Merz, former BlackRock chairman in Germany, is the grandson of Nazi party official, Josef Paul Sauvigny, who joined the SA in 1933 and held an official position as a Nazi mayor. (If Ukraine loses the war, BlackRock’s $800 billion fund to “rebuild Ukraine” will not be realized.)… pic.twitter.com/af93kbfIxX
— Alan Watson (@DietHeartNews) October 4, 2026

JD Vance has a 95% approval rating with the MAGA GOP.

They keep telling us "MAGA is dead".

The base is stronger than ever. pic.twitter.com/Spf6KK1BHr
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) October 5, 2026

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2107240561761517677?s=20

This was clear years ago. Is politics blind on purpose?

“Google Plugs Into Constellation’s Nuclear Reactors As PJM’s “Bring Your Own Power” Era Arrives…”

• “Bring Your Own Power” Era Arrives (ZH)

For most of 2026, the bear case on the US power producers could be summed up in one sentence: nobody is signing data center PPAs in PJM. Last week Amazon did. This morning Google did, too, and this one is five times bigger.

Google parent Alphabet has contracted for 3,590 megawatts of power from Constellation Energy (CEG) inside PJM, the largest US grid, the companies said on Tuesday, according to Reuters, confirming an overnight report from Bloomberg. Roughly a quarter of it, 890 MW, is new nuclear capacity squeezed out of 11 existing reactors under a 20-year PPA backed by more than $4.3 billion of Constellation investment, expected to start delivering in 2028. The rest is a long-term supply agreement for another 2,700 MW. And in case anyone missed why this is happening now, the companies said it outright: the deal is a response to PJM’s “bring your own power” proposal.
Constellation shares jumped as much as 14% premarket (they were up 6.3% when Bloomberg first broke the story last night), trading above $300 for the first time in a month.
Zerohedge readers know this story didn’t start this morning. We have been tracking the AI-nuclear trade since Microsoft agreed to restart Three Mile Island in September 2024, when nuclear names surged across the board on what was then a shocking headline. (Five years earlier, we were writing about “America’s Chernobyl” finally closing its doors. Funny how the AI capex cycle changes things.) Two years later, Constellation has become Big Tech’s nuclear landlord.
Below we break down the deal, why PJM forced Google’s hand, what Goldman’s power desk and utilities team are saying, and why the cheapest nuclear megawatt is the one already built.
The Deal: 890 Nuclear Megawatts… Plus 2,700 More. The terms, per the companies’ statement and the Reuters and Bloomberg reports:
• 890 MW of new nuclear capacity under a 20-year PPA, coming from upgrades at 11 Constellation units in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The first upgraded plant is expected to start delivering in 2028.
• $4.3 billion+ of new investment by Constellation in “new equipment and technology… increasing thermal and electric efficiency,” as Goldman’s industrials desk put it this morning.
• A separate long-term supply agreement for 2,700 MW in PJM that is “not tied to a specific generation source and serves as long-term revenue certainty for Constellation’s operating plants,” per Google.
Translation: the 890 MW is the headline-friendly “new clean firm power” part. The 2,700 MW is essentially Google locking in a long-dated price for a big chunk of Constellation’s existing output. Who needs a hedging desk when you have a hyperscaler?
Stack it next to Constellation’s other hyperscaler deals and Google’s is bigger than Microsoft, Meta and Amazon put together (2,646 MW combined), at least once the non-unit-specific supply is counted:

It also comes less than a week after Amazon’s 690 MW, 20-year PPA at Calvert Cliffs, which we covered on Thursday in “Amazon Secures 20 Years Of Nuclear Power From Constellation As Goldman Sees Industry-Wide Win”. And Google is hardly new to the game: it is already funding the restart of NextEra’s Duane Arnold reactor in Iowa (which just landed a $1.9BN DOE loan), and last month lined up new capacity from Southern Co. by paying for upgrades at two of its nuclear plants.

Putin doesn’t kill Ukrainians, Zelensky does. The rest is filler.

• Why Might Putin Finally Decide To Bring Ukraine To Its Knees (Korybko)

Regardless of why Putin might have held off on this for so long, he’s now arguably motivated at least in part by the tantalizing possibility of reaching big-ticket resource deals with the US after the conflict ends, the details of which his and Trump’s envoys have been negotiating for over a year already.

The New York Times cited allegedly intercepted Russian communications to report that Russia plans to obliterate Ukraine’s power, heating, and water systems this winter. While their claim can’t be confirmed, it aligns with Putin mildly “escalating to de-escalate” over the summer in response to Zelensky’s strike campaign, which has taken the form of ramping up attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. If the report is true, then Russia doesn’t just aim to sever Ukraine’s military logistics, but to bring Ukraine to its knees.
Putin has thus far eschewed this arguably due to his belief that Russians and Ukrainians are kindred people. Some have suggested that Russia might not have had the drone and/or missile capacity to do so earlier, however, whether due to low production till now and/or to hedge against the scenario of a hot war with NATO. In any case, Putin now seems to have made peace with the humanitarian consequences of ending the war on Russia’s terms sooner rather than later, or at least on as many of them as possible.
He might be motivated by more than just Ukraine’s “war of attrition” against Russia that began over the summer with American backing and interestingly enough France’s as well. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly told his Russian counterpart over the summer that no business deals are possible so long as the conflict continues. Since then, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met with Putin to discuss such deals among other topics, after which Kirill Dmitriev traveled to the US to follow up on that.
For background, Putin boasted in late February 2025 that American companies “will make a decent profit” from investments in Russia’s resource industry, and Trump’s Special Envoy to Belarus John Coale recently confirmed that he received approval to pitch a Belarusian-like deal to Putin. It would involve sanctions relief in exchange for the release of “political prisoners”. Putin’s ally Alexander Lukashenko already agreed to several such deals and is now negotiating a massive potash one with Trump.
Just last week, Lukashenko also proposed a trilateral Belarusian, Russian, and US fertilizer plant deal, but that requires the US lifting its sanctions on Gazprom. Russian officials from Putin on down have called for the West to lift its sanctions on Russia, and while the US might lift some if Putin agrees to a Belarusian-like quid pro quo, the Ukrainian Conflict will first have to end for this to happen at scale. Their resultant resource-centric strategic partnership could then revolutionize the global economic architecture.
The Russian economy has survived the West’s unprecedented sanctions onslaught, largely due to the combination of its natural resources and national payment system, but its Economic Development Ministry expects only 0.6% GDP growth this year. United Russia’s landslide victory during last month’s Duma elections, the first since the large-scale phase of the Ukrainian Conflict began, gives Putin the mandate to do whatever is needed to win the war and deliver more prosperity to his people afterwards.
It’s therefore within the realm of possibility, consistent with Russia’s policy of demanding the lifting of Western sanctions, that Putin is motivated at least in part to end the conflict on as many of Russia’s terms as possible sooner rather than later so as to then reach big-ticket resource deals with the US. This imperative, which could revolutionize the global economic architecture and deliver more prosperity to his people, contextualizes the New York Times’ report about him planning to bring Ukraine to its knees.

How was this ever legal?

• White House Declassifies DOJ and FBI Documents of Susie Wiles Targeting (CTH)

The White House has declassified documents from within the executive branch, specifically from within the Dept of Justice and FBI highlighting that Jack Smith used the Washington Field Office of the FBI to target President Trump’s campaign advisor, campaign manager and current Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

The activity took place while Joe Biden was President, Merrick Garland was Attorney General and Lisa Monaco was Deputy AG. The FBI targeting of Susie Wiles was authorized by Merrick Garland on March 28, 2022. Recommended by Monaco eight days prior on March 20th. The FBI opened an investigation on Wiles that encompassed tracking her phone and email records during President Trump’s pre-campaign under the auspices of a “Sensitive Investigative Matter” that would later become “Plasmic Echo.”
In 2016 the Obama FBI opened an investigation of Donald Trump to monitor his campaign activity. In 2022 the Biden FBI opened an investigation of Donald Trump to monitor his campaign activity. The intents and purposes of the investigations seem identical. This is quite a remarkable series of documents provided by John Solomon. If, like me, you are deep in the weeds on these issues, you might also ask the question: why are we only just now getting to see this information? The answer seems to be at the top of the documents released.
The declassification was done by newly installed White House counsel Will Scharf. On August 9th President Trump noted the departure of White House Counsel David Warrington {source}, who was then replaced by Will Scharf effective September 1st {source}. According to the documents released, Will Scharf declassified them on September 29th {source}.
When Warrington’s exit was announced, there was a curious lack of explanation. Those of you who follow the inside baseball will note my criticism of the White House counsel in both Term-1 and Term-2. Given the context of these releases, it looks like Warrington was an impediment to sunlight on the corruption within the DOJ and FBI. I’m left to wonder if these documents were sitting in the White House counsel’s office, for more than a while.
Why did the White House wait to release these documents showing how the FBI and DOJ were targeting Donald Trump, his advisors and his campaign team until now. You decide. To me, this is beyond frustrating. I am trying to remain gracious, but there is no excuse for keeping sunlight away from this level of corruption. Hopefully the South Florida legal team is reviewing these documents as evidence in the larger conspiracy investigation.
There were different legal justifications used by Main Justice to target Donald Trump. In 2016, ’17, ’18, ’19 it was the nonsense around Trump-Russia. In 2021, ’22, ’23 and ’24 it was the J6 insurrection. However, the outcome of both DOJ/FBI efforts is identical – keep Donald Trump under FBI surveillance.

