ELON MUSK: SpaceX expects $100 billion+ in ARR this year and $1 trillion in revenue by 2030.

“We are expecting to reach 100 billion-plus ARR in December of this year. And it’s probably also worth mentioning that our internal projections for reaching a trillion dollars in… pic.twitter.com/vxhkEnLGZZ
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) August 4, 2026

https://twitter.com/WallStreetApes/status/2084756194426855834?s=20 https://twitter.com/Crazyunfill94/status/2084245771369738332?s=20

Are we at the point where the words are picked to make Iran’s leaders feel they can sell them?

• Iran-Oman Route ‘Agreed To’ as Iran Warns Against US ‘Interference’ (ZH)

A statement from Iran’s Foreign Ministry warns that the United States and military ‘interference’ remain the biggest obstacles to a final Hormuz deal to reopen the strait:

Esmaeil Baqaei: The geographical coordinates of the route proposed by Iran and Oman in the Strait of Hormuz have been agreed upon. If some third parties do not obstruct this process, the joint statement between the two countries is in the final review and drafting stage. The understanding between Iran and Oman, in itself, cannot guarantee the safety of the Strait for passing ships, because the factors that create insecurity in the Strait of Hormuz, particularly those stemming from the United States, such as the naval blockade and other aggressive and threatening actions against Iran and its interests, still exist.
Latest details from Financial Times: “Initially, Iran would send ships, including oil tankers, through the waterway to ensure it is free of mines before the strait opens to other shipping, FT reports citing sources. Ships would not be charged fees during the temporary arrangement, the people added.If a deal holds and the strait reopens, the US would lift its naval blockade on Iranian ports and reinstate a waiver to allow Iran to sell oil and petroleum-related products, one of the people said.
Iranian pundits and state media continue touting this as a ‘victory’ over the US-Israeli war of aggression: Ali Akbar Dareini, a Tehran-based researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies, has said Iran is aiming to “stabilise” its control over the Strait of Hormuz, which is its “biggest military achievement of the war”. “Negotiations are aimed at stabilizing those achievements,” Dareini told Al Jazeera. “You do not negotiate to give away your achievements but stabilise them.” Once Iran opens up the strait, Dareini said Iran is still likely to put in place a mechanism to “ensure that peace will prevail”.
“Iran wants to make sure that there will be innocent passage … But there will not be hazardous passage, there will not be war,” he said, arguing that Tehran needs to ensure the US and its allies do not transport military equipment that could be used for attacks against it. This also as Yemen’s Houthis continue a ‘siege for siege’ blockade of Red Sea passage, targeting Saudi-linked vessels of Yemen’s coast, as we described. Thus far on Wednesday, the White House has remained mostly quiet on what seem to be Iran and Omani-driven talks for terms of the Hormuz Strait’s reopening. Tehran, however, has not remained quiet – as US bombs have fallen silent over the past couple days:
IRAN SAYS NEW HORMUZ ROUTE TO BE VALID FOR 2-4 MONTHS: IRNA
IRAN: NEW OMAN DEAL TO CLOSE TEMPORARY HORMUZ SHIPPING ROUTES
GHARIBABADI SAYS IRAN RECEIVED MESSAGES FROM US: IRNA
IRAN: US SAID IN MESSAGES IT’S READY TO RETURN TO ITS PLEDGES

And via Israeli media, though without official confirmation from Washington: Approaching an agreement on opening the Strait of Hormuz, N12 reports, citing American officials; The signing of the agreement is possible as early as tonight. Meanwhile, much of all of the above depends on what ‘mood’ Trump is in:
US military-intelligence leaks to media are designed to dissuade Trump from escalating his war (we’re out of missiles & interceptors, Iran isn’t; Iran won’t break, etc). Whereas Israeli intel leaks to media are designed to rile Trump into escalating the war by calling him a pussy https://t.co/Uu3wfmZX8r
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) August 5, 2026

“.. talks between Iran and Oman over the Strait of Hormuz “have nothing to do with the United States”

• Iran Set To Emerge With More Hormuz Leverage Than Before The War (ZH)

President Trump said late Tuesday that talks with Iran are “moving along very nicely” – in a highly fluid and ambiguous situation where it appears the two sides are only interacting indirectly at best.

But the Iranian side has continued to insist that there are currently no peace or ceasefire talks happening, but only the Iran-Oman negotiations which focus on reopening the Strait of Hormuz and setting terms of how it will be managed. Consistent with this narrative, Al Jazeera freshly cites Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB which reports that talks between Iran and Oman over the Strait of Hormuz “have nothing to do with the United States”. But Washington is presenting it as a US-Oman deal for the strait’s reopening, even if it fundamentally remains an Iranian-Omani proposal.
Trump in his latest comments echoed his Treasury Secretary from the day prior, saying, “It could happen. Tomorrow or the next day.” This was on the heels of traveling to Los Angeles yesterday for a fundraising event hosted by the Republican National Committee. “A lot of progress has been made.”He told Fox that the White House is now having “very good discussions” with Iranian officials as part of an “all-day negotiation” and that the Strait of Hormuz reopening “is going to be open very soon.””If they back out again, they are going to get hit really hard,” the president told the outlet. He had said the same by close of last week, but by the weekend reversed course and decided to refrain from attack Iran again.
According to Bloomberg, “The US, Iran and Oman are preparing to announce a 60-day agreement on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz” – but the Iranian side has not affirmed this.So as it stands, Tehran says it is driving the Oman talks and that Washington has been sidelined, while the White House claims that it has directly involvement in shaping the outcome.mBut all sides do seem in agreement that the technical details and mechanics of the deal are currently being worked on. According to the latest outline of what this is expected to look like via CBS:
Under the current proposal, ships entering the Strait would use the channel closest to Iran, with Iran coordinating inbound traffic, while vessels leaving the strait would use the Omani side, with Muscat managing outbound traffic. The proposal also includes a “service fee,” with the revenue split between Iran and Oman.According to the source, the broad outlines have largely been agreed upon, with the remaining discussions focused on implementation and timing. Axios reported something similar, in which the US is nearing a Hormuz deal. Axios added that no tolls or fees would be charged during the 60-day period and the parties would work on clearing naval mines from the median lane of the strait within 30 days.
As for the claim of ‘no tolls’, this could once again be just semantics, given the Iranian and Omani sides have consistently signaled the need for fund collection under the headers of safe navigation, logistics, and environmental protection.There has also been some progress on agreements for third-party demining operations. But as Rubio reminded the world yesterday, Washington still insists resolving the nuclear issue – something which the Iranians still say can only be broached after the conflict is ended and there is peace.

Victor Davis Hanson.

• What the Situation on the Ground in Iran Actually Looks Like (VDH)

We’re hearing more and more every day about Iran and [President Donald] Trump as the midterms now are only about 90 days away. There’s kind of a narrative that is emerging, left and right, that we are bogged down. I’ve heard the word Vietnam evoked. Donald Trump may have contributed to that because, although in that 150 days, we’ve been operating in the Gulf, we’ve only bombed Iran about 50 or so days, and we’ve been discussing it for 100 days.

So the narrative has emerged that Donald Trump promises to hit them hard, they back down, and they say they want talks. They do not want talks. They want to delay, delay, delay, delay. Donald Trump then sporadically hits them. They come back to the table. We have no idea who we’re dealing with because the Iranian Revolutionary Islamic Guard seems to be playing the bad cop, and the moderate elected—“moderate elected”–officials, seem to put a happy face on things, and they either have no power or authority, or they’re in league with the hardcore to give them time and run out the clock.
So, what are the relative pressures? Everybody’s getting very angry over this on, off, on, off, on, and we’re concentrating too much on what Donald Trump says. We know what each side is doing. Donald Trump has 90 days before the midterms. If he should lose the midterms, his team is convinced, A, that there will be an impeachment circus for the next two years, and B, anybody around him will be hauled before Senate and House committees. But mostly in the House because I don’t think the Republicans will lose the Senate. And they will be inquired into, they will be researched, they will be berated, and it will cost them a fortune, and that will be a circus.
And so, Donald Trump doesn’t want that. To avoid that, he has to have gas getting near $3 a gallon, the world price around $65 a barrel, the Strait of Hormuz open, and all that requires him either to have a new Iranian government or a debilitated Iranian government or a negotiated settlement. What is Iran trying to do? Iran is trying to talk, hit the Gulf, close the Strait, talk, repeat, wash, rinse, spin, wash, rinse, spin, drag it out, see Donald Trump lose the House, have the House Left and its new Islamicist socialist base cut off funds for [the Iran conflict], and then wait out the clock and get a democratic socialist type of president that would follow the Obama regimen and pretty much appease them and let them do what they want.
So, what’s going on? What’s the big picture? I think we’re missing what’s actually happening every day. There is still an embargo on Iran. No tankers can come in with merchandise, food, material goods, industrial goods, and no Iranian oil is getting out. We have bombed now most of the rail links that go into the former Soviet Union and on into Russia and on into China. So, they are not getting imports, and they are not exporting. They may have some airlift capacity in regional airports where China or Russia are sending in material, but it won’t be much.
But more importantly, they are debanked. Assets are frozen. The economic embargo continues. They are losing in revenue about $500 million per day, and that loss is geometrically increasing, not just arithmetically. In other words, as you start to damage their infrastructure, their bridges, and we have, their roads, and you start to inflict enormous damage on the military, and they draw scarce resources from the domestic economy to fix it, the people are getting more anguished and poorer and poorer, and the country is getting worse and worse.
We don’t see that because of what? We don’t see that because there’s no ground troops. It’s not embedded. We don’t know what’s going on. mSo, while the Left keeps saying to all of us that time is running out for Donald Trump, we’re in a Vietnam quagmire, the war is lost, we need to just look at not what the Left says, not what the right says, not even what Donald Trump says, not what Iran says. Just look dispassionately and disinterestedly at two things. What is the actual state of affairs in Iran?
We have tragically lost 18 soldiers and probably spent $40 billion. But at that cost in blood and treasure, we have debilitated, neutered, deindustrialized, and pretty much destroyed the military, industrial, and nuclear complex industry of the largest state, in terms of economics and population and area, if you combine all those factors together, in the Middle East, and the bully, and the most anti-American. And so, while the Left thinks time is running out, the actual data show us that Iran is running out of time.
And I don’t know who will win this standoff, but Iran has less resources and less wherewithal to withstand this python-like squeezing of it than we do in inflicting it. We can do this forever. One final asterisk or footnote. Things have changed somewhat. Donald Trump and the Republicans don’t think the midterms are lost. If they thought the midterms were lost, then they would accelerate the bombing probably and say, “We have nothing left to lose. Let’s end the Iranian threat now.” But they don’t think it’s lost because of what?

“A president asked why the FBI wouldn’t publicly admit what it privately told him, that he wasn’t under investigation, and the bureau treated the question as evidence of a Kremlin conspiracy.”

• Declassified FBI Document Blows Up Everything About Russiagate (Margolis)

For years, Democrats and their media allies swore up and down that the FBI’s investigation of Donald Trump was a serious national security investigation, launched only because of grave concerns about Russian collusion. Newly declassified FBI records tell a different story. It turns out that the bureau formally opened its full counterintelligence investigation into Trump back in 2017, and used his firing of FBI Director James Comey as the justification.

