually believed that you could catch syphilis from toilet seats. Busses were segregated because blacks did heavy work and had soiled clothes, but white women would not go to town unless well dressed. Soiled bus or streetcar seats ruined their dresses.
The actual facts were ignored by the northern liberals who delighted in their feelings of moral superiority over alleged Southern suppression of former slaves. White northerners blamed Southern opposition to coerced integration on racism, but coerced integration was resisted because it was seen as a second Reconstruction. Out of this moral self-righteousness arose white liberals teaching black Americans to hate white people on whom all black underperformance and failure was blamed. Today we have the situation where a white person of any gender or age risks being sucker-punched by a hate-filled black and left unconscious on the sidewalk.
White liberals explain away the hate-driven violence that they created as “retribution for white racism.” Hasan Piker, an unofficial spokesman for the Democrat Party’s rapidly expanding left-wing component, said: “We want more immigrants to come into our counties and then they’re going to fuck your sisters and then your daughters. We’re here to destroy the White Race.” The response of the white liberals is: “Oh you poor dears, so abused by white racism, anything you need from us, we will make amends.”
If race hatred existed prior to the white liberals teaching it, how was it possible that white households employed black Americans to cook their food, help raise their children, and in some cases have responsibility for the weekly household budget. I have memories of my mother and her black helpmate chatting amicably washing clothes in the bathtub and then hanging them up to dry on clothes lines. If the races hated one another, blacks would not have been involved in intimate family matters such as food preparation and child raising.
I think that school integration helped to create racial animosity on the part of blacks. For whatever the reason, blacks were not competitive with whites in the schoolroom. This became obvious to the black children, to the teachers, and to the black parents, and out of a sense of inferiority arose animosity that was fertile ground for the white liberals’ sermons on white racism. Standards were lowered and grades inflated until we had high school graduates who could not spell or read.
Next amelioration was used to compensate for disparate performance. Affirmative action introduced race-based preferences which developed into DEI and the replacement of a merit system by race-based privileges. Even black Americans who made it could not be sure they had, and this added to resentment.
School integration also destroyed the Parent-Teachers Associations (PTA) that maintained close cooperation between parents and teachers. It was no big thing to attend an evening meeting at the local school But integration required busing across town, and meetings in distant and strange neighborhoods were not attractive. Disputes and antagonisms took the place of cooperation with parents lining up with kids against teachers, especially if the teacher was white and the parents back. If the black kid didn’t make all A’s, it was the fault of white racism.
https://twitter.com/MrWhiplash_/status/2086587458905583768?s=20
Don't know who is the originator of this meme but seems accurate. pic.twitter.com/9jWTUu9tG7
— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) August 9, 2026
Elon Musk acquired the Tesla” name by purchasing the rights for $75,000 from a man in Sacramento who already owned them.
— X Ethan (@XEthanai) August 10, 2026
According to the account, Musk sent one of the most persistent and courteous members of his team to negotiate the deal, waiting at the owner’s door until he… pic.twitter.com/prYacBSgA2
Tesla and SpaceX are about to need chips faster than the world can produce.
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) August 10, 2026
The answer? Terafab.
A chip factory in Texas so huge it will dwarf landmarks like the Pentagon and Apple Park, with a goal of producing more than 1 terawatt of compute every year.
The point is to stop… https://t.co/cTJg17OBlE pic.twitter.com/vVQCFOnJ0J
CHAMATH PREDICTS A 99.999% CHANCE TESLA AND SPACEX EFFECTIVELY BECOME ONE COMPANY.
— Vivek Sen (@Vivek4real_) August 10, 2026
"DOLLARS TO DONUTS, THESE THINGS ARE GOING TO MERGE."
"HE'S BUILDING THE ROBOTS, BUT THEY'RE USED INSIDE OF SPACEX."
"HE'S BUILDING A TERAFAB, THEY'RE USED INSIDE OF TESLA."
"HE'S BUILDING XAI,… pic.twitter.com/q2VwcsjvtC
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