“We all know that Mamdani is an antisemite, and his efforts to pretend he isn’t don’t fool anyone.”

• Mamdani Tries to Hide His Jew-Hatred and Only Exposes It Further (Matt Margolis)

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is desperately trying to prove that he’s not antisemitic, yet his efforts to do so only keep proving that he is. Last week, Mamdani rolled out his long-awaited strategy for fighting antisemitism, complete with a new Interagency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism and a $30 million price tag. He needed it badly. The city’s first Muslim mayor has spent months fending off charges that he has no use for the Jewish community, and Jewish New Yorkers keep getting attacked at a growing rate on his watch.

NYPD data released in August showed hate crimes climbing 9.4% citywide this year, and more than half of those incidents targeted Jews. That happened while all seven major crime categories dropped across all five boroughs, with murders and shootings hitting historic lows. Crime is falling everywhere in New York except where the victims are Jewish. The department’s figures also showed antisemitic attacks up 8% through August, with anti-Jewish incidents accounting for an outsized majority of all reported hate crimes.
So what did he deliver? A plan to combat antisemitism that never defines antisemitism. Nothing in it explains what sets Jew-hatred apart from any other racial or religious bigotry. Mamdani also declined to formally recognize Israel’s existence while unveiling it. The document never uses the word Zionism and gives Israel a single passing mention. Think about that for a second. Mamdani produced an entire plan about hatred of Jews and scrubbed out the Jewish state, the one thing his political allies despise most.
And the $30 million? It’s proving itself to be a ruse. Most of the plan recycles measures former Mayor Eric Adams already put in place, so New Yorkers get little that’s new. What is new is classic Mamdani, because the plan boosts funding for a group tied to anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour. Here’s what reporting on the plan’s partners turned up:
One of the top advocacy groups involved in P.A.T.H. — which works to prevent hate crimes across the city through community programs and grants — is the anti-Israel Arab American Association of New York. The Brooklyn-based group, which was run for over a decade by Mamdani’s mentor and pro-Palestinian firebrand Linda Sarsour, repeatedly cheered on the anti-Israel encampment at Columbia University and other protests following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
The organization pocketed $3.3 million in city funding between 2017 and 2024, the Washington Examiner first reported, citing data analyzed by the transparency watchdog group OpenTheBooks.= P.A.T.H. partners also include the 67th Precinct Clergy Council, aka “the Godsquad,” the LGBT NYC Anti-Violence Project, the Asian American Federation and the Hispanic Federation.
Mamdani’s answer to surging attacks on Jews is to hand more public money to an outfit that applauded the mobs at Columbia. He is asking the people who helped make Jewish students feel hunted on their own campus to protect Jewish New Yorkers. It’s outrageous, and he expects the city to thank him for it.
None of this should surprise anyone who watched his rise. Mamdani supports the slogan “globalize the intifada.” He campaigned alongside Sarsour on arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His wife celebrated the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. Anyone who knows Mamdani’s record knew his plan to combat antisemitism was going to be phony, and he happily obliged.
Jewish leaders certainly noticed. More than two dozen of them denounced the report and demanded that the Mamdani administration reissue it with a version that deals with Zionism. They understand what the mayor refuses to admit, which is that the hatred driving attacks on Jews in his city so often arrives dressed up as hatred of Israel.
We all know that Mamdani is an antisemite, and his efforts to pretend he isn’t don’t fool anyone.

No more Democrat playground. How can that be a bad thing?

• Latin America’s Many Trumps (Daniel McCarthy)

Latin America is turning right, and it’s a vindication for President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In some ways, the Cold War never really ended in the Western hemisphere: Socialism has haunted the nations of Central and South America long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the same Cuban regime the Soviet Union propped up for decades remains in power to this day.

The hard left thought it had cemented control over Venezuela, too, thanks to Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro — until American forces snatched Maduro right out of his bed back in January and took him to New York to stand trial. Yet most of our neighbors to the south are not ruled by dictators. Instead, elections in Latin America have swung back and forth between left and right. Only now they’re all swinging to the right, as the region’s biggest nation dramatically illustrated last weekend.
Brazil is now the scene of the greatest right-wing comeback since President Trump’s own reelection two years ago. Flavio Bolsonaro — whose father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, is under house arrest — defeated leftist incumbent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in the first round of the country’s presidential contest on Sunday. Bolsonaro took 47% of the vote to Lula’s 45%, and with other right-leaning candidates garnering nearly 5%, Bolsonaro’s prospects in the runoff election on Oct. 25 look bright.
Yet that’s only half the story: The right, and the Bolsonaro family itself, also made huge advances in the nation’s legislative elections. “The Bolsonaro clan claimed victory in every race they contested,” the Buenos Aires Times noted. The ex-president’s wife, Michelle, won a federal senate seat, as did his second son — Flavio’s younger brother — Carlos, while third son Jair Renan Bolsonaro was elected as a federal deputy, as was the former president’s brother, Renato.
Their party, the Liberal Party, nearly doubled its number of senators, from 15 to 28, and won the largest number of seats in the Chamber of Deputies of any party since the nation’s current constitution came into effect in 1988. Smaller conservative parties also fared well on Sunday — the Brazilian people sent an unmistakable message that they are through with the leftism Lula represents. In this, the Brazilian electorate is moving in synchrony with voters throughout Latin America, who in election after election have tossed out left-wing regimes or reelected conservatives who were already in office.
It’s as if the whole region has been going through its own version of Trump’s 2024 reelection over the past two years. And more than one wit on social media has remarked leftists haven’t won a single national election in Central America or South America since USAID was dismantled. Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Honduras and Costa Rica have all moved right, while Javier Milei’s party staved off left-wing challenges and won big in Argentina’s legislative elections last year.
No, this isn’t just because American taxpayer dollars are no longer being funneled by progressive non-government organizations — NGOs — into humanitarian efforts that get co-opted by left-wing foreign interests.But the ecosystem of international aid, which during the Cold War was seen by Washington as a way to blunt the appeal of Communism in the Third World, has for a long time helped rather than hindered the global left. That’s been true of Washington’s rhetoric as well:
Jeane Kirkpatrick, who became Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, argued in the late ’70s that Washington treated foreign friends on the right worse than most enemies on the left, as if the only way to beat Communism and socialism was to prove America could appeal to left-wing sensibilities, too. Trump and Rubio have taken the opposite approach: They encourage pro-American, right-leaning governments, especially close to home in the Western hemisphere.
This has given Central and South Americans a moral boost to free themselves from left-wing governments, much as the stark contrasts President Ronald Reagan drew between freedom and Communism helped inspire Eastern Europeans to tear down the Berlin Wall. The people of Eastern Europe knew better than anyone how evil Communism was, but they had reason to wonder whether the West was really willing to stand for an alternative, rather than offering endless moral accommodations and capitulations.
Until now, the State Department and Washington’s foreign-policy elite have habitually thought our country isn’t good enough and must prove itself equal to the professed — yet entirely fraudulent — ideals of left-wing regimes.
The Trump administration has a different attitude: It’s proud of America, and in the places around the world where hope and pride matter more than resentment and shame, that new attitude gets results.
Latin America knows it has a choice — and now that it’s clear, the people of South and Central America are choosing “Trumps” of their own.

US funding and interference have played a role in the South American country’s presidential election, the independent journalist has told RT..

No, we are not surprised. Is there even one single person who is?