The president exercised his constitutional authority to fire an FBI director, and the FBI responded by opening a counterintelligence investigation into him. The key document is a declassified FBI “Opening Electronic Communication,” dated May 16, 2017, exactly one week after Trump fired Comey on May 9. It authorized a full investigation into the sitting president of the United States under the codename “Oxferd Comma.” No, that’s not a typo. Don’t ask me why it’s spelled that way.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: This morning, the White House Government Transparency Task Force released newly declassified documents exposing an FBI criminal investigation code-named Oxferd Comma. The documents can be downloaded here. https://t.co/8l9NWPnCx0
— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) August 5, 2026

“The FBI is opening a full investigation based on an articulable factual basis that reasonably indicates that President Donald J. Trump may be or has been, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in activities for or on behalf of the Government of the Russian Federation which may constitute violations of federal criminal law or threats to the national security of the United States,” the document reads.
The stated goal was to determine “if President Trump is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation in a manner constituting a threat to the national security of the United States and/or a violation of federal criminal statutes.” The same document reveals that investigators were also examining Trump for possible obstruction of justice.
So what was the “articulable factual basis” for treating a duly elected president as a suspected Russian asset? Trump’s conversations with Comey. The document claims Trump “sought Comey’s personal loyalty” and “asked Comey to publicize the fact that the President was not the subject of an FBI investigation.” It also states that Trump “asked Comey to do what he could to resolve the investigations.”
That’s it. That’s the smoking gun. A president asked why the FBI wouldn’t publicly admit what it privately told him, that he wasn’t under investigation, and the bureau treated the question as evidence of a Kremlin conspiracy.
The document also argues that Trump’s shifting explanations for firing Comey “can be reasonably read to imply that the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation was a factor in President Trump’s decision to terminate Comey.” In other words, the FBI took a routine personnel decision, one Trump had every legal right to make, and spun it into proof that he was doing the bidding of Moscow. The memos show that both Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were advised that the probe had been launched.
The FBI’s leadership was furious that Trump fired its director, so it retaliated by branding him a potential Russian agent. Naturally, Democrats ate all that up. The bureau didn’t open the probe because of collusion evidence. There wasn’t any. You know that. I know that. Even Democrats know it, but they pretend not to. Yet, we got years of breathless wall-to-wall coverage, endless Democrat fundraising emails, and a cloud over an entire presidency, all built on a document that cited a personnel decision as its foundation.
Russiagate hobbled Trump’s first term, poisoned public trust, and gave the left its favorite conspiracy theory. Now we have the receipts showing how it started, and it’s just as bogus as anyone could have expected. Every official who signed off on this disgrace owes the American people an explanation, and the country owes Trump something it will probably never get from the Democrat Party or the press: an apology.

It’s probably very politically incorrect to say that no US senator should be named Abdul.

• The Democrat Establishment Is Freaking Out Right Now (Matt Margolis)

NBC News projected early Wednesday that Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) in the state’s Democrat senatorial primary. Our partner DDHQ has also just called the race. Establishment Democrats are freaking out right now.
Bernie Sanders’ organization Our Revolution also declared victory in the race. “Last night, Michigan delivered one of the clearest messages of this election cycle: people power can beat big money,” Joseph Geevarghese, Executive Director of Our Revolution, said in a statement. “Abdul El-Sayed was outspent by nearly ten to one, facing the largest single-race AIPAC investment in history and tens of millions of dollars from billionaire-backed super PACs determined to buy this election. But they couldn’t buy what mattered most: the trust of working people. Abdul refused corporate PAC money, built a grassroots movement that reached hundreds of thousands of voters, and won anyway.”

Money out of politics.
Money in your pocket.
Medicare for All.

Michigan…

We won. I am so proud to be your Democratic nominee for US Senate. Let's win in November. pic.twitter.com/RItVmqrzob
— Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (@AbdulElSayed) August 5, 2026

El-Sayed’s victory gives the party’s socialist wing a real foothold in a Midwest battleground heading into the November 2026 midterms. Stevens should have won this race easily. She’s a four-term congresswoman who, by every measure, was the more electable option in November. That’s exactly why Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer jumped into the race on July 24 with a late endorsement of Stevens, an obvious last-ditch attempt to keep El-Sayed off the ballot. Outgoing Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who chose not to seek a third term, also endorsed Stevens before Tuesday’s vote. It failed to stop El-Sayed, and now the party is stuck with him.
This is a genuinely terrible outcome for Democrats. The problem is November, where polling suggests El-Sayed is going to have a much rougher time closing the deal. Don’t forget that Trump carried Michigan in 2016 and 2024, so we’re not talking about a deep blue state here. This is winnable territory for Republicans, and a seat Democrats can’t afford to lose. And El-Sayed is the candidate the GOP wanted to face in November.
Just last month, El-Sayed, who has ties to antisemitic influencer Hasan Piker, said Israel should not exist as a Jewish state. He can’t quietly walk that one back before the general election. It’s on the record, and Republicans will make sure every Michigan voter hears it. Watch what happened when Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer questioned Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) on El-Sayed’s rhetoric. Dingell botched the answer badly, managing only to confirm that as the Democrat nominee, she would support him anyway. Other Democrats will face that same question throughout the rest of the campaign.
As more radical candidates like El-Sayed become the face of the party, Democrats won’t be able to put any real distance between themselves and the socialist wing. They can’t dismiss it as some fluke confined to the bluest corners of the bluest cities. This will reflect on the party at large heading into the midterms, whether Democrat leaders want to admit it or not. Losing a winnable Senate seat in the Midwest because the base chose ideology over electability would be a self-inflicted wound Democrats can’t afford.

“Abdul doesn’t represent a vision for the future. He’s leading a movement grounded in ideological fanaticism,” Rogers said.”

• ‘Common Sense vs. Complete Insanity’ (Ben Whedon)

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., on Wednesday presented the Michigan Senate race as a choice between level-headed governance and radicalism after progressive Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination. Rogers faced no opponent in the Republican primary and is set to face El-Sayed in November. The progressive defeated Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., in what many analysts saw as a battle between the Democratic Party establishment and its progressive base. But the contest was unexpectedly close and the Associated Press did not call the race for El-Sayed until Wednesday morning.

Rogers, for his part, went on the offensive shortly after El-Sayed’s win. “The choice this November is simple: common sense or complete insanity,” he said in a statement. “For more than 25 years, one party has controlled Michigan’s two Senate seats — and they’ve run our state into the ground. They’ve driven 200,000 manufacturing jobs out of Michigan. They’ve dropped our schools to 45th in the nation. They’ve saddled families with the highest utility rates in the Midwest. Working people are paying more, earning less, and getting left behind.”
“And now the same failed politicians are asking us to send Abdul El-Sayed to Washington. Abdul isn’t just another liberal. He’s an extremist,” he added. “Abdul doesn’t represent a vision for the future. He’s leading a movement grounded in ideological fanaticism. His agenda would make our communities less safe and our state less affordable,” Rogers went on. “This election isn’t just about choosing a Senator. It’s about deciding whether Michigan has a future built on common sense — or whether we hand the keys to the most fringe extremists in the nation.”
The characterization of the race is likely to be a common theme for Republicans campaigning this election cycle, as many increasingly find themselves pitted against insurgent progressives, many of whom ousted incumbent lawmakers. Rep. Tom Barrett, R-Mich., has found himself in a similar position after socialist William Lawrence managed to defeat former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink for the Democratic nod in the state’s 7th Congressional District. That district, which is centered on Lansing, is regarded as a toss-up and could prove pivotal to the battle for the House.

Earlier this week, Sundance wrote: “I give it four months, and it’s over..”

He’s quite likely right, but you are not supposed to know. You are supposed to think “we” are winning. That’s why we ban RT.

• Ukraine Shot Down Zero Missiles In Huge Russian Overnight Salvo (ZH)

According to a growing casualty count, a large barrage of ballistic missiles fired by Russia on Ukraine has killed at least 21 people and wounded dozens more. The overnight attack has raised the alarm for Ukraine’s Western backers, given it is being widely reported that among the over two dozen ballistic and anti-ship missiles fired, not a single one was intercepted by Ukraine.

The attacks come on the heels of a record month: July saw over 380 missiles of all types launched on Ukraine, with government authorities citing the highest civilian casualties since 2022, with at least 377 civilians killed, and another 2,129 wounded for the month of July.As Ukraine grapples with very low and limited missile interceptors, and amid reports that the Pentagon too is struggling to keep up supplies amid the Iran war, CNN also confirms that “as Russia fired more than two dozen ballistic and anti-ship missiles” and that “none” were intercepted by Ukrainian defenses.
President Zelensky again took to social media to urge partners to rapidly send more anti-air missiles: “It is crucial that our partners realize that delays in their delivery or a reluctance to provide anti-ballistic systems lead precisely to such horrific casualties and destruction,” he said. “Partners who are not ready to help more actively with the supply of interceptors right now can help by imposing new sanctions,” he added. Notably the Russian strikes have expanded to not just city infrastructure, energy cites, military bases, and ports – but now Russia appears to be going after prominent businesses.
This comes after Ukraine’s repeat attacks on Wildberries facilities, the Russian online retailer giant comparable to Amazon: The strikes also caused damage to prominent businesses in Ukraine, including the country’s largest e-commerce platform, Rozetka, and Epicentr, a retail chain comparable to IKEA. In a statement, Epicentr said Russia launched a ”devastating attack” on its manufacturing infrastructure, killing one of its male employees. In a matter of minutes, Russian missiles destroyed what the company had been building for decades, the statement said.
FOZZY group, which is one of Ukraine’s largest retailers that operates supermarket chains, said Russian shelling caused fires at two of its distribution centers. It said that six of its employees had been killed, while more have been injured.
https://twitter.com/AMK_Mapping_/status/2084827361103753594?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2084827361103753594%7Ctwgr%5Edd2eacefa4402eff7bfa44235249b6be873b8fe7%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fukraine-shot-down-zero-missiles-huge-russian-overnight-salvo-killed-least-21
But on the flip side Ukraine has only expanded its own long-range drone attacks on Russian territory, including on the capital city. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin has explained to TASS that “In recent months, the number of drones launched toward Moscow has increased significantly. And overall, of all the attacks carried out almost daily against Russian territory, two-thirds of the drones are heading toward Moscow.”
Last month Zelensky had announced a 40-day “operation of influence” – describing a multi-pronged campaign of long-range drone strikes intent on forcing Moscow to halt the war and get to the negotiating table on terms favorable to Ukraine. The Russian military has all the while also been upping its response.

“Let’s remember them in peace,” she added, “when there is peace.”

• How Zelensky’s 40-Day ‘Influence Operation’ Against Russia Fell Apart (RT)

In late June, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky announced a 40-day “operation of influence,” portraying it as a campaign of long-range drone strikes meant to force Russia to enter negotiations on Kiev’s terms.As of early August, the campaign in practice turned out to be what Moscow has described as “terrorist attacks” on Russian oil refineries, residential buildings, logistics hubs, and other critical infrastructure, resulting in the death of dozens of civilians.