• Brazil Votes: CIA Cultivated Evangelical Churches ‘For Decades’ – (Pepe Escobar)

The US has sought to influence Brazilian politics for decades, including through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and has played a role in the country’s current presidential election, independent journalist and geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar has told RT.

He was speaking after Sunday’s first round of voting, in which right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, finished ahead of incumbent left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Both fell short of the 50% threshold needed to win outright. The two are set to face each other in a runoff on October 25.
Brazil’s government has previously accused Washington of interference in its internal affairs, while Trump has denounced the prosecution of the former president – who is serving 27 years for plotting a coup – as a “witch hunt.” Brazil’s Federal Police have since opened an investigation into alleged US interference in the election, following a request from the Attorney General’s Office over reported US funding of projects aimed at undermining the country’s Supreme Court.

“The Americans put a lot of money in this election,” Escobar said, calling for a federal investigation into possible foreign influence. He singled out Brazil’s influential evangelical churches, claiming that the CIA had spent “decades” funding efforts to cultivate them and that this was now “paying off.”
Escobar’s remarks come as US involvement in Brazilian politics has already become a point of contention between Brasilia and Washington. Flavio Bolsonaro met US President Donald Trump at the White House in May, while his brother Eduardo has lived in the US since 2025. Eduardo was sentenced by Brazil’s Supreme Court in June to four years and two months in prison for coercion after the court found that he had sought US pressure on Brazilian authorities in an effort to interfere with proceedings against his father.
Escobar also claimed that two days before the vote, the CIA already knew Bolsonaro was ahead, even as Brazilian opinion polls showed Lula leading. He attributed Bolsonaro’s strong showing in part to the influence of evangelical voters, who now comprise some 27% of the country’s populations, a historical high from the 15% in 2000.
The runoff is widely seen as a highly polarized contest over Brazil’s political direction. Lula has sought to strengthen the country’s role in BRICS and deepen ties with China and other Global South powers, while Bolsonaro has advocated closer relations with Washington.Lula previously served two terms as president from 2003 to 2010 before returning to office for a third term in 2023, following the annulment of corruption convictions that had prevented him from running in 2018.
A Bolsonaro victory could also have major implications for Brazil’s foreign policy, according to Escobar. He predicted a “complete reversal” toward closer alignment with Washington and the Trump administration. Such a shift could diminish Brazil’s role in BRICS, Escobar argued, saying the country could become a “bystander” within the group. Brazil is a founding member of BRICS alongside Russia, India, and China.

“The WikiLeaks co-founder has played a key role in creating an alternative to mainstream media, which has been controlled by intelligence services for decades, Ray McGovern has said..”

• Assange Created The ‘Fifth Estate’ – Ex-CIA Analyst (RT)

Julian Assange has become a key figure in the creation of alternative media, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has said, expressing hope that the Australian journalist and activist is preparing to get back to work. McGovern spoke to RT as WikiLeaks marks its 20th anniversary. The website, co-founded by Assange in 2006, has published some of the most explosive leaks of the past two decades, exposing CIA hacking tools, classified US war records, illegal mass surveillance, and other closely guarded secrets.

The platform became a global phenomenon, making Assange one of the most prominent contemporary publishers, while also embroiling him in more than a decade of conflict with the US and other governments. Ahead of the anniversary, Assange suggested that he was returning to public life two years after striking a deal for his freedom with the US and securing his release from British custody.
Assange has become a key figure in the creation of alternative media, the “fifth estate,” McGovern said, adding that traditional media have long since lost their intended purpose, becoming closely controlled instruments for many governments worldwide. “The media in our country, and I dare say in many countries, the UK, Germany, is very tightly controlled. And so that’s the fourth estate, as Edmund Burke said, more important than Parliament itself. The fourth estate is co-opted now, it has been for decades,” he said.
“It’s very clear that the intelligence services have a lot of influence over what goes out into the media. And so you need an alternative. That’s why we placed great hope in what we call the ‘fifth estate,’ namely WikiLeaks and outfits like it that would encourage people to blow the whistle in a secure way and not endanger themselves,” he added.
McGovern welcomed the prospect of Assange’s return to active work, calling it a “salvation” for people willing to blow the whistle on dirty government secrets. “He will find ways to make it possible for people like me and my colleagues, if we come upon information that needs to be spread out into the media or out into the public, to have a secure way of doing that. That was his success. He’s bright enough to do that again, I am convinced,” he added.

I had no idea things were this bad.

• The Education Cartel and the Blue State School Scam (Turley)

“In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once wrote in an 1879 travel book. “That was for practice. Then he made school boards.” It appears that most Americans now agree with him. New polling shows that K-12 education has now reached a record low in the number of people who are even “somewhat satisfied” with the state of education in the U.S.

What is most troubling is that the near-total contempt for our school system does not make a bit of difference. Families and students have become largely irrelevant to an education cartel, a self-sustaining, self-perpetuating political alliance of unions and politicians. According to Gallup, only 32 percent of American adults say they are “completely” or “somewhat” satisfied with the quality of K-12 education. That is the lowest figure in Gallup’s 27 years of asking the question. Public satisfaction with the school system has dropped almost 20 points since just 2024.
The collapse comes at a time when universities are reporting that college students are entering higher education without basic math and other skills.We have also seen the dismal decline in standards at elite universities like Harvard, where faculty have been compelled to teach high school-level math classes to students. In May, faculty in the University of California system (which eliminated standardized testing to achieve greater equity in admissions) reported an alarming lack of math knowledge among new students.
Most recently, a University of California, San Diego, faculty report found a nearly 30-fold increase since 2020 in incoming students whose math skills fell below a high-school level.For many of us, neither the drop in skills nor public support is surprising. For generations, the public school system has failed students in major cities. Despite massive budget increases, actual test scores continue to fall or remain at subpar levels.
In a prior column, I was particularly moved by the frustration of a mother in Baltimore who complained that her son was in the top half of his class despite failing all but three of his classes. Her story led to my changing my view of school vouchers. Despite my long support for public schools, I believe vouchers may be the only way to wrest control away from the education cartel by introducing real competition based on academic performance.
Faced with low proficiency scores, teachers’ unions and school administrators have continued to lower proficiency requirements. They are simply pushing students out the door without basic skills, robbing these kids of any chance to break out of cycles of poverty and unemployment. When confronted with their poor performance, school board members have declared meritocracy to be a form of “white supremacy.” Gifted and talented programs are being eliminated in the name of so-called “equity.”
In any other field, such generational failure would be unthinkable. No business or enterprise could sustain itself. However, that is the point. There is little competition in this system. Blue states have largely blocked voucher systems while protecting teachers from performance-based standards.
Actual students have become irrelevant to budgets. In Chicago, there are schools that remain open despite 80 percent vacancy rates. One school, Frederick Douglass Academy High School has only 27 students, or 2 percent of its building’s capacity. The school system spends $55,000 for each student at Frederick Douglass Academy.
Overall, 35 percent of Chicago schools are half full or less. But that did not stop the schools from spending a couple million on transcendental meditation sessions or giving teachers and students days off to join May Day protests (with city-subsidized buses).
According to a recent study, in 2025, Chicago Teachers Union spent a record $4.2 million on politics and lobbying but less than 18 percent on representing teachers. This included massive contributions used to elect former teacher and union organizer Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former organizer for the union. Johnson, in turn, has effectively turned over his office to the far-left union.
In economics, there are few scourges older and more damaging than the cartel, which uses its power over an area to create “higher prices, lower quality, and stifled innovation.” There is a natural tendency for people to form such groups to stifle competition and feather their own nests. Adam Smith warned that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”
The Education Cartel is becoming one of the greatest and most insidious forms of such anti-competitive conduct. Teacher unions have used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to acquire unchallenged power in blue states where they can dictate ever-increasing salaries, pensions, and budgets. One estimate found that, since 2015, the nation’s two largest teachers unions — the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — spent $669 million on federal campaigns and another $336 million on state and local campaigns.
Figures such as Randi Weingarten with the American Federation of Teachers effectively made their unions piggy banks for the Democratic Party and appear at far-left rallies to support Democratic causes. In return, Democratic leaders give this cartel most everything that it demands, including barring competition in the form of public vouchers or tying budgets to improving the education of actual students.
It is a closed circuit. Democratic leaders increase school budgets and salaries and the unions then send back hundreds of millions to fund Democratic campaigns. If you want to understand the priorities of the unions, just watch one of National Education Association head Becky Pringle’s unhinged speeches.

Her declarations that the union will “win all of the things” clearly did not include educational improvements for students.
A recent study found that blue states with strong teachers’ unions overwhelmingly have worse student literacy scores than red states. At least eight of the ten states with the worst literacy scores were liberal districts with politically powerful teachers’ unions, according to the Progressive Policy Institute.

The most destructive housewife ever?!

She’s worse than Thatcher, right?

• Many Germans Long for Merkel (Rainer Zitelmann)

The polling institute YouGov recently asked: “Do you think Angela Merkel, as chancellor, would be better, worse, or just as well suited as the current chancellor, Friedrich Merz, to solving the problems and challenges Germany faces today?” The result: Forty-eight percent of Germans believe Merkel would be better suited than the incumbent Friedrich Merz to solving today’s problems. Twenty-nine percent thought Merkel would be just as well or as poorly suited as Merz. Only 8% thought Merkel would be worse. Fifteen percent gave no answer.

A Forsa poll published in early September produced an even more dramatic result: Only 7% considered Merz a better chancellor than Angela Merkel, while 71% considered him worse. Even among CDU and CSU supporters, 57% share this view.
Presumably, many Germans think this way because the economic data during the Merkel years was significantly better than under her successors. But that was not her achievement. Merkel, who took office in 2005, benefited from the reforms of her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder (SPD). He cut taxes and liberalized the labor market, leading to strong and sustained economic growth. As so often happens in politics, the successor benefits from free-market reforms, while the politician who actually implements them is punished.
Merkel herself carried out neither tax reform nor labor-market reform. Instead of cutting taxes, she raised them: In 2007, VAT went from 16 to 19%, while the so-called “rich tax” added three percentage points to the top income-tax rate for high earners. Social spending also went from 26.9% of GDP in 2007 to close to 32% in 2021.
During the same period, Merkel neglected investment in infrastructure, the negative consequences of which only became apparent much later. In 2020, the OECD noted that Germany had one of the lowest levels of public investment. During Merkel’s time in office, the backlog in municipal investment grew massively despite a strong economy and low interest rates: KfW estimated it at €132 billion as early as 2015 and at a then-record level of almost €159 billion in 2018. Germany’s crumbling bridges and dilapidated schools are part of the legacy of the Merkel era.
One of the main causes of Germany’s current problems is its high energy costs. This is a direct consequence of Merkel’s “Energiewende,” or energy transition, which has cost €500 billion to date. Merkel’s decision after the Fukushima accident to accelerate Germany’s nuclear phaseout was just as consequential as the fact that — despite warnings from the United States and Eastern European countries — she made Germany dependent on Russian gas. Germany is therefore now among the countries with the highest electricity prices in the world — a direct consequence of Merkel’s policies, which effectively transformed Germany’s energy sector into an ideologically driven planned economy.
Mass immigration is another problem, due to policies initiated by Merkel during the 2015 refugee crisis. And she was the midwife of the right-wing AfD, which, according to current polls, is by far the strongest party. It was founded in response to Merkel’s misguided “euro rescue” policies. As late as August 2015, the AfD stood at just three percent in the polls. By January 2016, it had risen to 11%, and in the 2017 federal election it ultimately won 12.6%, compared with 4.7% in 2013.
The problems caused by Merkel’s policies or left unresolved during her 16 years in office also include: Germany’s dramatic lag in digitalization and the erosion of Germany’s defense capabilities. When Merkel left office in 2021, the Bundeswehr lacked operational aircraft, helicopters, ships, ammunition, and personal equipment — Germany had allowed its ability to defend itself and its NATO allies to deteriorate for years.
Then there is the failure to reform the pension system despite demographic change that had been foreseeable for decades. Instead of using the economically strong years to carry out fundamental reform, Merkel’s government introduced additional benefits costing billions of euros, including retirement at 63.
Merz’s responsibility is that he has failed to initiate the urgently needed change of course after Merkel — a change he had promised. His defenders argue that this is impossible with the SPD. Exactly! But who forced Merz to enter into a coalition with the SPD? He voluntarily assumed the role of captain of a sinking ship.

Since we gutted USAID, the left hasn’t won a single presidential election in Latin America.
Billions in taxpayer cash were funding NGOs, “democracy” programs, and activist networks that conveniently always backed the same side. They called it aid but it was election… https://t.co/jFEsYginxj
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 5, 2026

https://twitter.com/MIPAGUY/status/2107145592350626175?s=20

When C. J. Hopkins wrote a book about Covid zealots, he compared them to Nazis, because Nazis are bad. In response, Amazon banned his book and the German government arrested him. We’ve decided to republish the book, “The Rise of the New Normal Reich” available now at… pic.twitter.com/sZa99YPSe7
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 5, 2026

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

This topic has 30 replies, 8 voices, and was last updated 4 hours, 32 minutes ago by Michael Reid.

Viewing 31 posts - 1 through 31 (of 31 total)

Author

Posts
October 7, 2026 at 6:25 am #252339

Raúl Ilargi Meijer
Keymaster

Willem de Kooning Woman III 1953 • “Bring Your Own Power” Era Arrives (ZH) • Why Might Putin Finally Decide To Bring Ukraine To Its Knees (Korybko) •
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle October 7 2026]

October 7, 2026 at 6:53 am #252350

Germ
Participant

“Erika Badenhorts, 67, believes without her flu jab she would have died.”

Flu. RSV. Sepsis. Oxygen.
Three weeks in hospital, followed by more hospital stays while doctors worked out why she kept getting so sick. 🤒

Eventually: immunocompromised, requiring lifelong treatment.

She’s now featured on the news praising the flu jab, saying she “wouldn’t be alive without it.”
Apparently this is what vaccine success looks like:

Get hospitalised → get multiple infections → require ongoing treatment → become the advert for the jab that supposedly kept you out of hospital.

Hundreds were supposedly “saved from hospital.”

Erika? She was the marketing campaign. 🤣

Nothing says “worked perfectly” quite like using someone who spent weeks in hospital as the testimonial for avoiding hospital.

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/health/i-felt-chill-sightseeing-within-34695524

TVASSF – wrecked immune systems

October 7, 2026 at 9:11 am #252382

Dr. D
Participant

Sooo…now we’re at official ZERO Iranian oil, anywhere. (Bessant)

MORE oil that before the conflict, is getting out. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj5S4VQfePE
So NO oil shortage, whatsoever, anywhere. The appearance of shortage is 1) Newsom shutting his refineries for no reason 2) Europe shutting their refineries for plausible “Maintenance” – classic Enron move 3) Shutting down and blowing up all the refineries in Russia. Where Russia has a SURPLUS of diesel in some places. (And attacking a refinery in Venezuela, this morning)

So all fake, ghey, and voluntary. All engineered by the usual suspects.

So no wonder the $90 oil looked primed to collapse.

42,000 job loss in Canada per month. Canada is selling oil TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS UNDER SPOT for their own oil. To Trump, to America. Because thanks to Carney, they have no pipeline. “When you want to win a trade war with a superpower, always sell your commodities at $25 under spot” – Sun Tzu.

And Quebec has elected separatists who are voting to remove 9 million of the most productive people. So like I said ONLY YESTERDAY, there is no Canada. It’s already split. Alberta is also voting for the same, shortly, and you may think it matters if both decide to stay on these votes. It doesn’t. 1) That’s normal first vote even if they’re leaving, 2) More importantly, the UNCERTAINTY will erase the economy, the politics, and the nation. That happened to Quebec originally, (which was almost certainly encouraged with matches and gasoline by the CIA) and where the Quebec separation shifted the power from Quebec alone (remember, Toronto was barely a city) or a 50-50 Quebec-Ontario with everyone else being 5%, to the Entire nation being run by Ontario.

And the devastation and ill will that arose from the Ontario-Ottawa monolith leading to several secessions today. As Ontario dgaf about anyone and a couple guys in Urban Toronto are shoving everything (that might make sense in a city) down everyone else’s throats in Moosehead.

But it was not that QC actually left – it was only everyone being tired of the UNCERTAINTY, the talk, the loss of effort in politics.

So here in two months since I started talking of it, Canada ALREADY is splitting QC off, some stunning, like 1/3rd of the nation, with ports, economy, culture, everything that makes that totally, completely possible, even advisable. And Alberta (plus more) ALSO easy to leave as U.S. territories maybe, as without Quebec, what power does Ontario alone have to make them? Not much. Okay, what is Ottawa going to do without Quebec on one side and Alberta on the other? Like, work to produce their own taxes? Hahahahahaha!! Surely you jest, sir. They can’t even get a bus to B.C, the other high-handed tax-hole.