Russia’s answer has been to pummel Ukraine’s defense industry – including facilities producing drones and missiles instrumental to Zelensky’s much-maligned campaign – while continuing to grind forward on the battlefield. As the 40-day deadline passed on Tuesday, there was no sign Russia had budged an inch.Here’s how Zelensky’s campaign collapsed far from its stated objectives. Zelensky approved the plan on June 25, describing it on social media as a combination of “long-range” and “medium-range sanctions” aimed at compelling Russia to end the hostilities.
Over the following weeks, Ukrainian strikes focused on three main target sets: Russian oil refineries, logistics warehouses belonging to retailer Wildberries (often described as “Russia’s Amazon”), and a wave of strikes that killed civilians far from any front line. Ukrainian officials have said that they seek to make the war psychologically “sweep over” large segments of Russian society. The Ukrainian leader has repeatedly insisted on freezing the conflict along the current front line before a final settlement can take place. Moscow, however, has objected to a ceasefire on the terms of Ukraine and its backers, arguing it would be used by Kiev to replenish its battered military and receive more Western-supplied weapons.
What impact have Ukraine’s strikes on oil infrastructure had?
Ukrainian drones have hit refineries across several Russian regions, including one major facility in Moscow, over the course of the campaign. The strikes did lead to temporary deficits, long lines at the pumps, caps on maximum fuel purchases for ordinary consumers, and logistics hurdles in several regions, particularly the Crimean Peninsula.
In late June, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the strikes were designed “to undermine our confidence in ourselves and our capabilities” and to “create conditions for launching negotiations on terms favorable to our adversary.” He stressed that Russia “will not give them [Ukraine] that opportunity,” adding that the attacks had “no impact whatsoever on the situation at the front.” Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak said the government had banned gasoline and diesel exports while strengthening air defenses around refineries, ensuring that plants operate at maximum capacity, and sending additional fuel to the hardest-hit regions. By late July, Novak said the market was “gradually stabilizing” as several refineries resumed operations and purchase limits were lifted in a number of regions.
Has Ukraine targeted Russian civilians?
Since Zelensky’s announcement, there have barely been any days without Ukrainian strikes killing civilians. According to Rodion Miroshnik, the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s mission tracking Ukraine’s alleged war crimes, in the week of July 20-26 alone 492 people were affected, including 57 killed, seven of them children. In the most recent weekly count, Miroshnik reported 49 people killed, including four children, as well as 342 wounded.
The campaign’s final days brought one of the deadliest strikes on civilians: On Monday, a Ukrainian drone came down on a beach near the resort city of Gelendzhik, southern Russia, killing at least eight civilians, including four children, with dozens of others injured. As part of the campaign, Ukrainian forces also started to attack Wildberries warehouses, hitting around a dozen facilities across Russia. At least eight people were killed and dozens more injured, with small sellers – mostly trading in clothes, toys, and other purely civilian-use items – suffering large and often irrevocable financial losses.
Zelensky has confirmed that the attacks were deliberate, claiming the warehouses stored dual-use components, including drone parts and navigation equipment – something any large-scale retailer in the world sells. Moscow has insisted the retailer does not supply the Russian military. Wildberries’ losses are difficult to estimate, but they reportedly exceed $1 billion. Following the strikes, the retailer will launch several warehouses in neighboring Kazakhstan.
How has Russia responded to Zelensky’s campaign?
Russia responded with long-range drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian defense-related facilities, with a focus on those producing UAVs that were ultimately being used in Zelensky’s campaign, along with attacks on cargo vessels it said were carrying military shipments in the Black Sea. Moscow maintains it does not target civilians.
On the ground, Russian forces continue to advance. According to TASS calculations, they liberated and took control of 32 settlements in July alone. The month’s biggest prize was Konstantinovka, a fortified stronghold in the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration that Russian troops fully secured in early July. Officials in Moscow estimated that Kiev lost around 13,500 troops while attempting to hold on to the settlement. Later in July, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov announced that Russian forces were on the verge of liberating Krasny Liman, another key Donbass stronghold.
Has Kiev commented on its 40-day failure?
Zelensky himself has so far kept silent on the self-imposed 40-day deadline, but the head of his office, Kirill Budanov, argued that the calendar was irrelevant. “Don’t get hung up on these numbers – 40, 50, 100, 15 days. What matters is the result,” he said. Budanov is the same Ukrainian official who on several occasions in 2022 and 2023 predicted that Ukraine would retake Crimea; Kiev’s attacks were ultimately bogged down in Russian defenses far from that objective. Zelensky himself recently admitted that Ukraine is unlikely to seize the peninsula, which overwhelmingly voted to join Russia in 2014 after a Western-backed coup in Kiev.
How has Zelensky’s 40-day campaign been assessed?
Ukrainian outlet Strana.ua noted there were no signs Moscow was shifting its position after 40 days, while describing Russia’s de-facto naval blockade of Ukrainian ports – imposed in response to Ukrainian strikes on Russian vessels in the Black and Azov seas – as one of the most serious problems the campaign created for Kiev. RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan wrote that the operation, “announced by Zelensky with such bravado 40 days ago,” had instead concluded with the liberation of Konstantinovka, the dismissal of half of Ukraine’s government, and Kiev appealing for an “air truce.” “Let’s remember them in peace,” she added, “when there is peace.”.

“Belgium relied entirely on imports of the fuel from Russia in July, according to Bloomberg..”

• EU Sets New Russian Gas Record Despite Ban Plans – Data (RT)

The EU has been importing record volumes of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) despite a push to fully stop imports from Russia, Bloomberg has reported. Plans exist to end long-term imports of Russian LNG from next year after the EU already banned purchases under new short-term contracts. Yet its latest watered-down sanctions package carved out exemptions for European companies to continue transporting Russian LNG to third-country markets after some member states balked at measures they said would damage their own economies.

Belgium relied entirely on Russian LNG imports in July as disruption in the Middle East curbed alternative supplies to Europe, according to Bloomberg calculations published on Monday. The country reportedly imported around 400,000 tons of Russian gas during the month, while total LNG purchases fell by more than 40% year-on-year. Moscow remained Europe’s second-largest LNG supplier after the US, the outlet wrote.
The EU has faced soaring energy costs after scaling back imports of Russian energy following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict. Natural gas has been the commodity the bloc has struggled most to replace since imposing unprecedented restrictions on Russia in 2022. Before then, Russia supplied about 45% of the EU’s natural gas imports. The Financial Times reported last month, citing Kpler data, that the bloc imported a record 9.89 million tons of LNG from Russia’s Yamal project in the first half of 2026, up 18% from a year earlier. France was the largest importer, followed by Belgium and Spain.
The US war on Iran and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz – a vital route carrying around 20% of global oil and LNG trade – have further strained Europe’s already volatile energy markets this year. Major suppliers such as QatarEnergy declared force majeure on shipments, sending European buyers scrambling for increasingly competitive US and West African LNG. The resulting spike in prices, freight costs, and supply disruptions has fueled inflation across the bloc, with analysts warning of gas shortages this winter.
The EU’s 21st package of sanctions targeting Russia included exemptions after Greece successfully lobbied to preserve European companies’ role in transporting Russian LNG to third-country markets. Athens warned the restrictions would hurt its shipping sector while benefiting foreign competitors. Moscow has condemned EU sanctions, particularly those targeting energy, as illegal and self-defeating, arguing they have undermined the bloc’s competitiveness.

“Sure, that sounds representative and fair. Great stuff, Barry, Eric, and the NDRC. Enjoy your fancy party!”

• Obama’s Exclusive Fundraiser for the Democrats’ Redistricting War (Thorne)

All together now: It’s only bad when Republicans do it. In today’s episode, the “it” in question is redistricting, also known as gerrymandering, depending on who’s doing it. The subject has become heated in the past year because awful, evil Republicans successfully redistricted the state of Texas back in August 2025. The move is projected to net an additional five Republican seats in the U.S. House. A slew of majority-Republican states have followed, with Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama redrawing their districts. They are expected to gain an additional one, one, two, four, one, one, and one seat, respectively.

Altogether, the reconfigured red states could net Republicans as many as 16 seats in the 2026 midterms.So, you can see why Democrats are upset. But as usual, it’s not because Republicans invented some new way of cheating — it’s because Republicans started playing by Democrats’ rules. As a resident of the Northeastern United States, I can testify that we Republican voters — Conservatives and MAGAs — are pretty much completely disenfranchised by Democrat gerrymandering. New York and California and basically every Democrat-controlled state has long been unfairly apportioned to help them hold onto power.
Now do blue states. pic.twitter.com/AejjKkmHyt
— Dale (@D47340) May 1, 2026

This is a “both sides do it” issue, but until Trump re-took office and started nudging Texas to take action, Republicans exercised more restraint and fairness in the states they controlled. Now, they have finally decided to play by the new rules. Predictably, Democrats have started shrieking and fainting as though the GOP had just invented the practice. And their media wing helps push the narrative. But did you know that the very first fundraiser Barack Obama hosted after Trump kicked his pinko party to the curb in 2016 was for a Democrat redistricting PAC?
A PAC that he helped launch, along with his former AG and wingman, Eric Holder, his comrade from way back in their Columbia University Activist Proving Ground days? On its website, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC) declares: Under Attorney General Holder’s leadership, the NDRC is the centralized hub to fight for fair maps. Since our founding, we have executed a comprehensive redistricting strategy that includes shifting the balance of power away from total Republican control of redistricting, raising awareness of redistricting, and empowering the public to get involved in the fight for fair maps.
Democrats lost substantial power on the local and state levels during the Obama years, so once the lads formed their PAC in 2016 and launched it in 2017, “we immediately began preparing for the 2020 Census and the 2021 redistricting cycle.” One can hardly blame the Republicans for fighting back against this Obama-level onslaught, almost 10 years on. And now, every August, the well-heeled swells on elite Martha’s Vineyard, one of the off-coastal enclaves in which the Obamas own a mansion, gather to raise millions in support of the NDRC. I must pause here to insert one of my all-time favorite memes, from ACT for America:

Ticket prices or admission tiers are never available for the NDRC’s ultra-exclusive big-money soirée, which is well into “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it” territory. The event generally raises between $1.5 and $2 million. Long-time supporter George Soros has personally contributed approximately $2.6 million to the NDRC over the years, and he is also linked to a 2025 $500,000 grant from Democracy PAC.[..]If you want a good laugh, visit the NDRC website to read tales of how the valiant organization fights “gerrymandering” (which is what Republicans do) with its noble efforts to “make our democracy truly representative and ensure that every voter has a fair shot at making their voice heard in the process” (which is what Democrats do).
On a separate page, you can read how the NDRC “Applauds Maryland General Assembly for Putting Redistricting on the Ballot.” Maryland Dems will attempt to amend their constitution this fall, enabling them to gerrymander the state from seven Democrat U.S. reps and one Republican rep to eight Democrats and zero Republicans. In a state where just over half the registered voters are Democrats (~51.5%), almost a quarter are Republicans (~23.5%), and a quarter (~25%) are unaffiliated or something else.
Sure, that sounds representative and fair. Great stuff, Barry, Eric, and the NDRC. Enjoy your fancy party!

“It’s an old song. It’s a sad song. But we’re gonna sing it anyway.”

• Actor Fired for Opposing Transgender Athletes in Women’s Sports (Turley)

Geno Segers was a widely acclaimed actor who starred in the Broadway production Hadestown. That came to an end this month when Segers expressed the view of the vast majority of Americans: women’s sports should be confined to biological women. He has now been fired, even after an attempt to apologize for expressing his own views on the subject. Other actors have expressed support for transgender players without any response other than praise in the latest example of the rising McCarthyism on the left.