Man, Carney is the best American ever. I wouldn’t have even guessed you could speed run the delivery of a whole country to the U.S. and to Trump personally.

On the other side? Carney is trying to give Canada to the EU, when they’re already down 17%. I mean, that’s the time to lash your ship, when the other ship is already 17% under and sinking fast. So what will happen? A: well the whole POINT of taking BRITISH North America is to DEVOUR it, eat it, sink it, to save themselves. That’s why Colonies exist – to be extracted. So that means Canada will be sunk RIGHT NOW, First! Why? If the point is to stop your sinking, and you have this means to stop, then you use it all, completely, first, and save England, Germany, France, etc, as Canadians are non-human non-peoples. Colonists. They exist to serve you, Europe, whether by life or by death.

So THAT is an ominous thought, but at the rate they’re being Ukrainized, a true one. I mean we’ll know in a month, but they ALREADY are selling off their ports like Greece, Sri Lanka, and once the sales are inked, it’s a bit late, eh? You need to mobilize, act to STOP it happening.

(P.S. STOP SCREWING ALBERTA. They won’t stay until you stop screwing them.)

“Trump To Unveil Anduril Deal, Bringing Submarine Parts Factory To Baltimore

Somebody IS building steel and shipyards to be fully independent and sovereign again. What a concept. Take a note, Halifax.

October 7, 2026 at 9:11 am #252383

Dr. D
Participant

“To Limit Immigration, Japan Hikes Residency App Fee 20-Fold, Requires Incomes Higher Than National Average

That’s silly: everyone knows the minute your airplane lands, you become as completely, totally Japanese as if your family were there 5,000 years. That’s how Culture and Immigration works. You touch their magic sand and the full knowledge of Japanese language and etiquette comes upon you.

“Socialist Americans are promising affordable housing through rent controls and government intervention. The evidence shows that these policies deliver the opposite…”

P.S. Progressive, Helpful France which has done everything for migrants is entirely on fire by the 100,000s. So I can probably stop saying things about Socialists now. The warning period is over, so no use: Everybody knows and can see with their own eyes now they don’t need me.

If they’re like England, they’ll house-arrest every citizen and keep bringing more migrants. WHILE they are setting their boats on fire and attacking police, at the landing site. “No! You don’t understand! Free hotels! Free Rapes! Here’s my 14 year old daughter!” they will yell through police bullhorns, as Lot did in Sodom before him.

“Multiculturalism is ending the way multiculturalism must end, with violence and war.” –Internet

October 7, 2026 at 9:11 am #252384

Dr. D
Participant

You say that like it’s a bad thing. They already did that, a million times, every person in UK found on on the nightly news for 20 years and did nothing.

“Explosion Rocks Venezuela’s Second-Largest Refinery

They are concerted to stop all refining as they can’t stop the oil. Why are they attacking you, the people, personally every day? A: To Hate Orange Man. Orange Man is trying to get you cheap oil, they are trying to take it away. You can guess which side the people are on, and you can’t make it up.

Noooo! I want HATE and high gas and housing prices! I want HATE and complete civilizational ruin like France has!!

Yup, really stickin’ it to Orange Man who doesn’t know who you are.

October 7, 2026 at 10:00 am #252397

tboc
Participant

The NEA is the Political Action Commitee for the education management industry. The education management industry is the parallel to the prison management industry. The school board is the public facing branch of the education management industry that is there to convince you that you and your fellow ad valorem tax payers own the school system.

Now that we have headlines designed to mislead your two question.
Is there a public library system where you live?
Does your child or you have a library membership?
a third question
Have you ever purposefully consumed any information that was not pre-selected to propagandize you?

The teachers that are members of the state education associations and The NEA are not members because they politicized, they are members simply to protect their pension plan. Put plainly they are networking just as the movers and shakers in the next tier do.

to paraphrase Smith:
they, they,they, they too

What is your investment in The Holocaust Industry?
How many languages do you hate? Or is it just the one?
Put on your atrocity headgrear today is October 7. A mind is an easy thing to bend.

Thankfully nothing about The Whore Moos today
except for the resident war monger who actually believe the expenditure of $45 bn in support of genocide is winning

October 7, 2026 at 10:36 am #252399

Dr. D
Participant

Today:
Merz: Well it’s not entirely fair. EVERYONE in Germany is related to a Nazi official or they would have been shot in 1943. While the impulse is admirable, it can’t be put into practice. Who are they NOW? Do they applaud Waffen SS members on the floor of Parliament, for example?

“Microsoft agreed to restart Three Mile Island in September 2024, when nuclear names surged across the board”

Turns out we CAN Have cheap energy! All we had to do was turn it on. Shucks. …Oh wait, no: YOU still can’t have cheap energy, but super-expensive ones, while BILLIONAIRE CORPORATIONS get the cheap energy, silly. To track you on Flock Cameras so you can be in a Prison Planet. Infinity money for that! Thanks, Elon.

“arguably motivated at least in part by the tantalizing possibility of reaching big-ticket resource deals with the US after the conflict ends,”

What the heck. ‘Cause Putin is a capitalist and Russia is well-known for engaging in the world this way. NO. Putin didn’t have the war FOR THE MONEY. He’s not ending the war FOR THE MONEY. That’s something Europe and the West do. It will seem similar, yes, but you’re not going to understand anything until you put yourself in the space Putin actually works from. This is – to join the trend – “civilizational.” There are a lot of co-equal considerations he’s promoting at all times, that we might make surplus BTUs (profits) is one of 20, or like 5%. Not being nuked from Poland is significantly higher.

America does this too despite all the false and empty blather about ‘free markets’, because all nations do it. They will point and say “Un-American” despite that we were never founded on this idea, never did it at any time from 1776 to now, and “The American Plan” is basically the opposite of this. But pointing out this the author’s assumption of some norm.

Thanks, Chicago School, air dropped/injected by Rockefeller himself. All imported Germans.

Back to the article, if it’s NOT that (As none of us know, but I’m proposing) then what IS Putin’s strategy and goals here? I’ve already stated it’s they knew NATO was trying for a war, that war would make the US fight it while they sat around, and that the impulse was unstoppable, so Russia needed to methodically weaken, and awaken, Europe, the U.S. until the war was not able to be run by them. …You know, like when they’re broke, have no economy, no energy, and all the war-diesel they stockpiled mysteriously is consumed. THEN the war can end.

…While we buy Russian crude and Belarusian Potash because we were never their enemy in the first place.

But maybe Fox News and the Alexes are right and Putin has no idea who he’s fighting. The FSB are a bunch of mindless incompetents, well-known. And Putin’s in it for the money.

“• White House Declassifies DOJ and FBI Documents of Susie Wiles Targeting (CTH)

See this with the above article on tracking Baron and Melania. I mean: the Secret Service knows where they are already! And the FBI needs to know, so calm down. But! That was Jack Smith. So and why? A: To track the Trump campaign, get an edge and beat him, hopefully find a scandal or something. Same here. They tracked every person 6 levels deep and found NOTHING. (Mr. Reid). He’s so dirty they’ve had 100 investigators on him for 20 years and still find nothing. Again this week. Discuss? Explain. Bad man is so Bad, he never seems to do any prosecutable crimes at all ever, because that’s what “Bad” means?

Yes, it’s election tampering. But having hard work, patience, honesty, and forbearance, we won anyway. As Christians do. They want us to lose our temper and start shooting instead. Uh, no.

“It’s as if the whole region has been going through its own version of Trump’s 2024 reelection over the past two years.”

I mean, it’s a mixed bag, but they were Socialist – the whole world was Socialist NeoLibs for decades – and the alternative is to just keep going like France, Ireland, UK? Its not working. Maybe like a diet, they just need a break, stop the momentum, pick your head up, nothing to do with Left or Right, which have no meaning anyway. (Trump is strongly to the Left of Bill Clinton for example). Latin America can just stop before the cliff, try something else.

“• Brazil Votes: CIA Cultivated Evangelical Churches ‘For Decades’ – (Pepe Escobar)

They certainly cultivated them here as well. They want non-Christian pastors to be famous, and genuine people scandalized and killed. Then they use them in the news, to get out the Socialist vote, although they have very little actual membership, and very little influence. The CIA turned 100 elections, but the very first elections they tampered with were ours. Truman. Ike. Kennedy. Ike told you on (Inter)National TV. To your face.

What Pepe keeps missing, or remembering then un-remembering, is the CIA has nothing to do with the United States and is in fact our sworn enemy. They are the enemy of the government, the People, and our Principles. From Day One, which is why they are British OSS doing an internal takeover, well-confirmed in every book. So his error is CIA=America when it’s CIA = ANTI-America. They do everything we tell them not to.

I refer you to the Bush’s “Businessman’s Coup” HW Bush, and his best friends like PNAC’s Dick Cheney.

• Assange Created The ‘Fifth Estate’ – Ex-CIA Analyst (RT)

He’s part of it, I wouldn’t say he created it though. It’s always been running with the Village Voice running articles on the Contras, School of Americas, and Ollie Iran-Contra later among many things (Often Palestinian). That’s why we have free speech. The problem is the Population was derelict of duty, not that the papers didn’t exist.

“It’s very clear that the intelligence services have a lot of influence over what goes out into the media.”

He should keep up. It’s very important that like Tim Pool last week, there is NO readership. Without USAID, all of it vanished. That proves what McGovern is saying, and that’s great, but really it’s important that WE’RE WINNING. Bigly. Let’s see, we have the most Free Speech, the most media protection, the most availability of Guns UNDER ORANGE HITLER, ‘cause, you know, that’s what Hitler does/is. While places of Non-Hitler, of Moral majesty, arrest 50 people a day for speech and de-bank them if they visit Ottawa in the winter. That’s what non-fascists, non-Hitlers do. Say on TV, as Rees-Mogg did, that if they don’t like a pointless war with Russia, we will conscript and jail as many as necessary until they have an expansive war of aggression, anti-Hitler style, and divide and define everyone according to race, anti-Hitler style, and make them all carry (Vaccine, Digitial) I.D. cards, anti-Hitler style. That’s anti-Hitler.

But Hitler is when you don’t do all, enforce the law but leave people alone.

So McGovern could be doing a victory lap here in a dozen ways, we have turned the tide and while a long march to Berlin, got them on the run. The CIA, our sworn enemy of the American People, is losing everywhere but especially in the media. …And not because of Assange. Because of Assange PLUS everyone else, thousands of us. You too, because you are on this site, reading this section.

“ neither the drop in skills nor public support is surprising. For generations, the public school system has failed”

Again, They’re not Mad. If they didn’t like it, they’d be mad and fix it. They’re not mad at all, so they DO like it. They do NOT want any one – even children – educated, and have clearly taken every dollar of that fortune from the state to prevent any education at all. …As competency at graduation in a dozen (Blue) cities is ZERO. Even randomly you’d do far better than that!

However bad he’s saying, it’s worse. School is where you meet your drug dealer, your pedophile, your OnlyFans instructor, and are daily bullied and abused, mostly by the staff but at least with their lavish approval of abuse. It’s quite possible prison itself is preferable. Having sub-zero education is actually the least of their crimes.

“• Many Germans Long for Merkel (Rainer Zitelmann)

They like competency. The problem is, Merkel is an evil competent, and Merz is an evil incompetent. …But I was really focusing on the “Not Evil” part?

Nah. Free Speech = Hitler. Doncha know.

October 7, 2026 at 11:36 am #252400

Michael Reid
Participant

Former UK diplomat Ian Proud on how he was detained under the Terrorism Act for going to a conference in Russia. You can check out but you’re not permitted to leave, he says sardonically

October 7, 2026 at 12:09 pm #252401

Michael Reid
Participant

Britain leads Western media’s demise through ‘fear porn’ narrative
Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Ian Proud’s arrest by secret police at a London airport marks a new low in how far the deep state can go to control a false narrative. But it also shows a new level of fear.

As mad as it sounds, it does appear that Western European nations at least are preparing themselves to go to war with Russia at some point in the not-too-distant future. What is particularly worrying is there seems to be a distinct vacuum in all areas of what we could broadly call ‘media’ in questioning this narrative. Thirty years ago it was considered normal for journalists to be the source of vexing questions towards state actors and to generally be a pain in the arse as they questioned every decision made and every idea presented. It was our job to be anti-establishment and to take a very cynical view of “policy”. There was nothing remarkable about this. It was what we did. Being despised by the greater powers was part of the job; working anti-social hours and having few friends also came with it.

Today there are no journalists in what we call ‘mainstream’ media doing this. They have been replaced by younger, more social-media-savvy ‘content creators’ who believe that journalism is more or less a grammatical role, where the raw material is handed to you with all the information therein, and the role of the journalist is simply to refine it to the style of the day for mass consumption.

The danger of this transition is that nearly all of what we are being presented with as news is actually fake, or at best heavily redacted to keep the masses where the elite want them to be: restrained, prepped and misinformed.

The Ukraine war is an excellent example. The main reason why people in the U.S. and UK are so fabulously biased against Russia and are so sympathetic towards the corrupt elite in Kiev is that for years they have been brainwashed with ‘news’ about Russia which has been negative and which cunningly feeds a racist bias – a prejudice which has been cultivated over at least a decade, if not more. The result is that now a number of lies have become established in newsrooms where journalists, even those who know, simply navigate around nuance and present a fairy-tale story, designed to be understood by the masses who have no other sources of information to even question it.

Just recently, Western news outlets reported a “plague” in Russia, with stories about a “lockdown”, following a case of a worker in a laboratory dying of pneumonia in circumstances which are still not certain. Western media, as part of their role to keep Russia-phobia at its peak, are so locked and loaded that their ‘hair-trigger’ reactions to bad news stories from Russia are understandable. They are also hungry for clickbait, and such stories feed a starved audience which has already had its first fix of such COVID hysteria stories and wants more. The truth is entirely immaterial. Hysteria and lies are what’s being fed at a feverish rate by ‘content creators’ red in tooth and claw, foaming at the mouth with their desire to serve the deep state and the elites who have invested so much in an agenda.

The contrast between Russia and the West is interesting, though, when we look at media. In Russia just recently, the BBC correspondent based in Moscow made the internet buzz on social media with his short interview with Russia’s foreign minister, who was kind enough to answer his loaded question about Russia’s war ideology with Ukraine. What absolutely no one noted was how Russia is happy to accommodate foreign journalists who have such a distinct agenda to feed the Russia-phobia back home, while Russian journalists have been banned in those EU capitals for years. Old Europe, which once held such values as a free press so dearly, has adopted the Soviet model, while Russia is actually more advanced when it comes to such tenets of what we expect in a democracy. Russia has no fear of the awkward questions, unlike the West.

We should be asking ourselves who really benefits from a war with Russia.

Is it too sceptical and ‘conspiracy theorising’ to assume that the industrial military complex has been successfully lobbying for such a war for AT LEAST a decade, and critically, it succeeded in convincing the intelligence and military establishment in the UK to use its leverage with media to provide journalists with the raw material which enhances a prejudice against Russia?

Normally such an idea could be dismissed as pure nonsense. But just consider how far the UK, for example, has gone to eradicate all media coverage which could be deemed as at least leaning towards Russia – or even simply just holding the UK government to account by asking the questions that British journalists have stopped asking. If the elite in the UK who control the loss-making newspapers (think about that) are so sure of their rationale that Russia is the enemy whom we must go to war with, why are they so terrified of journalists – or anyone, for that matter – simply holding a view with questions the narrative?

I can’t be the only Western pundit who believes that double agents Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were not poisoned with nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in 2018, which was reported at the time as “sparking a huge diplomatic crisis between Britain and Russia”. Isn’t the real story that British security chiefs decided, upon discovering that Sergei Skripal was actually a triple agent who was feeding information back to Moscow, that he was dispensable? And what better way to supposedly teach the Russians a lesson, while blaming Moscow for his death, than to murder him and his daughter using a nerve agent which either was Novichok – which a British lab just down the road from where the Skripals lived had conveniently sitting in a fridge – or a similar poison? What’s important to note about Novichok is that the victims usually die instantly upon contact with it. What is likely is that the Skripals were not poisoned by the Russian drug but a British version of another nerve agent. It is a shocking example of how poor British journalism is that hacks in the UK simply report the Skripal incident of Novichok poisoning without a single shred of evidence to back it up. They don’t even add a note of scepticism in their reporting about the drug and who is “claiming” that it is Novichok.

We see the same shocking level of atrocious, biased reporting about the Ukraine war, which the British public were simply told through the media narrative was an “invasion” by Putin’s army. No background, no nuance, no glimpse of Russia’s perspective, as no one can cope, it would seem, with the story being clouded by facts.