This is only the latest termination over the political views of artists in New York. As the song states in Hadestown, “It’s an old song. It’s a sad song. But we’re gonna sing it anyway.” We have previously discussed how private companies can fire employees for public conduct or statements that bring controversy to their business or products. However, even though the First Amendment does not govern such controversies, there remains a free speech issue. Free speech goes beyond the confines of the First Amendment and private companies can engage in censorship that curtails this human right.
The question often comes down to consistency in companies enforcing content-based standards. I did not like some of the comments of Segers, but there is little question that equally strong comments against “cisgender” athletes or for transgender athletes would not result in such termination. Segers posted statements critical of transgender athletes playing in women’s sports as well as the posting of preferred pronouns. The comments were certainly mocking and insulting at points: “If you asked me what my preferred pronouns are and it’s not obvious to you that I’m a he/him, that I’m good with he/him — Surely you don’t need any help. I’m not wearing a dress.”
One can understand why transgender advocates would be upset with the content and tenor of these comments, including “I don’t see transgender people becoming oppressed or being oppressed … life is unfair.”However, Segers also wrote: “I’m not against anyone living out their lives the way they want, but I am against their rights superseding the rights of other people. That’s a little bit foul.” Segers attempted to apologize for his comments after the cancel campaign picked up steam:
I wish to extend my most sincere apologies to everyone impacted by my words. While I never intended to inflict harm, I recognize that the impact of my statements is what matters most. I am fully committed to listening, educating myself, and elevating my standards. I will work tirelessly to earn the opportunity to make things right.Actors, athletes, and academics routinely offer equally strident and insulting comments about the issue as well as radical comments on cisgender citizens and culture. Those comments generally do not trigger cancel campaigns.
In academia, the bias is obvious and open. As discussed this week, over 40 percent of academics say that they will vote against faculty candidates who voted for Trump regardless of the intellectual content of their scholarship. Even moderate conservatives are rare in teaching while higher education is heavily populated with the most extreme voices on the left.
An example is the recent book published by Pennsylvania Professor Beans Velocci claiming “sex isn’t real” and the gender “binary” is “incoherent.” The assistant professor in history and the sociology of science seemed to relish the anticipated controversy over his book, telling Duke University Press in an interview that “any right wing or TERF detractor who wants to s***-talk the book is going to have to say or write the phrase ‘Sex Isn’t Real’ in the process.” Velocci is no standout in higher education. Attacking “cisness” and conservatives is a clear winning strategy for faculty candidates. As with actors, the opposing views would be lethal to an applicant.
The same is true with athletes. The mob has now come for Sophie Cunningham as it did for authors such as J.K. Rowling. Cunningham stated her support for maintaining women’s sports for biological females, a position also declared yesterday by Aryna Sabalenka, the number-one-ranked female tennis player. Cunningham was not obnoxious or extreme in her comments. She simply stated her concern for girls in sports. Nevertheless, she has been viciously attacked (including by a team owner), as have girls who support her.
Athletes, including coaches, routinely make opposing statements with no cancel campaign, including a women’s basketball coach. Former U.S. Women’s National Team star Megan Rapinoe routinely made controversial statements in favor of transgender athletes without any repercussions. However, Cunningham is now the target for the mob. Guardian’s Howard Bryant wrote, “Sophie Cunningham is now … accepting the role as the right’s anti-Black, anti-transgender culture war ambassador.”
Whether it is actors, athletes, or academics, there is a demonstrably different level of tolerance for controversial views on gender. Take Segers’ statements, swap the nouns or pronouns, and ask yourself if there would have been a cancel campaign, let alone a termination. It is not the fact of the controversy but the lack of consistency that is so problematic in these areas. It is likely that Segers will now be effectively blacklisted in seeking new roles and productions. For him, the musical lyrics came true: “Hadestown, Hadestown, a place where you can die.”

Who organizes this? Why are we not told?

• Spanish Immigration Crisis Exposes Cracks in European Union (JTN)

The Spanish immigration crisis has exposed cracks in the European Union and an opportunity for right-wing leaders heading into elections next year in Spain, Italy and France. Last week, tens of thousands of migrants poured over the Spanish border at Ceuta, a North African exclave ruled by Spain since 1580. The small coastal city is situated on a narrow peninsula on the southern edge of the Strait of Gibraltar between Spain and Morocco — the only place where a European border touches Africa.

Instead of fully backing Spain as they may have done in the past, more than 20 European leaders instead criticized the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez for passing policies that attract illegal immigrants. PBS reported that as many as 60,000 entered the nation illegally, and that at least 57 migrants died on the journey. Other leaders went further. The government of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni harshly criticized Sanchez’s leftist government and suspended Italy’s participation in the Schengen Area—the passport-free zone that is a pillar of the European Union.
Though at an emergency EU meeting on Tuesday, the various governments played down criticisms of Spain’s leaders and applauded its quick response to send the vast majority of those who crossed the border back to Morocco, the incident exposed cracks in the continental bloc. Specifically, the right-wing candidates with elections next year—in Spain, Italy and France—have used the incident as a way to bolster their own credentials ahead of the contests and seek to ride the wave of Europe’s move towards stricter immigration enforcement.
Earlier this year, while Europe was working on tightening border controls and rethinking its asylum policies, Spain was an outlier. Under Prime Minister Sanchez, Spain announced a reform that will grant up to half a million people legal status, amounting to around 1% of the population. The move sparked domestic backlash and elicited concerns from leaders around Europe. “Some say we’re going too far, that we’re going against the current,” Spanish Prime Minister Sanchez said at the time. “When did recognizing human rights become something radical?”
At the time, the tide had turned elsewhere in Europe. In France, Germany and Italy, leaders have been pushing for tighter immigration controls, stepping up border patrols, scaling back asylum rights and helping to fund initiatives to create incentives for would-be migrants from Africa, the Middle East and Asia to stay home, Just the News previously reported. Spain’s neighbors accused Sanchez’s legalization plan of creating “pull factors” for illegal immigration to Europe and endangering the continental efforts to curb “uncontrolled mass crossings” that have become the hallmark of migrant flows from Africa in recent years.
“Irregular and uncontrolled immigration poses a danger to national security:” Italy
The critics were led by the government of conservative Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has long campaigned on curbing illegal immigration to her country and to the European Union. Meloni’s Foreign Minister, Antonio Tajani, placed the blame squarely on Spain’s amnesty policy, arguing that it undermines national security. “Irregular and uncontrolled immigration poses a danger to national security. The images coming from Ceuta show how the Madrid Government’s decision to grant Spanish, and therefore European, citizenship to over 500,000 irregular immigrants is profoundly wrong and encourages human trafficking,” he said.
Meloni’s government temporarily suspended open air and sea transport between Spain and Italy on Friday amid concerns that Spain was not doing enough to control the flow of illegal migrants. Under the Schengen Agreement, 29 participating European countries created a passport-free travel zone without internal border checks. France also mobilized police and military units to conduct checks on the Spanish border. Meloni also led a joint letter by 22 European leaders, criticizing Spain for its policies that they contend attract illegal immigrants, putting the entire European Union at risk.
regularization of a very large number of irregular migrants,” the nearly two dozen European leaders, led by Meloni and Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, wrote to the European Commission. “We cannot allow uncontrolled mass crossings, the instrumentalization of migration or other hybrid threats to create the perception that illegal entry into the European Union is possible. That a migrant’s illegal entry can turn into a legal stay,” the leaders added.
Conservative party leaders and candidates across Europe also see the Spanish border crisis as an opportunity, especially in Spain, Italy and France. Those three countries are set to have elections next year. In Spain, where the crisis took place, Sanchez’s Socialist Workers’ Party is facing a likely alliance of conservative and right-wing populist parties polling ahead of his left-wing bloc. The populist Vox party is gaining steam as the main opposition against Sanchez’s immigration agenda.
Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal, traveled to Ceuta amid the crisis to present a sharp contrast with Sanchez’s leadership. There he called for the militarization of Spain’s borders and labeled the flood of migrants an “invasion.” Abascal also called for Sanchez to be jailed over his handling of the crisis. Vox and Spain’s largest conservative party, the People’s Party, are gearing up for a general election next year. Sanchez’s leftist party has clung to power since 2023 after receiving fewer votes than the People’s Party. However, Vox and the PP were unable to form a coalition to remove Sanchez from power because they fell just short of an outright majority. Both are looking for an opportunity to oust Sanchez next year.
Blaming socialism
“By regularizing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, the socialist prime minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, has opened the doors of Europe,” said Jordan Bardella, leader of France’s conservative National Rally party and member of the European Parliament. The party’s longtime presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, will run in the election to replace French President Emmanuel Macron next year. The first television debate will take place later this month. “In 2027, we will stop this madness by reserving Schengen free movement for EU nationals,” Le Pen said in a post to Facebook.
Meloni, who led the opposition to Spain’s immigration policies, will also have to answer to voters in an election next year. Italians will decide whether to reward the prime minister for her own efforts to crack down on illegal immigration to Italy, one of the core campaign promises that catapulted her party to the top of polls in Italy’s 2022 elections. Meloni has led a remarkably stable governing coalition of right-wing parties in Rome and is the country’s second-longest serving prime minister.

Jensen Huang publicly named who's winning the AI race. Not OpenAI. Not Anthropic. Not Google.

Elon Musk.

His reasoning wasn't personality. It was infrastructure math:

– Tesla's AI factory is stacked with NVIDIA hardware
– Tesla's road fleet is the largest world-data collection… pic.twitter.com/6D3h8OUSE3
— stark0xbt (@stark0xbt) August 3, 2026

https://twitter.com/realCarola2Hope/status/2084611544260702584?s=20

Bill O’Reilly just made one of the boldest predictions yet about Anthony Fauci: He’s going to be “in court for the next five years.”

O’Reilly says Fauci may have escaped federal prosecution with the pardon from Biden…but the real legal battle is only just beginning.

O’REILLY:… pic.twitter.com/pge6Y81fXM
— Overton (@overton_news) August 4, 2026

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

32 Responses to “Debt Rattle August 6 2026”

Dr. D says:

August 6, 2026 at 10:18 am

“Jim Cramer Just Sold His Bitcoin And Bulls Couldn’t Be Happier

Buy Buy Buy!

Well, Nenner didn’t say but he says gold is about to climb (at least previous highs) so that tracks.

“Fresh Panic As Pentagon Has Used ‘Virtually All’ Its Long-Range Precision Missiles On Iran

Panic with whom? You think the Pentagon and therefore the President don’t know how many missiles we have? Or they have ever reported it correctly? For example: SR71 is a conspiracy theory. There is no such plane. …Until there was. The official speed of an F14 is 1.8 Mach. …While it appears to be 2.5 Mach, still unconfirmed. We have no space lasers. Except they threw 4,000 objects at the USS Lincoln and not one hit. It is now being admitted that maybe we have deck-based laser defense systems installed. But they tell CNN down to the single digit how many missiles we have. Sure.

So whose panic? People who don’t know anything about the military, don’t ask questions, but also have no common sense.

We’re taking apart washing machines to make those missiles as we speak. Same as Russia who ran out in March 2022. Still shooting.

It’s not the Thing. It’s that no one learns and just do it again tomorrow. Other people read those people who were never discredited.

NYC is under water now from Global Warming. …26 years later, not an inch. We also ran out of oil then. More is pumped than ever. And so on. They learned it when they were 8, and just keep saying it ‘til they die, I guess.

“As you say, Just Capitalism Operating “As It Should.”

Yes, every time the GOVERNMENT does something – or in collusion with the corporations – it’s voluntary free market exchange. Got it. Government being the #OPPOSITE of Capitalism and Free Markets.

“what do you think of American capitalism”
i think they should try it.”

Indeed.

You also say daily the U.S. isn’t doing this. Israel is running everything, including attacking all nations ending with Iran. Which is it? Us or them? Make up your mind. Both. Neither. Aiiii.

“Lawrence Wilkerson: Trump Sacrifices the Republic to Preserve the Empire”

Goes to show Wilkerson. Quite the opposite. Dead Opposite. Didn’t he say so like yesterday? We lost and so there’s no bases, no empire? Make up your mind. He sacrificed the Republic to have Free Speech, no roundups, and you can buy all the guns you want, and are no longer investigated for being Catholic or speaking at a School Board meeting. Oh noes. America all gone now. We can speak and print books. It’s clearly the end.

Back to Iran: “OMAN AND IRAN ANNOUNCE DEAL — WHAT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING

So I guess Trump was right again. I take cash and checks. Since also we are fighting on behalf of Oman and the Gulf States and not ourselves. If you need a refresher that was the Petrodollar Deal starting 1971. We are their military. Well-known, that’s why they don’t have one when they could buy a new Aircraft Carrier every year. This is the deal. Right? Any objections to this extremely well-known, 50 year fact?

“Wolff Responds: “Chinese Competition: The Myth of Overcapacity” dated August 5, 2026”

If Wolff said it, it’s bound to be wrong. Let’s see: China usage shrinks by 40%, all the factories are still there. Hmmm….I’m guessing massive overcapacity now, what do you think?

“Larry Johnson. US Navy on starvation rations.”