And it’s the same with the Russia “plague” story, as it was with the RAF base “attack” story recently, which was probably just local thieves buying contraband gasoline from corrupt U.S./UK soldiers looking to make a quick buck at the UK base. Notice how quickly Trump used the story as a basis to move all U.S. bombers off the base and back to U.S. soil, where they are completely useless in his so-called Middle East war. For Trump it was an opportunity for another media stunt which keeps him on the front pages and everyone guessing. He was probably grateful to the British for being offered the raw material. Another problem of this new generation of journalists is how compliant they are to report “news” which isn’t news at all, but just material used as a distraction, one day at a time. Trump is a master at manipulating media with this game, usually saying something so stupid and so controversial, which draws journalists away from doing real journalism. If you can occupy journalists with writing up stories about the latest idiotic comment or statement by Trump, then you control them as you control their time.

Just look at how the Epstein story is not being reported and investigated. How Trump got off scot-free, as since February 28th journalists’ attention was diverted to the war with Iran – which is one of the reasons why Trump keeps this story alive with constant troop movements and talk of a massive attack after midterms. People have not made the link with the Epstein material being leaked and the war with Iran kicking off practically on the same day.

For the British, the “Russians are coming” story has no cynical write-up by journalists who are 100 percent compliant with its erroneous narrative. The fear of elites in London is palpable, though, that it will always be questioned by fringe actors taking up bandwidth on social media. In the past this was the RT correspondent in London, who was able to ask difficult questions and generally be a thorn in the side of the Westminster village which controlled journalists like rats held in a basket. The main reason why RT was kicked out of the UK was that it offered a style of reporting on UK politics which had since left us thirty years ago – such is the murky world of the deep state and how it saw how in Brussels journalists could be manipulated until they become stenographers for it.

Yet even with this new Stalinist style of media control in the UK, the state is wobbly. Even with the impressive set-up it has now of total media dominance, where journalists pump out total garbage about the Ukraine war or what they are told to write about the Middle East, still the fear is there.

The example of video blogger Ian Proud, a former UK diplomat once based in Moscow, is worrying but poignant. Simply going to Moscow to attend a conference where Putin was speaking was enough to have him get the full Stasi treatment at Heathrow airport – detained and all digital content seized.

Proud’s YouTube interviews, with his dowdy style of presenting, are proving to be popular as he simply offers a more sober view of both Russia and the UK Foreign Office, his former employer. These interviews are getting the attention of UK spooks, who are so nervous about the truth getting out about Russia and the shameful lies which are being packaged now for the British public, that they had to give Proud the American prison ‘shake down’ routine. Britain, a country which once was a beacon for the world with its view of liberty and in particular its passion for free speech, has fallen to a level which we can only compare to a West African country which has just had a new dictator installed, complete with black aviators and epaulettes. What the Proud Heathrow airport case shows is that this new regime in power will stop at nothing to control a narrative, and that the last bastion of free speech – YouTube podcasts – is the next target. The more successful Proud’s channel becomes, the more inevitable it is that he will be forced to leave the UK and settle in Russia to continue practising free speech. The shoulder tassels of Britain’s deep state will not sleep well until the country has a media narrative which would make Joe Stalin blush – and British journalists are helping them with this goal.

Britain leads Western media’s demise through ‘fear porn’ narrative

October 7, 2026 at 12:48 pm #252402

Michael Reid
Participant

Elijah Magnier: BREAKING: Houthis Strike Saudi Military HQ at Aden Airport With Ballistic Missiles

October 7, 2026 at 12:53 pm #252403

Michael Reid
Participant

Injecting Policy into Mass Ferment
Dennis SmallOct 6, 2026
Injecting Policy into Mass Ferment
These French high school student in Bayonne are part of the mass ferment. Credit: CC/Patxi Beltzaitz, Berria
In Italy, farmers, fishermen, and truck drivers have launched a national protest over the deadly economic conditions they face as a result of the European Union’s war-friendly policies, which are geared to bail out the bankrupt City of London and Wall Street banks. The Schiller Institute today sent a letter of support to the Italian strikers, noting that in France, Spain, Germany, and other countries across Europe, people are also taking to the streets “with different demands, but they are all united by opposition to policies that divert resources away from social services and production, while allocating more and more to rearmament and the financing of the war in Ukraine.” The Schiller Institute message adds: “We demand that resources be redirected away from rearmament and war, and toward adequate support for producers; and that we return to stable, low-cost energy supplies.”

In Brazil, a boisterous youth movement quickly took to the streets after President Lula’s setback in the first round of that country’s presidential elections on Oct. 4, to mobilize to make sure that Lula wins the Oct. 25 second-round vote against Trump-backed neo-con Flávio Bolsonaro. A national wave of student protests is in the offing, with a major demonstration scheduled for tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro. Denouncing Flávio’s austerity and privatization policies, one graduate student group wrote: “Let’s take the public debate by storm and make sure Brazilian science is heard in this runoff election. We need to prevent what could be the greatest blackout of science the country has ever experienced.”

The Schiller Institute’s International Youth Movement, which includes a number of Brazilian members, promptly sent a message of greetings and support to the planned demonstrations, stating that a defeat of Lula would be a defeat for the BRICS and for the entire Global South in its struggle to end 500 years of neo-colonialism once and for all. Lula made Brazil a founding member of the BRICS, and Flávio has announced he will pull the country out of the BRICS if he is elected. “For Brazil, the Global South, and humanity to prosper, we need a new international security and development architecture, one that will be win-win for all participants—and a permanent end to the austerity and attacks on sovereignty that Wall Street and the City of London are imposing everywhere,” the message states.

In country after country, people are up in arms and searching for solutions. They know in Europe that their highly unpopular political leaders (such as Merz and Macron) are dragging them into a war with Russia that only a lunatic would want. They see that the banks and the hedge funds are evicting vulnerable seniors out of their apartments after tripling and quadrupling their rent, as is happening in Spain, and that millions of people can no longer afford to pay for both their rent and their food. In Brazil, they know that austerity and privatizations will only make things worse. In the United States, the skyrocketing price of diesel is making it likely that farmers will simply not bother planting wheat this season, because they lose money for every ton they produce. And measles, a disease which was officially declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, has now exploded in New York State, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, thanks to the medievalist anti-science and budget-cutting policies coming from Washington.

All of this ferment is very dangerous… and at the same time an opportunity not to be missed. As Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly explained, for example in a March 2, 2011 speech headlined “The Mass Strike Calls For Real Solutions:” “When you have a mass-strike phenomenon, it can go bad, too. One case, for example, the French Revolution, was a mass-strike phenomenon, which went bad…. So, when you get a mass strike like this, a movement which we’re having now, which is coming on, if the nation-state system does not respond to the demands of the mass-strike movement, the mass-strike will turn into an obscene mass…. So therefore, we better listen to the mass-strike voices now, while there’s still time to do so. We now have to offer real solutions.”

What the Schiller Institute, and other organizations associated with the thinking of Lyndon LaRouche, are now doing, is injecting the urgently needed real solutions into this ferment, to make sure humanity arrives in the safe port of a new international security and development architecture.
https://eir.news/2026/10/news/injecting-policy-into-mass-ferment/

October 7, 2026 at 1:55 pm #252408

Michael Reid
Participant

So …
the European Union’s war-friendly policies, which are geared to bail out the bankrupt City of London and Wall Street banks

October 7, 2026 at 2:06 pm #252409

Michael Reid
Participant

Dear D:

Is this what your Trump is up to?
austerity and attacks on sovereignty that Wall Street and the City of London are imposing everywhere

Are you sure he is working for the benefit of America?

October 7, 2026 at 2:55 pm #252410

Michael Reid
Participant

How To Fight in the Face of Tragedy (w/ Chris Hedges)

October 7, 2026 at 3:25 pm #252411

zerosum
Participant

without a single shred of evidence
—————
Dr. D loves Canada
————-
We have been brainwashed

The result is that now a number of lies have become established in newsrooms where journalists, even those who know, simply navigate around nuance and present a fairy-tale story, designed to be understood by the masses who have no other sources of information to even question it.

No background, no nuance, no glimpse of Russia’s perspective, as no one can cope, it would seem, with the story being clouded by facts.

And it’s the same with the Russia “plague” story,

as it was with the RAF base “attack” story recently, which was probably just local thieves buying contraband gasoline from corrupt U.S./UK soldiers looking to make a quick buck at the UK base.
Notice how quickly Trump used the story as a basis to move all U.S. bombers off the base and back to U.S. soil,
where they are completely useless in his so-called Middle East war.
For Trump it was an opportunity for another media stunt which keeps him on the front pages and everyone guessing.
He was probably grateful to the British for being offered the raw material.
Another problem of this new generation of journalists is how compliant they are to report “news” which isn’t news at all, but just material used as a distraction, one day at a time.

Trump is a master at manipulating media with this game, usually saying something so stupid and so controversial, which draws journalists away from doing real journalism.
If you can occupy journalists with writing up stories about the latest idiotic comment or statement by Trump, then you control them as you control their time.

htt
ps://strategic-culture.su/news/2026/10/06/britain-leads-western-media-demise-through-fear-porn-narrative/
Britain leads Western media’s demise through ‘fear porn’ narrative
Martin Jay
October 6, 2026
————-

across Europe, people are also taking to the streets “with different demands,
but they are all united by opposition to policies that divert resources away from social services and production,
while allocating more and more to rearmament and the financing of the war in Ukraine.”
The Schiller Institute message adds: “We demand that resources be redirected away from rearmament and war, and toward adequate support for producers; and that we return to stable, low-cost energy supplies.”

In country after country, people are up in arms and searching for solutions.

What the Schiller Institute, and other organizations associated with the thinking of Lyndon LaRouche, are now doing, is injecting the urgently needed real solutions into this ferment, to make sure humanity arrives in the safe port of a new international security and development architecture.
https://eir.news/2026/10/news/injecting-policy-into-mass-ferment/
————-

October 7, 2026 at 3:29 pm #252412

zerosum
Participant

MASSIVE STRIKE ON UKRAINE: Kyiv, Dnipro Hit ⚡ Zaporizhzhia: Bridge Badly Damaged 💥 MS 2026.10.07

—————

October 7, 2026 at 7:31 pm #252413

Dr. D
Participant

“Is this what your Trump is up to?”

I don’t understand. We’re getting rich AF. So is Venezuela. Mexico is getting the cartels kicked out. Russia gets high oil prices to fund the war, China gets no war at all.

The only people suffering and on austerity is not JUST those who sacked and pillaged their own people and played the fool these 30 years, but are STILL doing it. They’re welcome to work and not arson. We won’t mind!

I mean, if we can do it, so can you. Steel mills, jobs, “Not Arson” these are not some strange alien tech. It’s not a secret but open source knowledge that you too can take advantage of. Stop Stealing. That’s it. Then everything works instantly.

So I mean, if your house and family suck, what does that have to do with me? I ain’t you daddy. Figure it out. Ignore us and clean your own room, guy. Canada is worse than even Europe, which seems a nearly impossible achievement. Grow cows, don’t kill them. Build plants, don’t level and shutter them. Do work, don’t demand handouts. Result: $3.99 Porterhouse steak. By the dozens.

October 7, 2026 at 7:34 pm #252414

John Day
Participant

That’ll work. Army Sets Dec. 3 Firing Squad Execution For Fort Hood Killer
(One guy in the squad gets loaded a blank. I’m sure he can tell from the milder recoil.)
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/army-sets-dec-3-firing-squad-execution-fort-hood-killer

October 7, 2026 at 7:58 pm #252415

Michael Reid
Participant

D says: result:%20$3.99%20Porterhouse%20steak

Interesting that I got the %20 in the copy and paste of the comment from D
I usually only see this from international sources like Pepe

Anyway my response to D is yes someone is robbing us here as the price of beef here is only affordable for the Epstein class and minions

October 7, 2026 at 8:22 pm #252416

Michael Reid
Participant

guest Dimitri Lascaris. Carney the Quesling of Canada, Trump’s Special Boy

October 7, 2026 at 9:08 pm #252417

Michael Reid
Participant

October 7, 2026 at 10:21 pm #252418

Michael Reid
Participant

Has the CIA just leaked the biggest secret that will shape the Iran war now and forever? Fmr CIA analyst Larry Johnson and retired US Army Colonel and Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson react to a bombshell report that details how much trouble Israel is in, and why it’s pressing with US help a restart to the war despite the CIA’s doomsday warning.

October 7, 2026 at 11:09 pm #252419

Michael Reid
Participant

October 7, 2026 at 11:42 pm #252420

Michael Reid
Participant

This is about one thing and only one thing;
International Jewish Supremacy in Israel, in the Middle East and through finance in the United States. That’s all.

October 7, 2026 at 11:53 pm #252421

Michael Reid
Participant

IRAN KILLED TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY AS RUSSIA CONTINUES ADVANCING IN UKRAINE – w/ Rick Sanchez

October 7, 2026 at 11:59 pm #252422

Michael Reid
Participant

breaking:%20IRAN%20BOMBS%20MORE%20SHIPS%20THAN%20EVER%20BEFORE,%20SYRIA

October 8, 2026 at 12:02 am #252423

Michael Reid
Participant

U.S. STOCKS WITHOUT AI IS ALREADY IN A BEAR MARKET, ECONOMY

October 8, 2026 at 12:36 am #252424

Michael Reid
Participant

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest surviving story in human history. Written in ancient Mesopotamia more than four thousand years ago, it tells of a tyrannical king of the city of Uruk, and the wild man Enkidu who was created to bring him to his knees. What followed was a friendship that would take both men to the very ends of the earth, in search of the one thing no king can ever claim: eternal life.

It predates Homer by more than a thousand years, and it was already ancient when the earliest books of the Bible were being written. It also contains the earliest known account of a great flood, a story that would later find its echo in the tale of Noah. Lost for two thousand years beneath the sands of Mesopotamia, the epic was recovered by chance in the nineteenth century among the ruins of the Assyrian city of Nineveh, preserved on twelve clay tablets in the wreckage of a burned library.

In this video, we tell the entire story of the Epic of Gilgamesh from beginning to end. The tyranny of a king who worked his own people to death. The creation of Enkidu from clay and sent to humble him. The friendship that changed both men forever. The journey through mountains no mortal had ever crossed. And the desperate quest for a life beyond death itself.

For easy navigation of this 2-hour Epic of Gilgamesh Documentary, click the timestamps below to jump to the moments you want to hear most!

🔍 Episode Chapters & Timestamps:

00:00 | Introduction
00:31 | The Epic of Gilgamesh
02:22 | Prologue: Finding the Oldest Story Ever Written
08:56 | Part 1: The King of Uruk
18:11 | Part 2: Gilgamesh and Enkidu
28:56 | Part 3: The Cedar Forest
42:06 | Part 4: Ishtar and the Bull of Heaven
51:31 | Part 5: The Death of Enkidu
1:04:15 | Part 6: The Edge of the World
1:21:04 | Part 7: The Flood
1:36:01 | Part 8: The Return

📚 Sources:

The Epic of Gilgamesh – translated by Andrew George (2002)

The Epic of Gilgamesh, Lecture by Andrew George
• The Epic of Gilgamesh,…

Austen Henry Layard – Nineveh And Its Remains Vol. I (1849)

Austen Henry Layard – Nineveh And Its Remains Vol. II (1849)

Austen Henry Layard – Second Series Of The Monuments Of Nineveh (1853)

Austen Henry Layard – Discoveries in the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1853)

E. A. Wallis Budge – The Rise and Progress of Assyriology (1925)

🎙️ About the Podcast & Host

Deep Dive History is a premium documentary and podcast series, exploring the stories, myths and lives that shaped civilisation. Hosted by the acclaimed British actor and narrator, David Rintoul (known for Pride and Prejudice, Game of Thrones and countless award-winning audiobooks), your journey into the past is guided by one of the finest voices in audio.

#gilgamesh #mesopotamia #ancienthistory

October 8, 2026 at 2:09 am #252425

WES
Participant

MPSK:

A blonde raccoon? No I haven’t!

But do blonde raccoons have more fun?

But we did have a black and white squirrel named “Percey” for a few years though!

Michael:

How is the moose hunt going?

Moose meat is healthier than beef too!

The closest moose around here lives in Algonquin Park!

I would think after 100 years, the moose in Newfoundland are genetically disposed to disappear during hunting season!

October 8, 2026 at 3:13 am #252426

Michael Reid
Participant

WES:

I got my moose.

When I lived in Ontario we got a moose in Algonquin park

October 8, 2026 at 4:26 am #252427

Michael Reid
Participant
Author

Posts