Another guy who’s never been right. But I’ll bite. There are issues? Ok. Noted. Once again, the U.S. military has failed, a husk of itself, incapable of anything, in fact the whole nation will collapse…same as 1971, 1975, 1986, 1994, 2002, and now. So, who benefits by saying this which has been proven false for a generation, while we just defeated a nation the size of Europe in 60 days. Yeah, totes starvation. Because not a ship sunk, that’s how bad off they are, so he can’t use that he promised only last month.

“How the Epstein Network is Privatizing Govt & Building the Surveillance State(w/Whitney Webb)

Ummm, Epstein’s gone? If you mean “Rich People” then yes, it is always them, because the rest of us are busy working and paying rent. A revelation. “Rich People get together and do bad things to get more money and power.” Who knew? We also seem to be revealing MORE about the nefarious workings of government each day, which is decidedly NOT in the same line and rolling out the Surveillance State. The U.S. is at the head of both revealing, and fighting or criticizing this (in Europe, but also against political opponents at home) so it would seem if there’s any such network they’re almost certainly based internationally, not here.

Right?

Log in to Reply
Dr. D says:

August 6, 2026 at 10:52 am

Today: Portugal saying you’re not allowed to wear a hat, or what kind of hat you can wear. I disagree. That’s not freedom. But it’s not my country, do what you want.

“• Iran-Oman Route ‘Agreed To’ as Iran Warns Against US ‘Interference’ (ZH) Are we at the point where the words are picked to make Iran’s leaders feel they can sell them?

I guess? That was my thought.

“US military-intelligence leaks to media are designed to dissuade Trump from escalating his war (we’re out of missiles & interceptors, Iran isn’t; Iran won’t break, etc). Whereas Israeli intel leaks to media are designed to rile Trump into escalating the war by calling him a pussy”

Yes, we see who does that: Fox News and TACO. So they are Israel, according to this. And Aspnaz, I’m sure. He would likewise say so, as well as Topcat.

But step one: Iran, a nation that has zero air defense, all ports and bridges gone, has infinity missiles, ackshully, while the U.S., where they haven’t shot up a taco stand, is unable to produce even one 9mm bullet. Wow!

Btw, that is the definition of “Out of Interceptors”, Iran, that we can fly lumbering, slow moving planes and generation-old helicopters over your airspace all day. Press yesterday: Trump talking about the capable Tomahawks, sure, but also Iran’s 8,000mph missiles. Five of them shot at our bases. All five shot down. So you tell me who is “Out of interceptors”. “We Just Say Things!” “We Make S—t Up!”

Next clue: They do a happy dance whenever a few missiles DO manage to get through, like I think Kuwait, not the missile itself but debris from shooting it hit the base. 1) They love Iran and hate the U.S. Yeah, we know. 2) If every missile was getting through, you wouldn’t do the happy, it would be assumed, like it is when we shoot back. It isn’t; so you know this equally well as I do.

So which side is ““Out of interceptors”? Whichever side I made up just now in my imagination.

““.. talks between Iran and Oman over the Strait of Hormuz “have nothing to do with the United States”

Ahh, that’s new. More things they just make up in their imagination. Now it’s true because I said it out my air-hole.

Yes, the military of Oman (us) has nothing to do with Oman, over the Straits I’m pretty sure we both agree is fighting over.

“• Declassified FBI Document Blows Up Everything About Russiagate (Margolis)

Then nobody went to jail because Donald Trump is a ruthless dictator.

“This is winnable territory for Republicans, and a seat Democrats can’t afford to lose. And El-Sayed is the candidate the GOP wanted to face in November.”

the reconfigured red states could net Republicans as many as 16 seats in the 2026 midterms.”

So many reasons Trump isn’t worried about the Midterms. As far as I can tell, the DSA is run by the Republican Party. Their every move makes Republicans a shoo-in. They’re the greatest ally the Right has ever seen.

“Not a single Patriot interceptor missile was launched, as Kyiv has now completely run out.”

This is how you know “The West” is completely on board, “As long as it takes” and that Trump is spearheading the war on Russia, as the Alexes all say. Giving no ammunition = directing and spearheading the war.

“• EU Sets New Russian Gas Record Despite Ban Plans – Data (RT)

Huh. So weird. And the U.S. has no sanctions on them either.

“Blaming socialism
“By regularizing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, the socialist prime minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, has opened the doors of Europe,”

I mean, yes. I don’t think this is a policy of LePen or Restore Britain, right? Consensus reality, extremely well-known…until it’s inconvenient, then it’s a conspiracy theory.

Not Noticing things. Graduate level.

This is printed up in books since Marx was sucking a billionaire’s teat. They’re very open about it.

Log in to Reply
Michael Reid says:

August 6, 2026 at 12:34 pm

Are the Iranians in the room with you now?

https://youtu.be/R65g7l8IAjg

Log in to Reply
Michael Reid says:

August 6, 2026 at 12:36 pm

Nima R. Alkhorshid: The Middle East Dynamic Just Collapsed Overnight

https://youtu.be/LqM6kn0fYdE

Log in to Reply
Michael Reid says:

August 6, 2026 at 12:48 pm

The Empire Is CRUMBLING: British Free Trade vs the American System | Alex Krainer

https://youtu.be/c_o3AgDQyug

Log in to Reply
John Day says:

August 6, 2026 at 1:54 pm

Do plumbers get fired for expressing opposition to transgender athletes competing against women? (asking for a friend)

Log in to Reply
Michael Reid says:

August 6, 2026 at 1:56 pm

Gerald Celente & Judge Napolitano: The Unraveling of the US Government

https://youtu.be/a5TQtdcSREI

Log in to Reply
John Day says:

August 6, 2026 at 1:59 pm

https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/united-states-of-israel

Scott Ritter has this: The United States of Israel – If Section 219/1217of the NDAA becomes law, we will have surrendered our Constitutional Republic to the Zionists. It will literally be the end of our country as we know it.
When I was travelling to Israel on a regular basis back in the mid- to late-1990’s as part of my duties with the United Nations, I was always struck by how closely many Israelis identified with the United States. On national holidays, many Israeli motorists would fly two little plastic flags from the windows of their cars—one the blue and white Star of David, and the other the Stars and Stripes. “We see ourselves as little America”, my Israeli host would explain when I pointed this out.
The reality was far different.
The Israelis conspired against their American counterparts behind their backs, and the US intelligence and security services viewed Israel as a threat to US national security.
I know—I was caught up in the middle of this power dynamic, and ended up being accused by the US government of spying on behalf of Israel. The charges were eventually dropped as unfounded and politically motivated, but the sentiment behind the accusations was real—a significant part of the US defense, intelligence and security establishment of the United States viewed Israel as a threat…
..We live in an age where the Israeli Prime Minister openly brags about having bought the US Congress.
Where AIPAC brags about spending $100 million to accomplish just that.
Where pro-Israeli operatives spent $30 million to evict Thomas Massie from the US Congress because he dared challenge the surrender of American sovereignty to Israel.
Where the US Secretary of State has openly declared that criticism of Israel is grounds for being denied a visa into the United States.
Where Israeli politicians openly advocate for the suppression of free speech in America.
And where the Chinese Wall that separated US and Israeli interests is being torn down by a compliant Congress, all the while the mainstream media, which long ago surrendered its independence and integrity to Israeli interests, remains silent.
The surrender document that signals the capitulation of the Constitutional Republic formerly known as the United States of America to a new entity which could more accurately be called the United States of Israel is the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), in particular Section 219 of the House version, and Section 1217 of the Senate’s version.
Section 219/1217 directs the Secretary of Defense to designate an Executive Agent (EA) to expand and accelerate deeper integration of Israel into US institutions. The EA authority would take precedence over the authority of the other DoD Component heads per DOD Instruction 5101.01, meaning that the EA would be able to overrule determinations by other DOD agencies such as the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) on Israeli access to US technology. This new EA would end direct Congressional oversight with supervision by the Secretary of Defense. There would be no Congressional confirmation or ability for removal of an executive agent.
In short, it is the surrendering of the constitutional duties of Congress to a politically appointment agent of the Executive branch of government…
..Section 219/1217 integrates American and Israeli research and development programs in a way which makes the United States dependent on Israel’s provision of specific technologies, thereby granting Israel a significant amount of leverage over future American policy and infrastructure, entangling defense supply chains of Israel and the United States across government, private and academic sectors, blurring the lines of territorial integrity and political sovereignty.
Section 219/1217 targets defense related procurement and acquisition processes so that it will be impossible for future Administrations to separate Israeli technologies or agreements from major defense procurement programs…
..Section 2191/217 grants the EA the authority to re-allocate the funding and focus of the Defense Department by prioritizing the integration of Israel into the US’ national defense structures. It is literally subordinating the totality of the most sensitive aspects of US defense to Israel, outside the purview of Congressional oversight.
At a time when the majority of the American people are waking up to the horrific crimes committed by Israel against the people of Palestine, and the role played by Israel in getting America involved in permanent wars in the Middle East, Section 219/1217 will permanently tie the United States to Israel, making the US Department of Defense and, by extension, all of the American people, complicit in these crimes…
..Right now, we have a Congress which has considered criminalizing any criticism of Israel.
This, or course, is an affront to the very notion of free speech.
By making Israeli security and US security indistinguishable, as would happen if Section 219/1217 becomes law, the inevitability of the criminalization of speech critical of Israel is assured.
The 2027 NDAA is America’s last stand.
Remove Section 219/1217, and we have a chance at survival.
Turn Section 219/1217 into law, and we have lost the Republic. https://scottritter.substack.com/p/the-united-states-of-israel

More: Israel-Palestine News, Understanding Section 219
The sweeping scope of this provision has led some media outlets and political commentators to describe it as “merging” the U.S. and Israeli defense industrial bases, which could—as this magazine observed earlier this month—give Israel additional leverage over our defense and foreign policy.
In the House itself, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and six other Republicans defied their party to vote against the NDAA and Section 219, which Massie denounced as “a betrayal of our sovereignty.” (All but six Democrats also voted nay, though many appear to have done so more out of opposition to the Iran War than Section 219 specifically.)
These concerns have increased the pressure on the Senate, which has yet to pass its own version of an NDAA for 2027 (a vote to advance it earlier this month failed due to near-unified Democratic opposition). The Senate’s bill contains a provision—Section 1217—that, though worded differently, is fairly similar to the House’s Section 219.
Although historically Senate Republicans have been strongly pro-Israel, the controversy over this provision has already led at least one GOP Senator to oppose defense industrial integration. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) told Drop Site News last Thursday, “I don’t think we should integrate our military with anybody, not even the Bahamas.”
But Democratic leadership has not come out against this provision, nor have they attacked the broader expansion of U.S.-Israel defense industrial ties. Both House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have preferred to frame their opposition to the NDAA around the Iran War and avoided talking about Israel in this context, even as their voters increasingly question the U.S. relationship with Israel. https://israelpalestinenews.org/understanding-section-219/

Bari Weiss’s “60 Minutes” Hires Producer Who Downplayed Gaza Starvation, Justified Killing Journalists
The latest CBS News hire shows that the way to get ahead in journalism is to act as a tool for the powerful. https://theintercept.com/2026/08/04/60-minutes-bari-weiss-cbs-news-israel-gaza/

Brian Berletic, US/IRAN -Regarding Reports of Empty US Stockpiles
Yes, stockpiles are likely low, including of ATACMS and PrSM missiles (the newer, longer-range replacement for ATACMS) – as well as anti-missile munitions; However all of these munitions are under production, PrSM missile are made 10 per month with an eventual peak production rate of 30+ per month sometime next year; This is why the US strikes Iran, plays “diplomacy” games, then strikes again – to refill stockpiles enough for the next round of operations. https://x.com/BrianJBerletic/status/2084864830432006527

Log in to Reply
John Day says:

August 6, 2026 at 2:00 pm

Gold & Geopolitics, Daily digest: 2026-08-06
The Hormuz “deal” inverted: Tehran publicly postponed the Oman agreement, denied Washington is even a party to it, and the US quietly pulled Iran sanctions off the Treasury site anyway – while gold ripped roughly $300 in a week and silver reclaimed $62.
The other big delta is the arsenal reveal: a WaPo account has Trump erupting at Hegseth over “virtually all” long-range missiles being spent on Iran, landing the same week Kyiv absorbed two dozen ballistics at a 0% interception rate.
Continuation underneath: Russia grinds forward on the Donbas and Sumy fronts, the Red Sea “siege” tightens, and the AI complex keeps wobbling into SpaceX’s lockup. https://no1sdailydigest.substack.com/p/daily-digest-2026-08-06

Gold & Geopolitics, Daily digest: 2026-08-05
The Hormuz “deal tomorrow” became “deal Wednesday” (i.e. today) per Axios, and stocks ripped to the first S&P record since June while crude crashed below $76 — except Iran rejected the Omani framework outright and added four new demands, so the thing markets priced doesn’t exist.
The genuinely new deltas: hard numbers on US missile depletion (ATACMS/PrSM “virtually all” gone, 80% of THAAD interceptors used), Kyiv’s worst strike in weeks with Ukraine admitting a 0% interception rate, and platinum breaking out +6% as gold reclaimed its $4,000 floor.
Iran rejected the Hormuz framework it “agreed” to — while Trump/Bessent sold an imminent deal – Iran abandoned the US-backed Omani proposal (inbound lane under Iran, outbound under Oman) and added four conditions: transit-fee collection, a permanent guarantee against attacks, an end to the naval blockade, and lifting of oil sanctions (HormuzReport, HormuzLetter, WSJ via FirstSquawk)
Iran state TV: strait reopening “depends on change in US behavior,” and the Oman talks are unrelated to any immediate reopening (zerohedge)
Yet the US is aiming for a Wednesday announcement of an interim Oman-brokered deal (Axios via zerohedge, KobeissiLetter)…
..US precision-missile and interceptor stockpiles are running dry – The US has expended “virtually all” long-range precision missiles in the Iran war; ATACMS and PrSM near-depleted, roughly half of Tomahawks gone (Reuters, Erin Banco)
CNN: ~80% of key interceptors used, Pentagon stockpile “dangerously low” (spectatorindex); 80% of THAAD and ~50% of Patriot interceptors…
..Kyiv hit by its heaviest strike in weeks; Ukraine admits zero interceptions – At least 15 killed, ~47–50 injured across Kyiv city and oblast; barrage of Iskander-M/Zircon plus 115+ Shahed drones on logistics/warehouse targets (MyLordBebo, AMK Mapping)
Ukraine’s Air Force confirmed not a single missile was shot down — out of Patriot interceptors…
..Oil: paper price crashes, physical stress doesn’t — Aramco warns, Yemen escalates on tankers
Diamondback says the war structurally raised the floor: ~5M b/d drained from reserves during the Gulf shutdown will need restocking (chigrl); the stress shows in the curve and cracks, not front-month (chigrl)
Aramco’s CEO warns a Hormuz closure removes ~100M barrels/week and that global refining runs near max utilization with little buffer (zerohedge, Amena Bakr); majors posted best quarters in years (Hedgeye)
Yemen’s forces say they hit an 8th Saudi tanker (NCC WAFA) and have forced 29 Saudi tankers to reroute, now targeting the northern Red Sea to “close all access points” (MenchOsint); Bab-el-Mandeb transits down ~22%…
..Russia-Ukraine: Konstantinovka and Gulyaipole advances; Odesa steel sector halts; the 40-day plan expires – Russian gains logged ~1km north of Konstantinovka into Alekseevo-Druzhkovka and ~2km at Novoselovka near Gulyaipole (GeromanAT, GeromanAT); Baksheevka and Vasyutynske reported captured (MilitarySummary, Kalibrated Maps)
The economic war widened: a Zelensky adviser says Russia is now hitting retail/food/logistics warehouses, with Ukraine’s own strike on Wildberries having opened a “Pandora’s box” (dana916); Odesa’s blockade has halted iron-ore exports, with Ferrexpo and Metinvest plants suspending (RALee85)
Zelensky’s self-declared 40-day campaign to force Putin to the table expired today with nothing to show (talkrealopinion); critics argue the Azov shipping strikes invited a far costlier response…
..Japan: the yen defense runs through a 2020-vintage Fed repo facility, not open-market sales
The play, unpacked: the US Treasury bought yen and paid in euros (to avoid signalling weak-dollar), then pointed Tokyo at the Fed’s FIMA repo facility — which lends dollars against Treasuries so Japan needn’t sell them (shanaka86); Bessent confirmed the euro sale was “reserves re-allocation” and floated upsizing FIMA (zerohedge)
First US-Japan joint yen-buying operation since 1998; Washington’s fear is Japan dumping Treasuries to self-fund…
..AI: capex “falls” on accounting, real commitments balloon; AMD and SpaceX punished on prints…
..Under it all, Goldman warns the market is oblivious to Chinese LLMs now dominating token usage as token prices go into “historic freefall”…
..US wages fell to 43% of gross domestic income — near the lowest share since records began in 1929 (PolymarketMoney). https://no1sdailydigest.substack.com/p/daily-digest-2026-08-05

Gold & Geopolitics, Daily digest: 2026-08-04
The Iran talks theatre hit peak farce: Trump announced Monday negotiations, and both Tehran and his own officials denied any were happening — while another tanker burned near Oman and the Dow still closed at a record.
The two hard deltas since yesterday: Zelensky’s 40-day “force Russia to negotiate” campaign quietly expired in failure as Bely Kolodez and Ustinovka fell and Russian forces closed to 4.7km of Kramatorsk; and Friday’s record yen intervention was already “wired back” within a day, pushing Fed dollar swap lines from theory to the open question. Everything else — memory shortage, gold premiums, Coldcard hack — is continuation with fresh numbers. https://no1sdailydigest.substack.com/p/daily-digest-2026-08-04

Don’t use voodoo; It’ll consume your own soul: Pentagon Crowdsources ‘Creative, Unconventional’ Ideas To Pressure Iran https://www.zerohedge.com/military/pentagon-sent-crowdsource-style-email-asking-creative-unconventional-ideas-pressure-iran

Second Foreign Vessel Attacked Off Yemen Within Hours, Amid Houthi ‘Siege For Siege’ Blockade https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/brent-bounces-houthis-threaten-saudi-tankers-raising-risk-new-red-sea-front

Log in to Reply
John Day says:

August 6, 2026 at 2:02 pm

Stopwatch has started again: Iran-Oman Hormuz Route ‘Agreed To’ As Iran Warns Against US ‘Interference’
Iran says Hormuz route is agreed: Tehran says it has finalized a shipping route with Oman, blaming U.S. actions for delaying a final agreement.
Tehran claims victory: Iranian officials say the deal would lock in Iran’s wartime gains and strategic leverage over Hormuz.
Mixed messages: Trump says a deal could come within days, while Iran insists the talks are only with Oman.
Draft outline emerges: Reports outline Iranian oversight of inbound traffic and Omani management of outbound shipping.
High stakes as pressure eased on markets, but geopolitical tensions high: A deal could ease energy market fears while leaving Iran with more influence over Hormuz than before the war. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/iran-set-emerge-more-hormuz-leverage-war-under-draft-us-oman-deal

I’d call it “southwestern”: Iran Moves T-72 Tanks Toward Southern Border Amid Reports of US Ground Contingency Plans.
Iran’s regular army moved three T-72-series main battle tanks south toward Abadan, positioning armor near the Iraqi and Kuwaiti borders. The limited convoy points to a localized defensive adjustment as Tehran weighs the risk of an expanded U.S. or Israeli campaign. https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2026/iran-moves-t-72-tanks-toward-southern-border-amid-reports-of-us-ground-contingency-plans

As we had all surmised: Russia Supplied Upgraded Shahed Kamikaze Drones to Iran for Attacks on U.S. Forces. https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2026/russia-supplied-upgraded-shahed-kamikaze-drones-to-iran-for-attacks-on-u-s-forces#google_vignette

11 tons of Russian humanitarian aid delivered to Iran https://en.mehrnews.com/news/246738/11-tons-of-Russian-humanitarian-aid-delivered-to-Iran

Huge Uptick In Israeli Airstrikes On Gaza Since Trump Hailed ‘Historic’ Hamas Deal https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/huge-uptick-israeli-airstrikes-gaza-trump-hailed-historic-hamas-deal

Log in to Reply
John Day says:

August 6, 2026 at 2:03 pm

Board of Peace says no Israeli withdrawal from Gaza before Hamas disarms – Netanyahu and board director Maldenov meet amid tensions over Gaza disarmament roadmap and recent Israeli attacks. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/4/board-of-peace-says-no-israeli-withdrawal-from-gaza-before-hamas-disarms

At least 13 killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza after Hamas agrees disarmament deal
Israel struck Gaza City, Khan Younis and Deir el-Balah, killing at least 13 people, hours after Hamas agreed to a disarmament deal. Israel said the strikes targeted militant operatives, underscoring that violence has continued despite diplomatic progress. https://www.vespernews.com/en/news/341e9eeb-5e1b-454d-aed4-7f87165cbdc8

Israel keeps breaking their phase-1 peace-plan obligations: Israel To Scale Back Gaza Strikes To Give Trump’s Hamas Disarmament Plan A Chance https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/israel-scale-back-gaza-strikes-give-trumps-hamas-disarmament-plan-chance

Israeli settlers shoot Palestinian child during farm raid
Israeli settlers shot a nine-year-old Palestinian boy in the back during a raid on a farm in the West Bank. The incident was captured on CCTV footage. https://www.vespernews.com/en/news/a5d21ef1-6e4b-4993-9663-77cfa5508226

Rights center: Israel arrests 600 Palestinians in West Bank, Old Jerusalem in July https://english.palinfo.com/news/2026/08/03/367721/

Log in to Reply
John Day says:

August 6, 2026 at 2:05 pm

JERUSALEM, August 2, 2026 (WAFA) – Terrorist Israeli colonists assaulted a Palestinian bus driver in occupied Jerusalem on Sunday, leaving him injured and requiring hospitalization.
According to local sources, a group of colonists attacked the driver while he was on duty in the city, severely beating him and inflicting multiple injuries and bruises. The driver was identified as Mu’tasim al-Qaq.
The assault comes amid an escalation in racist attacks by Israeli colonists against Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem, including those working in the public transportation sector. https://english-wafa-ps.translate.goog/Pages/Details/173133?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Israeli colonists cut power poles, damage electricity network south of Nablus https://english-wafa-ps.translate.goog/Pages/Details/173112?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

In July, Israel killed 152 Gazans, more than any other “ceasefire” month https://israelpalestinenews.org/in-july-israel-killed-152-gazans-more-than-any-other-ceasefire-month-daily-update/

This looks like a .30 caliber armor piercing round that shed its copper jacket: Israeli fire wounds Palestinian student inside Gaza classroom https://english.palinfo.com/news/2026/08/03/367763/

Israel wipes genocide evidence in Gaza, carting off rubble and human remains in 100 trucks daily https://english.palinfo.com/news/2026/08/03/367743/

Log in to Reply
John Day says:

August 6, 2026 at 2:06 pm

Israel’s Smotrich Repeats Call for Netanyahu To Approve Establishment of Three Jewish Settlements in Gaza https://news.antiwar.com/2026/08/02/israels-smotrich-repeats-call-for-netanyahu-to-approve-establishment-of-three-jewish-settlements-in-gaza/

(“Netanyahu” may be a figure of speech since early March.) Türkiye says Israel’s latest attacks on Gaza prove Netanyahu has no intention of peace
Foreign Ministry says Israeli strikes undermine mediation efforts, urges global community to uphold international law https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/turkiye-says-israels-latest-attacks-on-gaza-prove-netanyahu-has-no-intention-of-peace/4016567

A female suicide-bomber died trying to enter: Kiev’s ‘terrorist plague’ spreading across Europe – Russian embassy
Investigators have yet to name any suspects behind the bombing of an Italian restaurant in central Moscow https://web.archive.org/web/20260803001612/https://www.rt.com/russia/643784-moscow-italian-restaurant-bombing/

Putin has still made no statement. Gilbert Doctorow, Putin commits political suicide on the evening of the attack on a Black Sea beach in the Krasnodar region that killed seven, including children
I watched the opening minutes of Vesti news last night and saw Putin’s smiling face, his basking in the ecstatic greetings extended to him by youths in a vast auditorium for participants in a youth program intended to encourage and support their development into leading professionals of the next generation.
The broadcaster made no concession to the shocking tragedy that was reported later in the news bulletin about the 7 killed, 15 sent to hospital, some with very serious injuries and still more wounded from a Ukrainian drone attack on a popular family holiday resort on the Black Sea in the Krasnodar region. Normal guidance for heads of state in such situations is for them to fly down to the scene of the tragedy, to declare several days of mourning and to address the broad public on what has occurred and what will be done about it. Not to have done so was a self-damaging act by Vladimir Putin that his compatriots will not forgive or forget. https://gilbertdoctorow.substack.com/p/putin-commits-political-suicide-on

August 3, Simplicius, Disastrous End to Zelensky’s 40-Day Operation Exposes a Dwindling Ukraine
The carefully-constructed facade of success that was meant to drive the orchestrated PR campaign has been violently torn away to reveal a frail Ukraine trembling on its last hind legs. Russia’s recent attack on Kiev revealed a catastrophic situation as Ukraine no longer has any Patriots to stop Russian ballistic missile attacks…
..Zelensky strategically chose to use all his reserves of man and materiel for the 40-day PR operation to simulate some kind of initiative for a ‘victorious’ Ukraine so that allies could pressure Putin into ceasefire and negotiations. But now that this has failed, Ukraine is experiencing a precipitous front-line collapse where Russian troops have begun advancing faster than any recent time…
..At the same time, the situation for Odessa has become worse than ever, with Russia having entirely landlocked Ukraine. https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/disastrous-end-to-zelenskys-40-day

Log in to Reply
John Day says:

August 6, 2026 at 2:07 pm

EU To Use $1.62 Billion In Interest From Frozen Russian Assets To Support Ukraine https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/eu-use-162-billion-interest-frozen-russian-assets-support-ukraine

This looks false-flaggy. Russia has hypersonic missiles: One-Way Attack Drone Found At Major German Airport: The Threat Has Arrived https://www.zerohedge.com/military/one-way-attack-drone-found-major-german-airport-threat-has-arrived

Can Green-deal flip to WW-3 deal? BMW Job Cuts And The Emerging German-French Industrial Strategy https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/bmw-job-cuts-and-emerging-german-french-industrial-strategy

Professor Ugo Bardi’s blogs were down for 2 weeks due to hacking which ate his virtual existence and parasitized his finances. The Seneca Cliff of the Internet – Seneca Returns!
Forrester’s original idea was that pollution created a feedback relationship with the other elements of the system, which would eventually lead to collapse. In a sense, Forrester was a worthy heir of the Roman Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca who stated that “Growth is sluggish, but ruin is rapid.” It was a good description of the effect of pollution, ultimately related to entropy.
Now, something similar is happening to the Internet. It has been growing rapidly during the past decades, and it is not surprising that it is generating an internal form of pollution. It takes the main form of “hacking,” people, or maybe bots, trying hard to take control of other people’s accounts. Defense takes the shape of more and more sophisticated systems of passwords, passkeys, authenticators, and more.
These technologies work, but they are a cost: it is the mechanism identified by Forrester. Attack and defense grow together, and with hackers becoming more and more sophisticated, it is not impossible that the whole internet might become inaccessible to people who can’t afford the most sophisticated defense technologies.
Personally, I already have the feeling of being under continuous siege, and I can see plenty of horrible things that successful hackers could do if they could take control of my accounts — as I am sure they can do, despite all the precautions I am now taking…
..It took less than a week for a good part of my digital life to come apart. My Substack account was suspended, my subscriber list deleted. LinkedIn and Amazon accounts were canceled, and every one of my paying subscribers on Substack had been refunded without my knowledge. At the same time, somebody was cheerfully spending my money to generate movie clips on an AI image site…
..The presence of the Trojan virus fits with what I found when I checked my email address on haveyoubeenpwned. It turned out to be one of 183 million unique email addresses, aggregated during 2025 from Telegram channels, dark web forums, and Tor. Each one of these records contains the email address, the password, and the specific website where the credentials were entered. The typical result of the work of Trojan viruses. The trojan in my PC may have been there long before the attack. It was neutralized by the Windows antivirus system, but it had the time to send my data to whoever was controlling it…
..So the attackers did not need me to have reused any password. They received the entire set of my passwords at once, in one file, together with the autofill data and the addresses of the accounts they were used to access…
..In my case, once the hackers had my passwords and account coordinates, they used all of them, more or less at the same time and in the same way…
..Some weeks earlier — before any of the account attacks began — I had noticed anomalies on my credit card. Strange messages I saw on an ATM screen. I did not connect them to anything, because there was nothing yet to connect them to. I simply thought: this looks wrong. I blocked the card.
That was luck, pure and simple. I was not being farsighted; I was reacting to a symptom whose cause I did not understand. But it is the reason this article is a story about inconvenience rather than about losing several thousand euros. It didn’t completely protect me; some of my money was siphoned off directly from my bank account. But it greatly reduced the damage…
..Meanwhile the sharks kept circling. Hundreds of spam messages — probably thousands — asking me to click this, confirm that, warning me that a subscription was expiring, threatening dark and dire consequences if I did not pay someone something. And one telephone call from a polite gentleman who claimed to work for my bank and provided as proof of his good faith that he knew my credit card number. I cut the conversation short, so I never learned what he wanted…
..What this episode gave me, more than anything, was a physical sense of how fragile the Internet is. https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/the-seneca-cliff-of-the-internet

A Civilian Plane Crashed in New Mexico. Was Military GPS Jamming To Blame?
Four people — two pilots, two medical crew — died when a Trans Aero MedEvac Beechcraft King Air 90 struck the Capitan Mountains near Ruidoso, New Mexico, in the early hours of May 14, 2026. The NTSB’s preliminary report, released June 18, confirmed what aviation watchers feared: military GPS jamming from White Sands Missile Range was active at the flight’s altitude and location. The crew had been briefed on the jamming through their ForeFlight pre-flight package. Knowing a threat exists and being equipped to survive it are two very different things.
Six Minutes In, Everything Compounded
The crew lost GPS navigation almost immediately — and ATC was already overwhelmed.
Six minutes after departing Roswell Air Center, the crew told Albuquerque Center their GPS was gone. RNAV approaches were useless. They requested radar vectors for an ILS approach, a non-GPS backup. But ATC was juggling multiple aircraft also blinded by jamming, and delayed vectors by several minutes. The King Air overshot its landing pattern by roughly 10 miles while waiting — a solvable problem compounding fast.
The NTSB preliminary report confirms:
GPS jamming originated from White Sands Missile Range’s routine NAVFEST exercises, coordinated with the FAA and published via NOTAMs
ADS-B surveillance degraded alongside GPS
ATC paused jamming temporarily; the crew reported Ruidoso in sight and requested a visual approach
Jamming resumed during descent; the aircraft struck terrain approximately 230 feet below a summit https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/civilian-plane-crashed-mexico-military-163855450.html

Log in to Reply
John Day says:

August 6, 2026 at 2:08 pm

Steve Kirsch on training AI models with or without respect to political narratives: Is AlterAI the only objective AI chatbot?
I have a simple “objectivity test” that all the AI chatbots fail. The secret? It’s in the training. Is there another honest AI? Let me know in the comments. https://kirschsubstack.com/p/is-alterai-the-only-objective-ai

Moon of Alabama with key insights: It’s The Math – How China Is Avoiding The AI Bubble
The Artificial Intelligence bubble in the United States is still growing. It is consuming a large share of the available financial resources. But its output, in form of real products, is so far rather meager.
There are some code generation tools which are, at times, helpful, but, unless subsidized, very expensive. There is ChatGTP and other squawk boxes which in the end are just new forms of inherently unreliable web search tools.
What is missing are useful mass applications billions of people are willing to pay for…
..What’s less clear is when the profits are going to start rolling in and how big they are going to be. “To me, it’s a math problem,” says Asad Ramzanali, the director of A.I. at a policy center at Vanderbilt University. “We are making trillions of dollars in investments on the back of tens of billions of dollars in revenues.”
That is why Ed Zitron and others will rightly tell you that the huge investments spent on AI are making no sense at all. Where are the products and the customers that will allow to recuperate the hundreds of billions of shady dollars spent on data centers for AI? …
..The NY Times presume that everything the U.S. does is copied throughout the world. If the bubble burst in the U.S. it will, in consequence, also burst in other places – especially in China.
This is a misunderstanding of what the Chinese AI models are, and what Chinese AI companies are doing.
Throughout the last year several Chinese companies have surprised the public by offering AI models that are nearly as capable as the best ones U.S. companies produce, but are offered at a price that just a tenth of the cost of the (heavily subsidized) U.S. models…
..The real discriminator between U.S. and Chinese AI companies is the math they use.
U.S. models run on algorithms that are computationally wasteful, while Chinese models use smarter methods, which need less compute, to achieve a similar quality.
Language models, which, given some text input, produce a related text output, are nothing new. Most are based on so called neural network algorithms which are a simulation of a rudimentary function of the human brain. Neural networks can be trained to recognize an input to then produce a related output…
..U.S. companies jumped onto the Transformer model. It was seen as a chance to create ever bigger and better models with the hope that a huge sized model would eventually reach or exceed the capabilities of a human brain.
The advantage of the Transformer model is that the math necessary to train it can be parallelized. Computer chips built to produce graphics have special hardware to process pixels. Instead of one pixel at a time they compute complete pictures by computing the (color) value of thousands of pixels at the same time. The use of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) allows for parallelized (matrix) operations on thousands of parameters. (A video by Grant Sanderson, Large Language Models explained briefly (vid), gives a good introduction to this.)
The disadvantage of the Transformer model is the exponential behavior of its attention mechanism. To digest one sentence of input the model has to process each element therein against all other elements held in the same context. That is an exponential operation. For a context of 500,000 input words (i.e to summarize a book of that length) the model will require 250 billion operations. OpenAI, Anthropic and others use a lot of tricks to optimize their computing but they can not escape the basic exponential constraints of the algorithm they use…
..For lack of compute capacity the Chinese model developers had to take different routes. They use recurrent neural networks and the so called Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) algorithms. These have been known since the late 1990s and are the basis for most machine language translations. Apple’s SIRI is using a LSTM model.
The LSTM algorithm has disadvantages. In its original form its training can not be parallelized. But it is able to ‘forget’ unnecessary context and its compute of an answer is (mostly) linear, not exponential.
The more recent extended LSTM algorithms allow for parallelizing the training of such models while keeping the advantage of a (nearly) linear response algorithm.
The recently revealed Kimi model of the Chinese company Moonshot.ai is based on a (modified) xLSTM algorithm, called Kimi Delta Attention. It also splits the model into a network of 800 ‘experts’ only a few of which are activated to answer a users specific question…
..The U.S. AI model providers, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and SpaceX, are all stuck with the Transformer model algorithms they use to build their models. It is what they have been building on for years and it is what their engineers are experts in. They have promised to build or buy a huge amount of computing capacity because that is what their models need.
It is this choice of an algorithm that has created the U.S. AI bubble.
The Chinese modelers, for lack of unlimited venture capital, have had to find better ways to solve the problems. Their use of different algorithms allows them to deliver nearly similar results for much less money.
There is also a difference in attitude. Where U.S. financiers like Larry Ellison are striving for some god-like general artificial intelligence, the Chinese (and some European) developers and financiers are much more interested in solving real world (industry) problems…
..Instead of reaching for the stars, like U.S. companies do, the Chinese are out to solve down-to-earth problems. Restricted resources have forced the Chinese developers to find better algorithms. Their primary orientation is on useful applications that will generate appropriate returns for their costs.
At some point the AI bubble in the U.S. will blow up. There will be a lot of collateral damage. Many people will lose their money. There will be a number of useless empty data centers up for rent. https://www.moonofalabama.org/2026/08/its-the-math-how-china-is-avoiding-the-ai-bubble.html

Meryl Nass MD on the right advertising slogan: Chinese-owned Smithfield is the largest pork producer in the US. They want the ability to keep pigs miserable in tiny cages or crates for their lifetimes. And they call this “Save Our Bacon.” Give Pigs a Chance (to have a life before being eaten). https://merylnass.substack.com/p/chinese-owned-smithfield-is-the-largest

BREAKING: Criminal Referral Requests Sent to All 50 State Attorneys General Seek Prosecutions of Fauci and Top Public-Health Officials
The 50-state legal campaign cites murder, terrorism, racketeering, human trafficking, elder abuse, and other serious offenses tied to COVID-era hospital protocols and financial incentives. https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/breaking-criminal-referral-requests-c3f

John Leake, “Lyme Disease Almost Certainly Came from These [Gain-of Function] Experiments” – Reviewing the evidence that Lyme disease emerged from US biodefense Lab 257 on Plum Island
On July 28, 2026, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a government-wide policy of ending federal funding for dangerous gain-of-function (DGOF) research.
A few readers—including a couple of angry readers—have asked me to explain why Kennedy just stated on Fox News that Lyme disease “almost certainty came from these [Gain-of-Function] experiments.”
Some readers may recall that, last November, in a conversation on the PBD Podcast, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary stated that “with a high degree of probability,” Lyme disease came from the U.S. biodefense “Lab 257 on Plum Island just outside of Connecticut.”
Makary elaborated that the pathogenic agent was developed primarily by the German veterinarian and animal virus specialist, Dr. Erich Traub, who previously conducted biological warfare research for Nazi Germany and was brought to the United States after the war as part of Operation Paperclip to acquire German scientific research while denying it to the Soviets.
As evidence, Makary cited the published literature on the U.S. bioweapons program to develop insects and arachnids as disease vectors. He specifically mentioned the book, Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, by Kris Newby.
I was already familiar with the theory that the causative agent of Lyme disease—a spiral-shaped bacteria (spirochetes) from the Borrelia genus, primarily Borrelia burgdorferi—came out of Lab 257 on Plum Island. The bacteria was first isolated and described in 1982 by Wilhelm Burgdorfer, a Swiss-American medical entomologist who worked at NIAID.
The first cluster of Lyme disease cases in humans was identified in 1975 in Old Lyme, Connecticut, after two mothers noticed their children’s unusual arthritis symptoms.
I hadn’t given this theory much thought until I saw the reflexive, widespread, and lockstep proclamations that Dr. Makary’s statement is a “debunked conspiracy theory.” https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/rfk-lyme-disease-almost-certainly

Log in to Reply
John Day says:

August 6, 2026 at 2:10 pm

Rare virus with no cure detected in New York – There is no vaccine or medicine to prevent or treat the Bourbon virus, which is transmitted by the lone star tick https://www.rt.com/news/643787-bourbon-virus-new-york/

Steve Kirsch, Official German KiGGS study found unvaccinated kids are much healthier, but they publicly claimed there was no difference
The had only 94 kids on the unvaccinated group so the results were not statistically significant. But in 13/14 comparisons looked at in the study, the unvaccinated kids were much healthier. https://kirschsubstack.com/p/official-german-kiggs-study-found

Steve Kirsch got a compliment from AI: “This is the most honest medical data I have ever seen on this topic [autism]” –AlterAI
I showed AlterAI the data collected from my latest survey of parents of kids who regressed rapidly. Check out all the things they have in common and see if you can determine the underlying cause. https://kirschsubstack.com/p/this-is-the-most-honest-medical-data

Steve Kirsch, The Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) plan avoids the elephant in the room
I read through their entire 336-page strategic plan and the word “vaccine” was never mentioned. Not even once. They are avoiding the elephant in the room. That is not how science should work. https://kirschsubstack.com/p/the-interagency-autism-coordinating

Log in to Reply
John Day says:

August 6, 2026 at 2:11 pm

Jessica Rose Ph.D. reviews more emails: Robert Gallo warned Francis Collins/Anthony Fauci of the dangers of using glycosylated spike proteins in vaccine context in May 2020 – His warning was ignored… the mRNA ship had to sail
Gallo writes a humble warning:
“On a final digression Francis I have had 36 years of on/off experiences with glycosylated spike proteins-their analyses immunologically and especially regarding use in vaccines and developing neutralizing Abs. I believe it will be a mistake to put most eggs in that basket. The risks: shortened antibody half life; 2) protection NOT correlating with neutralizing Abs; 3) sometimes hazards from them. Admittedly, they might work, but I trust and hope that not everything is going in this bag. If you wish to discuss this again I will be available.”…
..He warned of three foreseeable issues:
shortened antibody half-life
protection NOT correlating with neutralizing Abs (antibodies)
sometimes hazards from them
This. Blew. My. Mind. Why? Because peer-reviewed data on the mRNA COVID-19 injectable products show all three. https://jessicar.substack.com/p/robert-gallo-warned-francis-collinsanthony

Meryl Nass MD, Evidence emerges that a placebo or less toxic COVID vaccine may have been used in some states or for some politicians https://merylnass.substack.com/p/evidence-emerges-that-a-placebo-or

Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome was named decades before the metabolic/prediabetic causes were discovered. PCOS Has a New Name; Doctors Hope It Will Improve Care for Millions https://www.globalresearch.ca/pcos-new-name-doctors-hope-improve-care-millions/5935763

Log in to Reply
zerosum says:

August 6, 2026 at 2:54 pm

I have nothing new to add to news.
Here, It’s hot and smoky.

Log in to Reply
tboc says:

August 6, 2026 at 4:00 pm

in a follow up to run with the crowd get where the crowd is going, the crowd doesn’t have Virgil to guide them.

on the home front i have received the worst lot survey i have ever seen in 45 years, to be used as a basis for a construction variance request. nothing divine or comedic about it

Log in to Reply
Raúl Ilargi Meijer says:

August 6, 2026 at 4:37 pm

Too late to change this stupid wrong format for the comments now. SORRY

Log in to Reply
my parents said know says:

August 6, 2026 at 4:47 pm

Haven’t people noticed that Whitney Webb frequently wears a yellow sweater in the AI generated versions?
She has told people not to “listen” to any video after oct 2025 because they are AI generated “slop”.
Go to her website (unlimited hangout) to hear what she really has to say.

Log in to Reply
Michael Reid says:

August 6, 2026 at 9:21 pm

COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Trump and Empire

https://youtu.be/1CGhxEgq_mE

Log in to Reply
Michael Reid says:

August 6, 2026 at 9:25 pm

The ORDER was Executed: Russia for the First Time Blew up Zelensky’s Underground Lair in DNIPRO

https://youtu.be/51wL9POAeUo

Log in to Reply
tboc says:

August 6, 2026 at 9:56 pm

Zelensky is not a head of state he is an international criminal, a hit man for the western moneyed interests.

One of the three butchers in the current meat market.
The only value his life holds is that it be taken from him.
This statement is gut wrenching, but it will stand.

Log in to Reply
Michael Reid says:

August 6, 2026 at 9:57 pm

Pepe Escobar : Iran Has No Fear of Trump

https://youtu.be/7ryENzD2NDw

Log in to Reply
John Day says:

August 6, 2026 at 11:59 pm

Lindsey Graham Was Allegedly This Trans Sex Worker’s Client. Now, She’s Speaking Out [WATCH]
Taylor Snider tells Uncloseted Media about a sexual encounter with the late senator, how she was threatened to remain silent, and what it says about anti-LGBTQ politics on Capitol Hill. https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/lindsey-graham-was-allegedly-this

Log in to Reply
charles says:

August 7, 2026 at 12:37 am

for those interested in the history of bankers starting wars. Not just London.
https://cynthiachung.substack.com/

Log in to Reply
Michael Reid says:

August 7, 2026 at 1:18 am

Larry Johnson: Massive Attack Coming… Wait, Never Mind’ – Iran’s Parliament Chief on Trump’s Theater

https://youtu.be/8ZisjyDeBx4

Log in to Reply
zerosum says:

August 7, 2026 at 1:52 am

How to become rich
First,
make the laws,
be in power,
have a great lawyer
have a financial wizard

otherwise it will be called …

Fraud, stealing getting rich off gov. programs.
(check out the democrats, check out Trump)

🙂

Log in to Reply
my parents said know says:

August 7, 2026 at 1:55 am

It’s easy (it’s so easy)
Like taking candy, from a baby!

Log in to Reply
zerosum says:

August 7, 2026 at 4:04 am

This is probably a fly in the ointment
https://t.me/Middle_East_Spectator/35765#

Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency has shared the initial text of the proposed ‘Strategic Control of Hormuz Act’ being prepared for Parliament

NOTE: This is a separate Iranian parliamentary law, in addition to the agreement between Iran and Oman.

1. The passage of vessels belonging to the United States, Israel, and other hostile countries through the Strait of Hormuz will be prohibited.

2. Shipments related to Israel, whether military or civilian, will not have the right to transit the Strait of Hormuz.

3. Vessels or cargoes that play any role in actions against the Resistance Front will also be subject to the ban.

4. Countries and individuals that have caused damage to Iran will not receive permission to pass through the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf until compensation is paid.

5. Heavy fines, including up to 20% of the value of the cargo, are planned for violators.

6. The government will assume responsibilities such as guiding navigation, monitoring vessel traffic, and protecting the security and environment of the Persian Gulf, in cooperation with the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic.

This draft is still in the review stage, and the parliament has asked experts to submit their suggestions for completing it.

Log in to Reply
zerosum says:

August 7, 2026 at 4:06 am

This is probably a fly in the ointment

https://t.me/Middle_East_Spectator/35765#

Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency has shared the initial text of the proposed ‘Strategic Control of Hormuz Act’ being prepared for Parliament

NOTE: This is a separate Iranian parliamentary law, in addition to the agreement between Iran and Oman.

1. The passage of vessels belonging to the United States, Israel, and other hostile countries through the Strait of Hormuz will be prohibited.

2. Shipments related to Israel, whether military or civilian, will not have the right to transit the Strait of Hormuz.

3. Vessels or cargoes that play any role in actions against the Resistance Front will also be subject to the ban.

4. Countries and individuals that have caused damage to Iran will not receive permission to pass through the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf until compensation is paid.

5. Heavy fines, including up to 20% of the value of the cargo, are planned for violators.

6. The government will assume responsibilities such as guiding navigation, monitoring vessel traffic, and protecting the security and environment of the Persian Gulf, in cooperation with the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic.

This draft is still in the review stage, and the parliament has asked experts to submit their suggestions for completing it.

Log in to Reply

The Automatic Earth

Debt Rattle August 6 2026

32 Responses to “Debt Rattle August 6 2026”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply