Aug 142026
 
 August 14, 2026  Posted by at 8:51 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , ,  Add comments


Rembrandt The Descent from the Cross 1634


Iran’s Military Command To Be ‘More Aggressive’ (ZH)
Skepticism Over Iranian Plot Against Trump In Turkey (ZH)
FBI Listed Bill Barr, Mike Pence and Other Reps as Russian “Conduits” (Turley)
FBI’s Approach of Attack: Aggressive on Trump, Protective on Biden (JTN)
Left Has Followed Every Play in Weaponization Playbook (Victor Davis Hanson)
ICE Refuses To Disclose Records On Ilhan Omar Fraud Probe (JTN)
Watch: UK PM Wants EVERY Area In Britain To House Migrants (MN)
The Foundations Are Eroding (Paul Craig Roberts)
California’s Rail Boondoggle Nears a Reckoning (Stepman)
The Dems’ Great White Hope Just Got Humiliated in Michigan (Stephen Green)
Karoline Leavitt Raised the Bar for All White House Press Secretaries (O’Brien)

 


 

 


 


Heating up the empty air,

Iran’s Military Command To Be ‘More Aggressive’ (ZH)

Oil prices have spiked Thursday on emerging reports that the Houthis have freshly targeted an Aramco refinery in Saudi Arabia’s Jizan with two drones, according to regional Saba News Agency. It seems this is part of Iran’s ‘counter-pressure’ playing book against Washington and its Gulf allies, given the Houthis have long been a proxy arm of Iran. The Houthi group is in the midst of a ‘siege for siege’ war on Saudi shipping and energy.


The Hormuz stalemate is meanwhile continuing, given War Secretary Pete Hegseth now says that the US military can maintain a blockade on Iranian ports for as long as needed.“Indefinitely the United States Navy can maintain a blockade like that because we’ll rotate ships in and out, as we have, and we’ll continue to,” Hegseth told reporters. But Iran is also vowing to outlast and keep up the military pressure, enforcing its own strait management protocol based on the Oman deal.

Attrition Game Outlasting US Politics
Top adviser to the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mohammad Reza Naqdi, has been signaling Iran’s more aggressive stance in media appearances this week, also following a significant reshuffling of top military leadership. “Look, we have to attain deterrence so that the enemy never dares to attack us, so we can live with security,” Naqdi said in an interview with PBS. “One way is to prolong this war until we get to the next term of the presidency and cause attrition, so that if anyone else wants to attack Iran, they will know there is a cost.”

Alluding to the recent military reorganization, he described: “Whenever the conditions are favorable and the order is issued, we must be able to take the operation into enemy territory” – while contrasting the approach with a pre-war doctrine “primarily based on defense and the preservation of the country.”Military.com underscores that “Iran has reorganized its military to be more aggressive abroad as talks on ending the war with the U.S. remain mired in stalemate, a sign that Tehran is preparing for a protracted era of regional conflict.”

As a reminder, this is after Tehran’s obvious pivot away from negotiations, and toward a more permanent state of military resistance. The Wall Street Journal previously pointed out: “Now, the new supreme leader, Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, is putting his own stamp on the country’s national-security policy amid a confrontation with the U.S. that could last months or even years.”

“Seasoned Hardliners” in Command
According to more of the analysis: In a sweeping overhaul of the government’s top echelon on Sunday and Monday, Iran named seasoned hard-liners to run the country’s security policies and institutions of repression. It marked the most significant government reshuffle under Mojtaba Khamenei, who hasn’t been seen in public since the war began. U.S. intelligence agencies say he is alive but severely injured, and top Iranian cabinet members say they have never met him since he took office. Iranian officials say he was injured but in good health.

Analysts said the appointments signaled Khamenei’s determination to hold fast in a showdown with President Trump, who is seeking concessions on Iran’s nuclear program and the Strait of Hormuz. “The regime is preparing for a more confrontational posture at home and abroad,” said Kasra Aarabi, an expert on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a powerful paramilitary force, at United Against Nuclear Iran, a policy organization that opposes Iran’s government. And some fresh insight from Michael Stephens, a senior associate fellow at the UK-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI):

Nearly six months since the beginning of the war, Iran is now convinced that the US is not willing to conduct a ground invasion. “That existential threat is gone,” Stephens said. “So they want to up the tempo and maybe make the pain a little bit more acute for President Trump. And the best way to do that is to drag this out.”Prior to the US-Israeli attack on February 28, the widely held belief was that the Iranian government would readily collapse, after enduring months of civil disobedience and unrest during major demonstrations in late December and January.

“That doesn’t seem to be the case now, and I’m not really sure the US has any tools in the bag to force the regime to do what they want,” the analyst said. Iranians can “live in this stalemate at the moment – it hurts them, but it’s not existential, and I think that’s the problem the US has now”. Iranian leadership continues boasting of squaring up against the much larger American foe…

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It’s easy to mock the Secret Service. Easier than it is for them to protect Trump.

Skepticism Over Iranian Plot Against Trump In Turkey (ZH)

US mainstream media has this week been dominated by claims that an Iranian assassination threat prompted President Donald Trump to secretly switch planes while flying out of Turkey last month, with Air Force One serving as a decoy while he flew out on a smaller military aircraft. The details of the ‘escape’ from alleged danger are wild, and continue to be subject of widespread scrutiny and questioning, given the American president was actually covertly transferred into a catering container, which then ferried him to a small C-32A aircraft, according to reports in The Washington Post and The New York Times.

BBC: Donald Trump secretly switched planes when he was returning from a Nato meeting last month in order to avoid a threat to his life from Iran.


The claim was that Iranian covert forces could target Air Force One at the airport in Ankara using shoulder-fired rockets, or MANPADS, from perhaps just one kilometer away Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Thursday while speaking of the broader war and the status of the Hormuz Strait appeared to gently mock the ordeal and controversy surrounding it. He referenced “fake intelligence” in the broad comments.

Importantly the words come as some like Turkey are accusing Israel of feeding Washington ‘fabricated’ intelligence, which then led to the dramatic Trump plane-switching escapade. FM Araghchi asserted that the United States has “has long miscalculated due to intelligence failures,” especially when launching its war on Iran. But that’s when he could be interpreted as mocking the Air Force One drama, continuing on X: “Worse than fake news is fake intelligence.”

Some analysts have questioned why at this point in the conflict, when Iranian government and armed forces have clearly survived nearly six months of everything the US military has thrown at it, Iran would even see the need to assassinate a head of state. Such an action would only invite a much greater military response than has been seen before, and the Islamic Republic seeks to keep its current leverage over Hormuz, wanting to keep things at a low-burn headed into US midterm elections.

In the meantime there are fresh reports that the US intelligence community itself is skeptical of the assassination plot claims: US intelligence officials were skeptical of an alleged Iranian assassination threat against President Donald Trump during his trip to Turkiye for the NATO summit, which prompted a secretive plan to fly him out of the country in an alternative military aircraft. The assassination threat was relayed by the Israeli government to the CIA, where analysts did not view the intelligence as compelling and conveyed that skepticism to Trump administration officials, Washington Post reported, quoting current and former US officials familiar with the intelligence said.

Another official called the reports of threats against Trump’s life “Israeli-derived, not US-generated, and viewed as low confidence,” Washington Post added. However, the Secret Service is trained to take basically every threat seriously and move fast, especially while the president is traveling through foreign countries, or in potentially hostile environments. More and more skepticism has emerged of late across the political spectrum related to official Washington claims related to the Iran conflict…

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Republicans are “Conduits of Misinformation”.

While George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and John Kerry were “targets” for Russian disinformation.

Do we realize how insane this was/is?

Also: most FBI agents are still in their job.

FBI Listed Bill Barr, Mike Pence and Other Reps as Russian “Conduits” (Turley)

Well, this explains why, whenever Bill Barr and I met for breakfast, he would order the Borscht with Biscuits. Various media sites are now reporting that the FBI allegedly listed Barr, Michael Pence, and other Republicans as “Russian conduits” while listing leading Democrats as the victims or targets of Russian disinformation or misinformation. It would be comical if it were not so concerning. In addition to the absurd listing of these figures, the task force is being accused of burying a significant number of witnesses alleging influence peddling and corruption by the Biden family.


Newly declassified documents from the White House transparency task force reportedly show that the FBI ran a counterintelligence operation called Round River to “neutralize certain narratives.” The operation was carried out by the bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force in the lead-up to the 2020 elections.

The declassified documents identified Republicans, including other high-ranking officials such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the late Lindsey Graham, as conduits for Russian misinformation. At the same time, figures such as George Soros, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and former Secretary of State John Kerry are “targets” for Russian disinformation.

What is bizarre is that the FBI was aware by that point that Clinton had secretly funded the Russian collusion hoax and helped launch the greatest political hit job in history with a cooperating media. Notably, American intelligence had concluded that the infamous Steele dossier funded by the Clinton campaign may have been the conduit of Russian disinformation. Yet, here is the FBI listing Clinton as the target for misinformation while listing virtually every prominent Republican as conduits for misinformation, according to these reports.

At the same time, the Round River reportedly declared “confidential human source files” revealing alleged corruption by the Biden family “to be Russian disinformation.” The Administration is looking into the task force and why it “did not go in and try to determine the merit of the allegations, or to examine if they were factually true, or consult with the agents working those informants. They simply designated them as foreign intelligence threats and designated their files as such.”

Congress should also look into these disturbing reports. The inclusion of Barr is particularly absurd, as one of the hawks who have long pushed for the toughest measures to combat Russian threats. Presumably, his inclusion is based on someone spotting him spreading Russian dressing on a salad. That would have been a stronger basis for the task force than the apparent counterintelligence analysis of the Round River investigators.

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“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 State..,”

FBI’s Approach of Attack: Aggressive on Trump, Protective on Biden (JTN)

The federal government’s most powerful investigative agency spent four years applying double standards to two investigations of presidential candidates. At the same time, they were floating as credible allegations against one that its own agents doubted, yet treated corroborated tips about the other as foreign disinformation. No one has been seriously held accountable for the disparity. The FBI led multiple operations prior to the 2020 election that helped politically and financially damage President Donald Trump and, at the same time, protect then-presidential candidate Joe Biden from law enforcement.


Two operations – Crossfire Hurricane and Oxferd Comma – served to undermine Trump and paint him as a Russian operative by zealously investigating unsubstantiated allegations pushed by Democrats. Running in tandem with those investigations was Round River, which was designed to fight “malign foreign influence” by ignoring actual evidence of corruption and crimes involving the Biden family and paint any Republican who questioned that family as a conspiracy theorist or Russian asset.

Crossfire Hurricane targeted Trump over Democrat paid-for allegations
Crossfire Hurricane involved the abuse of surveillance rules during the Obama administration allowing the FBI and other intelligence agencies to target the Trump campaign under the guise of fighting foreign influence. Based on unsubstantiated allegations pushed by the Clinton campaign, the investigation involved undercover informants infiltrating the Trump campaign to try and lure out incriminating evidence – which never came. An Inspector General report from the Department of Justice released in 2019 admitted some of that surveillance was “unlawful.”

The Inspector General report found that the FBI altered evidence against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in order to investigate him, leading to FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith pleading guilty in 2020 to falsifying an email for the purposes of obtaining a FISA warrant. That warrant authorized spying on Page and his interactions with the Trump campaign. Page had worked with the CIA dealing with Russians in the early days of the Obama administration, but Clinesmith altered an email to make it appear as though Page had never worked with the agency.

Declassified records released by the FBI and obtained by Just the News show Stefan Halper, an informant who also worked as a Pentagon researcher, was directed to meet with Page at a Virginia farm in October 2016, to try to elicit information about the campaign’s possible ties to Russia. Other declassified documents show that Halper was paid nearly $1.2 million by the FBI over three decades.

The FBI also sent an undercover operative to meet with Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos while posing as a research assistant named Azra Turk, according to reporting from The New York Times in 2019. The investigators attempted to get Papadopoulos to falsely admit the Trump campaign was working with Russia. Halper was also asked by the FBI to speak with Papadopoulos about alleged Russia collusion, records show.

Special Counsel: “No criminal conspiracy between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Trump campaign.” Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s massive investigation into Russia collusion determined there was no criminal conspiracy between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Trump campaign.=A second Special Counsel, John Durham, went even further, concluding during the Biden administration that the Obama-era FBI and DOJ had no basis to open an investigation of Trump-Russia collusion.”Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” Durham wrote in a 300-plus page report sent to Congress in spring 2023.

Declassified documents pertaining to Crossfire Hurricane released in April 2025 revealed that the FBI had doubts about the authenticity of the allegations against Trump, but pursued the president anyway. Oxferd Comma began eight days after Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey in 2017. The FBI knew that the firing had nothing to do with Russia, but investigated the sitting president anyway.

“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,” reads the electronic communication, approved by then-FBI General Counsel James Baker and then-Assistant Director for Counterintelligence William Priestap.

“The goal of the investigation is 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 memo added. “In addition, this investigation will also seek to determine whether President Trump and others yet to be named obstructed and/or conspiracy to obstruct any associated FBI investigation.”

The memo went on to make clear the investigation was tied to Crossfire Hurricane, even though in both instances, the FBI knew or had doubts about the authenticity of the allegations against Trump. In contrast to the two above investigations into Trump, the Round River operation sought to discredit anyone suggesting corruption amongst members of the Biden family – and actively suppressed information that confirmed that corruption.

As Just the News reported Wednesday, the FBI had 14 informants with information on Biden family corruption but worked to portray Biden and other Democrats as victims of Russian disinformation from conservative news sites, painting every story as “Russian disinformation.” Prominent Republicans were labeled as “conduits” of Russian disinformation. Confidential Human Sources (CHS) reported concerns about the Biden family and its ties to Ukraine beginning in 2015, but labeled former Attorney General Bill Barr’s investigation into that corruption as a conspiracy theory and Barr himself as a conspiracy theorist or Russian asset.

Other agencies helped Biden and undermined Trump, media played same game
In addition to the FBI and IRS, others helped Biden in 2020 and undermined Trump, including 51 former intelligence officials who signed a now infamous letter claiming a bombshell report from The New York Post about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. The officials knew this was not true, but coordinated with the Biden campaign and then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken to release the letter prior to Biden’s debate with Trump, so Biden could dismiss a major Trump talking point. When Trump came back into office in 2025, he revoked the security clearances of the former intelligence officials who signed the letter.

The FBI under Biden also pressured social media sites to censor the laptop story, with former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later admitting that censoring the story was wrong. Facebook executives also suppressed the story to gain favor with the Biden administration, the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the weaponization of government found in 2024.

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“.. the 2016 election? Hillary Clinton, she lost the Electoral College. She won the popular vote. What did she say almost immediately? That Donald Trump was not legitimately elected. In other words, he wasn’t our real president. Was she an outlier? No. Former President Jimmy Carter said that Donald Trump was not a legitimate president. “

Left Has Followed Every Play in Weaponization Playbook (Victor Davis Hanson)

Recently, the Left in general and Democrats in particular have been criticizing a lot of things that this administration has done. This came up with the confirmation hearings of Attorney General Todd Blanche, and people suggested that, though he may have been qualified, he had too close a relationship as a personal attorney, or he acted in a legal capacity with [President] Donald Trump, and therefore there would be an incestuous relationship between the [Justice Department] and the White House.


But who broke that standard? I think it was broken during the JFK administration. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic president, appointed his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general. They conferred daily. If we were worried that that was an aberration, remember Eric Holder bragged that he was, quote, Obama’s wingman. So, the Democrats have had a long history of a close relationship between the DOJ and the White House.

We’ve been told that the Democratic Party is very angry because some local, i.e., state or county or municipal, prosecutors might take a look at Anthony Fauci and see if he had criminal exposure other than federal exposure. And people said, well, what business do these local prosecutors have looking at Anthony Fauci, who was a federal bureaucrat? And if he did anything wrong, it would be a federal offense. You can’t have freelancing prosecutors all over the United States going after—yes, you can. We established that principle with Donald Trump.

Remember that Letitia James went after him for a real estate deal in which Deutsche Bank, the lender, had no problem with the loan as it was conducted. She was the attorney general of New York. Alvin Bragg could not get Donald Trump on anything other than to bootstrap a federal campaign violation that even federal prosecutors didn’t want to touch. He was just the municipal DA of Manhattan.

Fani Willis met her paramour, Nathan Wade, who was part of her legal team. He met in the White House with Joe Biden, and she was only a Fulton County prosecutor. So, long ago, we dispensed with the idea that regional or local or state or county prosecutors can’t go after a high-profile federal official, and there’s nobody more high-profile than the United States president.

Then we heard last week that they were worried that Donald Trump’s IRS may be too partisan. I think they destroyed that barrier as well. Do you remember Lois Lerner? She was pretty much conducting special audits of Tea Party groups and other conservative-affiliated groups to make sure they did not get nonprofit status, and that was going into the election year 2012.

Do we remember the New York Legislature when Donald Trump’s tax returns were released illegally by the federal IRS? The Legislature in New York piled on and said, we’ll pass a bill that says anybody this year, i.e., Trump, who is under federal audit and whose tax returns are subpoenaed by a congressional committee, once they saw them, we’re going to turn over his confidential state records as well. That was about as weaponizing the state and federal IRSs as you could imagine. How about election denialism?

Hillary Clinton. You remember, anybody, the 2016 election? Hillary Clinton, she lost the Electoral College. She won the popular vote. What did she say almost immediately? That Donald Trump was not legitimately elected. In other words, he wasn’t our real president. Was she an outlier? No. Former President Jimmy Carter said that Donald Trump was not a legitimate president. He was an election denialist. Stacey Abrams, you remember her? She ran for governor of Georgia and lost by 50,000 votes. She toured the country for two years and said she was the real governor of Georgia, she won that election. She was really an election denialist.

Do we remember in 2000, when George W. Bush beat Al Gore? Al Gore said that he really didn’t lose the key swing state of Florida. Later, The New York Times conducted an affiliated investigation of the county returns that Al Gore had sued to get a hold of. They looked at them, and guess what? George W. Bush did win Florida and, with Florida, won the election. Did that stop the Left? No.

They said that George W. Bush was selected. He was not elected. Do you remember that? Do you remember the 2004 election, when a large contingent of the Democratic House refused to honor the vote in Ohio and voted not to accept George Bush’s popular-vote victory in Ohio that put him over the top? So, that bar was destroyed a long time ago, and it’s pretty low or nonexistent that you don’t deny an election result. That’s what the Left taught us, at least.

We were told that the Supreme Court of the United States is too weaponized, too consistently conservative, voting in a bloc. There’s been a lot of studies. One of them showed that the six-justice majority votes anywhere from 60% to 64% in line with their conservative philosophy in cases that come up with an ideological theme to them. And how about our three left-wing, Democratic judges? The same study found that they are a little bit more partisan. Up to 70% of ideological cases, they vote consistently with the Left. In other words, if you believe in a weaponized Supreme Court, the greatest offenders are the three liberal justices, which you don’t hear.

We’re talking about a weaponized FBI a lot. Kash Patel has weaponized the FBI. I don’t think he has, but if he were to weaponize it, he would be tutored by James Comey. You remember James Comey? He, 245 times before a House Oversight Committee, said he couldn’t remember, or he didn’t know, or he had amnesia. He inaugurated the bogus Operation Crossfire effort to promulgate the lie that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. That was during the campaign. Had that lie been widely publicized and widely believed, it would have affected the election. Donald Trump wouldn’t have won.

No sooner had Donald Trump been elected than, with Operation Two that was Oxford Comma, they tried to suggest the sitting president had Russian ties. That was a lie, too. Andrew McCabe, his interim successor, lied four times under oath on ideological or political matters. His lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, forged a document and submitted it to a FISA court. That was an FBI lawyer. I could go on with Robert Mueller, the Mueller investigation, claiming under oath he didn’t know what the Steele dossier was, even though it prompted his very appointment. I would say the FBI was pretty weaponized and politicized by the time Kash Patel got there.

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“It’s All in the Family: The agency claims that releasing documents related to an investigation into the lawmaker’s alleged immigration fraud would, under the law, interfere with “enforcement proceedings.”

“In 2002, Omar applied for a marriage license to marry Ahmed Hirsi, but did not marry him civilly, only in a Muslim ceremony. In 2008, she separated from Hirsi and a year later married Elmi. In 2011, Omar and Elmi separated with a Muslim divorce, and a year later she began another relationship with Hirsi. After her election to the Minnesota house, she filed for a formal divorce from Elmi in 2017. She married Hirsi in 2018. ”

ICE Refuses To Disclose Records On Ilhan Omar Fraud Probe (JTN)

The federal government is refusing to turn over records related to an investigation conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement into allegations of immigration fraud by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., citing a legal exemption for ongoing investigations. Just the News filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the records in January, seeking the records pertaining to any investigations conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the allegations that Rep. Omar, who represents Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, married a relative in order to help him remain in the country.


Omar has denied the allegations. No court records, DNA evidence, or other documentary proof has ever substantiated that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, Omar’s legal husband from 2009–2017, was her biological brother. “ICE has determined that the information you requested is being withheld in full pursuant to Title 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(A). Disclosure of any responsive records at this time could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings,” ICE told Just the News in response to the FOIA in May.

The FOIA exemption cited by the agency “applies to records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes when their release could disrupt such proceedings,” the reply reads. The Department of Justice guidelines for invoking exemption 7(A) say that doing so requires a two-step assessment. “First, there must be a ‘reasonable likelihood’ of a pending or contemplated law enforcement proceeding,” the guidance says. “Second, release of the information must be reasonably expected to cause some articulable harm to that proceeding.”

Some say it’s an open-secret known about as early as 2016
Harm includes things such as exposing the case to witness tampering or tipping off suspects, according to the guidance. The exemption makes no distinction between criminal, civil, and administrative cases. Trump administration border czar Tom Homan first said in December last year that the Department of Homeland Security was investigating whether Omar committed immigration fraud by allegedly marrying her brother, Just the News reported. “We’re pulling the records, we’re pulling the files,” Homan said in an interview with Newsmax last year. “We’re looking at it […] I’m running that down this week.

Earlier this year, Vice President JD Vance confirmed that the Justice Department was reviewing the allegations. “I don’t want to prejudge an investigation,” Vance said. “It certainly seems like something fishy is there. If we think that there’s a crime, we’re going to prosecute that crime, and that’s something the Department of Justice is looking at right now.” The allegation that Omar’s second husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, is related to her, or even her brother, first surfaced during her 2016 election campaign for a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives. At the same time, allegations emerged that when she married her second husband she was still married to her first.

Omar denies allegations related to her matrimonial status
Omar’s campaign vehemently denied both allegations. “Allegations that she married her brother and is legally married to two people are categorically ridiculous and false,” said then-campaign spokesman Ben Goldfarb. The timeline of Omar’s relationships, however, is not in dispute. Omar was born in Somalia and lived in a refugee camp in Kenya before coming to the United States in 1995.

In 2002, Omar applied for a marriage license to marry Ahmed Hirsi, but did not marry him civilly, only in a Muslim ceremony. In 2008, she separated from Hirsi and a year later married Elmi. In 2011, Omar and Elmi separated with a Muslim divorce, and a year later she began another relationship with Hirsi. After her election to the Minnesota house, she filed for a formal divorce from Elmi in 2017. She married Hirsi in 2018.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly invoked the claim that Omar “married her brother” in order to get him into the country, accusing her of committing immigration fraud. “She married her brother in order to get in, right? She married her brother. Can you imagine if Donald Trump married his sister?” He also called for her removal, saying, “We ought to get her the hell out,” Trump said at a December 2025 rally.

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Next! (they don’t have anyone anywore, it’s over)

Watch: UK PM Wants EVERY Area In Britain To House Migrants (MN)

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has decided that “all parts of the country need to play their part. ”That means middle-class families and leafy villages must now accept large numbers of asylum seekers so the poorest areas are no longer the only ones carrying the load. This approach obviously does nothing to stop the root of the problem, the sheer number of migrants washing up in boats. It simply advertises better accommodation to the next wave of illegal arrivals.


Burnham’s comments came in direct response to the ongoing revolt in the Oxfordshire village of Piddington. Residents there face plans to house up to 1,250 single adult male asylum seekers on a former military site near a community of roughly 400 people. The numbers would leave locals heavily outnumbered. Children have written letters pleading with the Prime Minister not to destroy their village. Families held a symbolic independence referendum in which 96 percent voted to leave the United Kingdom in protest.

Seven-year-old Rex Perkin said his family had lived in the village for over 100 years and that he walked to his sister’s grave. He worried he would no longer be able to do that. Other children begged to keep their park, their dog walks, and the quiet life they knew. Parents described the prospect of being so outnumbered that daily life would change completely. Burnham told GB News he understood concerns and would look into the issues raised by “the good people of Piddington.”

He then made the wider point clear: “We cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers. I do believe all parts of the country need to work, to play their part. ”Borders minister Anna Turley doubled down, defending the plan to impose the numbers on the tiny village and insisting the policy was about “fairness” and a “more fair and equitable system.”

She said the men would be “contained” on the site but still allowed out. The message to anyone watching from the French coast is straightforward: break into Britain and you may end up in a secure facility near a prosperous English village rather than a rundown hotel in a deprived town.

The Centre for Migration Control put the core problem bluntly:

Labour MP Graham Stringer, speaking on TalkTV, rejected the idea that opposition was rooted in racism. GB News coverage highlighted the demographic reality. Certain areas could see locals outnumbered three to one if the redistribution continues on this scale.

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At his age, one’s foundations are always eroding.,

The Foundations Are Eroding (Paul Craig Roberts)

Dr. Mehmet Cengiz Oz, a dual citizen of Turkey and the US, is head of Medicaid, a federal program that provides health care for the uninsured poor. He announced last Tuesday that Medicaid, as directed by President Trump, would no longer pay for change of gender surgeries for children and for hormone therapies to counteract their natural gender.


(During the George W. Bush/Cheney/zionist neoconservative regime, joint Israeli-US citizens held high appointments in the Defense Department, State Department, and National Security. This power over America exercised by citizens of other countries has now been provided to Turkish/US joint citizens. How exactly is America American when citizens of foreign countries are in high US federal offices?)

The question that occurred to me is why was Medicare, a program for the health care of uninsured poor, paying with Americans’ tax dollars change of gender surgeries. In what sense is surgical change of gender a health issue?

I lived for many decades in the US prior to the emergence of the transgender ideology that people were suffering because they had been born in the wrong bodies. How exactly do you get into the wrong body? The advent of the transgender ideology seems to me the sudden appearance of a satanic practice of overturning God or nature. If people have been suffering from living in the wrong bodies, how come we only recently heard about it?

If being born into the wrong body is historically common, why suddenly is a new generation unable to cope without complaint and surgical intervention when previous wrong body persons were able to live with their condition? Have we simply become a weaker species that cannot even cope with our nature-given, God-given gender?

While thinking about this I read, yet again, that US Navy personnel on one of our US aircraft carriers stationed missile distance from Iran could not cope with being deployed away from the comforts of home for six and one-half months without both sailors’ morale collapsing and their families complaining of the strain. The sailors are trying to jump overboard in order to be honorably discharged for mental health reasons. One doesn’t sense strength resonating from the US Navy’s human resources. Wherever one looks, Americans are unable to cope. Sexual perverts can’t cope with Christian disapproval. Zionist Jews cannot copy with criticisms of Israel’s policies. It is so hurtful to be held accountable.

Black American students, most of whom are half white (so why are they called blacks?) are too fragile to go to schools named after Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, two citizens of Virginia who did not own slaves or commit war crimes, unlike Abraham Lincoln who has a memorial in Washington and an aircraft carrier named after him. Lincoln’s solution to the “negro problem” was to send them back to Africa or to somewhere in Central America, which would have been the case if Lincoln had not been assassinated. The tariffs imposed on the South by the North’s war victory would have paid for it.

Jews are so fragile that in order to ensure their ability to continue to exist they have to be protected by criminalizing all criticisms of Israel and its all powerful lobbies, so powerful that they control the President, Congress, media, and financial system of the United States.

We see all over the Western world extreme weakness. Governments are unwilling to prevent immigrant-invaders from overrunning their countries and from raping the ethnic population’s women and children. The Spanish prime minister’s response to the recent overrunning of a Spanish city of 80,000 by 60,000 immigrant-invaders was to say that as Spain was a former colonial occupier, it had to show empathy for the victims of its occupation. This is straight out of The Camp of the Saints, a forecast of the end of all white ethnic countries.

Who are the real oppressed? White heterosexual ethnic American males who have been second class citizens in law since the Jew Alfred Bloomrosen at the EEOC stood the 1964 civil rights act on its head and created a system of racial and gender preferences. These preferences are now being extended to immigrant-invaders. The American tower of babel now has animal sacrifice, calls to Muslim prayer over loudspeakers in the capital of Minnesota, demands of unassimilated communities for Sharia Law, Spanish as a second official language. The people whose this country is are powerless. In a few more years they will be a minority and will be pushed aside to be dealt with later.

Wherever you look in America it is the immigrant-invaders who are confident. They can count on the guilt of white American liberals to hand over to them all power. The few white Americans who understand the situation are demonized as conspiracy theorists and white supremacists.

A narrative has been constructed for whites by whites that denies whites the ability and will to protect themselves from marginalization. Wherever you look in America whites are working around the clock to give power over them to immigrants-invaders. As I posted yesterday, the Massachusetts state government is creating a commission for the unconstitutional purpose of favoring the promotion of Muslims to positions of power in the state government.

The MAGA movement to restore America failed, because Trump and his regime represent Israel, not America. Trump’s failure has likely demoralized many if not most of his supporters, and they, demoralized, will just give up, leaving the field to the leftish Democrats.

It is likely, though not certain, that the future belongs to the rising left in the Democrat Party. Their first targets are the established corrupt Democrats elected and reelected by the campaign contributions from donors they service legislatively. As I currently read it, the leftist Democrats are not aiming at just occupying the same corrupt position as traditional Democrats. The leftists are aiming at overthrowing the system. Establishment Democrats might be able to keep the leftists from power for a while by stealing elections as they appeared to have done in Milwaukee. Polls showed Francesca Hong with a large lead and she lost. Evidence has emerged of vote fraud. In America it is easy for establishments to steal elections.

The left won’t quickly win, as the Democrat primaries have shown. But they will win in the end, because only they are armed with the disgust, the determination, and the will to prevail.

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Can he run at all for anything after that?

California’s Rail Boondoggle Nears a Reckoning (Stepman)

California’s high-speed rail boondoggle may finally be running out of money. It’s bad news for Gov. Gavin Newsom, possibly good news for the people of California. I’ve been opining about why the California bullet train will never succeed since I wrote my very first column as a young college pup. But even my accurate (though not difficult) prediction about its certain failure didn’t quite capture the sheer depth of the wasteful insanity this project has achieved. There now may be a glimmer of hope, though a faint one, that the “project”—a word I use loosely in this case—may mercifully starve to death after fattening itself on taxpayer cash for nearly two decades.


According to a recent review by the Office of the Inspector General, the California High-Speed Rail project “will exhaust its current funding resources as soon as December 2027 if it does not secure financing.” The inspector general warned that the high-speed rail faces a $9.5 billion funding gap over the next five years and there is currently no plan to fill it. Even more damning is the inspector general’s note that there are “significant concerns” regarding transparency and that completion projections have been a moving target.

The only reason the high-speed rail was even keeping close to its already massively bloated budget numbers was due to just lopping off parts of the planned line. “Ultimately, the major cost savings observed in the Merced and Bakersfield extensions are not due to increased efficiency—which we define as delivering equivalent scope for less cost—but are instead the result of planning to build less,” the report explained. The report noted that the Merced-to-Bakersfield line, the pitifully shortened and getting shorter segment of what was once sold as a connection between San Francisco and Los Angeles, now has a projected completion date of September 2034.

I’d love to go back in time to my college campus and tell students who bought into the fast, “green” train that was going to connect the whole state that what they were ultimately getting was a short line in the Central Valley that might finish construction closer to their retirement than graduation—if they are lucky.On top of everything else, the inspector general wrote with seeming exasperation that the High-Speed Rail Authority tasked with overseeing the project “has obscured basic facts about the project, hindering lawmakers’ ability to provide effective oversight of the project.”

I’d argue that if the lawmakers and powers that be in the state cared about the high-speed rail’s viability, they would have taken action to shut it down and untangle the mess long ago. A few lone voices, including Republican Rep. Vince Fong, have been pointing out red flag after red flag for years, but they’ve mostly been ignored. Fong, like poor Sisyphus, did so again after the IG report came out.“California’s High-Speed Rail is the quintessential example of government mismanagement,” he wrote Tuesday on X. “I’ve called it out since day 1. Californians were promised a completed rail 6 years ago. Today we’ve spent billions and billions, for a total of zero trains. Gavin Newsom owes us an explanation. And an apology. It’s beyond time to shut this down.”

Fong is right. Not only should the California bullet train to nowhere be shut down, but taxpayers also deserve a full accounting of what went wrong here.We don’t even know the depths of failure outside the shifting budget projections and the visible lack of evidence that a functioning train is likely to come online any time soon.Every piece of information that drips out of the high-speed rail project is about delays, increased costs, deceptive practices, and total unaccountability.

Even basic things, like buying the trains, are behind schedule with no explanation. Newsom and other California Democrats blamed President Donald Trump for the recent hiccups on the removal of $4 billion in federal funds. However, according to a recent investigation by CBS News, the delay in buying trains, which was supposed to be done by the end of last year, had nothing to do with the lost federal funding. And, of course, the California government has provided no explanation for the hold up.

California quietly withdrew its lawsuit against the federal government over the pulled funding at the end of 2025, which was the right call given that it can’t meet basic deadlines. What this means is that the high-speed rail project—which I’d argue has been operating as a slush fund for bureaucrats and fake jobs for some time—might truly be put on full pause soon. The Trump administration isn’t going to hand them a penny now or ever again.

Private investors have mostly stayed far away. The best they’ve got on that end is some companies “exploring” the viability of the project, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they are just trying to find ways to gobble up some of the remaining public money. And without public subsidies that would have to be approved by voters, it’s hard to see where the money will come from to keep the thing rolling. Well, not rolling at all, actually. It’s shameful that this charade has gone on for so long. I truly hope this report will be the beginning of the end of this long, expensive, pointless scam that the people of California have endured for too long.

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“..whose national ambitions — thankfully for those of us who don’t live in California — appear permanently stymied by his conspicuous corruption and incompetence.”

The Dems’ Great White Hope Just Got Humiliated in Michigan (Stephen Green)

Pity poor Gavin Newsom, whose national ambitions — thankfully for those of us who don’t live in California — appear permanently stymied by his conspicuous corruption and incompetence. The latest evidence comes from Michigan, where the would-be Democrat presidential contender was just humiliated in the state’s deepest indigo of blue enclaves. Calling it Newsom’s “swing (and miss) state tour,” Politico reported on Wednesday that his “buzzy X posts and vertical videos” from Michigan “this week suggest a slam dunk trip to an early nominating state.”


But even though Newsom’s social media feed racked up “a million views of a 65-hour tour,” Politico noted that “the posts may also be the latest sign that social media is not real life.” Translation: It was a trip notable mostly for bad execution and embarrassing turnout. Rep. Debbie Dingell, “the Downriver doyenne largely responsible for nearly securing Michigan’s status as the fifth 2028 nominating state,” told the magazine, “I didn’t hear from the governor. I didn’t expect to: I’m a car girl.” That’s likely in reference to Newsom’s 2035 mandate banning new ICE vehicle sales in California.

Newsom snubbed Virgie Rollins, whom Politico described as “the influential chair for the DNC’s Black Caucus. “There’s more:Some Michigander politicos pointed out that Newsom canceled a fundraiser with state AG nominee Eli Savit that included the controversial host Kelly Neumann, according to an invite obtained by POLITICO and circulated to some Democrats who didn’t realize the event was canceled when Newsom’s team was made aware of Neumann’s background. Newsom initially planned two competing fundraisers in Ann Arbor on Sunday, one for Savit and one for the state House Democrats.

When the latter found out about the Savit fundraiser they pulled out, citing a small Ann Arbor donor base. Saying Ann Arbor has a small Democrat donor base is like saying you couldn’t spot any tech bros in Palo Alto. “He had a lot of good meetings,” Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel told Politico, adding Newsom was a big hit at a local barbecue.I believe this was the barbecue:

Yikes, how the mighty have fallen. Then again, “Newsom huddled for nearly an hour with Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed,” if you want to know the governor’s current priorities. Politico argued that “it’s also true that some of the hard feelings may underscore just how much Newsom is in demand,” but I’m not sure I see it. nI wouldn’t be too surprised if Newsom 2028 ended up following a similar path to Kamala Harris 2020. It makes me smile every time I remember that the Dems’ Queen of Summer 2019 ended up dropping out of the race in December, weeks before the Iowa caucuses — her polls cratering almost as quickly as her coffers.

It’s no coincidence that they’re both from California. As my partner in thoughtcrime, Stephen Kruiser, and I have discussed several times over the years, the Golden State is maybe the nation’s worst breeding ground for Democrats with presidential ambitions. Once a Dem woos the right money people — particularly Nancy Pelosi, but she’s now fading — they never really have to compete. Or even learn how to compete. Taking a Democrat like Harris or Newsom out of California is like taking the Boy in the Bubble out of confinement and directly into Wuhan Institute of Virology on a particularly leaky day.

Besides, as conservative Hollywood scribe George MF Washington put it on X this morning, “The energy of his party is done with straight white men.” Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Newsom has learned the lessons Harris never did. Maybe he really is the Democrats’ Great White Hope. But I didn’t see much evidence of that in Michigan.

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Wonderful write-up,

Karoline Leavitt Raised the Bar for All White House Press Secretaries (O’Brien)

The contrast could not be more stark. Arguably the worst White House press secretary in the history of the position, Karine Jean-Pierre, was followed immediately by one of the best, if not the best, in Karoline Leavitt.


Because of my profession, I’ve intensely studied every single White House press secretary, the good and the bad, for the past few decades, and based on my own observations, I have to give it to Leavitt. No press secretary has represented a force of nature like President Donald Trump so effectively. You don’t manage a boss like that, and yet, you can’t let him roll over you. Otherwise, you’re doing him no favors. She was probably the only one on the planet able to strike that balance the way she did.

By the same token, the level of vitriol, hostility and outright dishonesty the news media has weaponized against the Trump administration in its second term is unlike any I’ve ever seen. It’s so far out of bounds on a daily basis that just about every member of the White House Correspondents’ Association should be sued for malpractice. That group long ago abandoned any pretense of journalistic professionalism.

When a Democrat controls the White House, they are propagandists and stenographers for the administration. When a Republican is in the White House, they are apparatchiks for the opposition party. And when Trump Leavitt has a supercomputer for a brain. She’s been able to absorb, process, and compartmentalize every conceivable issue and question she might have to face. She’s been able to internalize all of it, and through her own behind-the-scenes work, process it all in collaboration with Trump himself and everyone in the administration.

While I am not privy to specific stories of Leavitt in private meetings within the administration, I know enough to know what’s involved. Privately, she’s likely had to push back on competing interests trying to influence both her and the president on issues and messaging. She’s also likely had to hold her own ground with the president himself on how some topics should be addressed and handled. It’s like being a lion tamer.


This is the pressure cooker in which she has had to operate even before she’s had to face the press. By the time she’s stepped up to the podium in that briefing room, she’s made sure to know every question she might face completely. She’s had every key message and response internalized and sometimes memorized. More often than not, she hasn’t needed to memorize, because she seems to be so much in sync with Trump. She has had this innate ability to know exactly what to say because she knows exactly what Trump would say in just about every situation. The best communicators are able to get inside the heads of those they represent, and she’s the poster child for this.

Leavitt is brass-knuckles tough. She’s the perfect fit for Trump, because while she is completely respectful of him and his agenda, once she’s outwardly facing, she seamlessly adopts a Trump-style toughness that comes up pretty close to the energy and sometimes the combativeness of the man she speaks for. As confrontational as Trump is, I have to guess that he sometimes prefers to take the posture of having to temper the combativeness of his people rather than to always have to try to light a fire under them. He’s never had to light a fire under Leavitt. She’s handled every single interaction with the press from a position of strength. She’s been in control. She been the one who sets the terms. And she’s followed up.


While Leavitt carried a binder to the podium for those press briefings, if you notice, she almost never looked at it. Yet, no matter what she was asked, she launched into a response within a second or two every time. No fumbling through a binder. No awkward pauses. No deer-in-the-headlights reactions. These sorts of behaviors were the hallmarks of both of Joe Biden’s press secretaries. His first press secretary, Jen Psaki, earned the nickname “Circle Back” for her habit of so routinely being unprepared for questions that she often had to tell reporters, “I’ll have to circle back with you on that one.”

Something equally noticeable but which may not get mentioned as much is Leavitt’s positivity. While she gives as good as she gets when skirmishing with the media, her fundamental energy and point of view are very positive and upbeat. Some people come across as naturally pessimistic. Leavitt is the opposite. She comes across as a naturally optimistic and happy person, which is immeasurable and a huge asset for her in terms of connecting with and winning the hearts and minds of the American people.

Relatedly, she is a very confident person, and that’s contagious. In fact, there is something about conservative women in general that makes them more attractive in a purely platonic sense. Positive, smart, self-assured, knowing who they are and who they are not. No apologies. That’s a woman other women and men want to be around. She has all of those qualities in spades.


Then of course, there’s that other sort of attractiveness Leavitt possesses that drives leftist women and men nuts. She’s good-looking, a very good dresser, and she knows how to carry herself with a level of polish that’s lost on most public figures – men and women – these days.

And finally, there are those values that she has pointed to as the drivers for her decision to step down from her current role at the White House – her family. Not only does she articulate conservative values well, but she lives those values. She’s the real deal, and this decision is proof of that. Her work has been consequential for a whole nation, and yet she was able to have enough perspective to know that at the end of the day, there are two people to whom she is their entire world. And she’s decided not to let them down.

Trump will not find a successor to Leavitt who comes up to her level. She has raised the bar for the position. She rewrote the job description. The country will now expect more of those who follow her precisely because she’s shown what can be done with the position.

But none will match her. It’s just a fact. She’s a rare talent, and she’s using her talents in the best ways possible. She’ll continue to be a member of the Trump inner circle, while taking the opportunity to be an integral part of her kids’ daily lives. Clearly, she knows that the one thing you can give your young children that matters most is time, and she chose wisely. If she’s as good a mother as she’s been a press secretary, these kids are going to change the world when it’s their turn.

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Home Forums Debt Rattle August 14 2026

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  • #247351

    Rembrandt The Descent from the Cross 1634 • Iran’s Military Command To Be ‘More Aggressive’ (ZH) • Skepticism Over Iranian Plot Against Trump In Turke
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle August 14 2026]

    #247373
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Sonar21A Son of the New American Revolution
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    The Butcher’s Bill Comes Due: A Military Run Past Its Limits, and the Leaders Who Keep Saying Everything Is Fine
    13 August 2026 by Larry C. Johnson 72 Comments

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    Larry’s note: This article discusses suicide. Service members, veterans, and family members in crisis can reach the Veterans/Military Crisis Line by dialing 988 and pressing 1, texting 838255, or visiting VeteransCrisisLine.net.

    When the Secretary of the Army orders every officer and sergeant in the force to personally check on every soldier, every single day, that is not a routine holiday gesture. It is an alarm. And in the ten months since Dan Driscoll issued that order, the alarm has kept ringing — from a carrier in the Arabian Sea, from a secretive command at Fort Meade, from the families of sailors who can no longer get a straight answer about why their children are hungry. The stories arrive from different branches and different missions, but they add up to a single indictment: the American military is being run past the limits of the people inside it, and too many of its leaders have responded not by fixing the problem but by denying it exists.

    The order that was an admission
    Start with what Driscoll’s November 2025 memo actually conceded. “Last year, we lost 260 soldiers to suicide,” he wrote. “Soldiers aren’t getting the help they need.” Read that again. The civilian head of the Army, in writing, told the entire force that its existing suicide-prevention apparatus — years of briefings, mandatory training, awareness campaigns, and dedicated prevention offices — was failing to reach the people who needed it. His solution was to fall back on the most basic human intervention available: order a person to call another person, once a day, and ask if they are okay.

    There is nothing wrong with that instinct. A daily check-in is humane, and Driscoll deserves credit for making it personal and mandatory rather than performative. But strip away the sentiment and the memo is a confession. The Pentagon’s own data shows active-duty suicide rates rising more or less steadily from 2011 through 2023, through multiple administrations and countless “prevention initiatives.” When the fix for a decade-long institutional failure is to command individuals to manually watch each other, the institution is admitting its systems don’t work. The daily check-in treats the symptom. It does nothing about the conditions generating the wound — and those conditions were about to get worse.

    The food fight the Navy tried to wave away
    By April 2026, the strain had moved from statistics to meal trays. USA Today published photographs — from the families of service members aboard the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and the assault ship USS Tripoli — showing half-empty trays, small portions, and a gray slab of processed meat. A sailor reportedly told his mother the crew “eat when they can” and split food evenly when someone got more than the others. The Lincoln had been pulled into the war with Iran and was grinding through a deployment that would stretch past 250 days.

    Here is where accountability stops being abstract. Confronted with photographs and firsthand accounts, the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, did not order an inquiry or promise to look into it. He went on social media and called the reporting “FAKE NEWS.” That response is the pattern this whole story turns on: when evidence of strain surfaces, the reflex from the top has too often been to attack the messenger rather than examine the condition. It is difficult to fix a problem you have publicly declared does not exist — and a denial from the Secretary of War sends an unmistakable signal down the chain of command about which answer leadership wants to hear.

    Fort Meade: where the tempo became fatal
    Then came the gravest signal, and it did not come with photographs. In August, Bloomberg reported that US Cyber Command — the force that defends American networks and runs offensive cyber operations — was investigating a cluster of deaths among its people. As many as five individuals who worked in or closely with the command died by suicide between early June and early July 2026, according to internal communications, records, and interviews the outlet reviewed. The concentration was abnormal enough that Cyber Command reportedly invoked the Pentagon’s “suicide cluster” designation; leadership had acknowledged three deaths in an internal email as early as June.

    Precision matters here, and it cuts toward accountability rather than away from it. Officials have not established a common cause, and there is no public evidence connecting the deaths beyond their timing — no one should imply otherwise. But what the reporting does establish is the backdrop: a workforce hit by a workload surge driven by foreign conflicts, the Iran war above all, with the deaths landing in one of the most intense stretches of that war. Cyber Command had reportedly started embedding mental-health clinicians at Fort Meade in May — before the public knew anything — which tells you the leadership already understood its people were in trouble.

    That is the accountability question in its sharpest form. If commanders were worried enough to move clinicians in during the spring, who was accountable for the operational tempo that made those clinicians necessary? Burnout in an elite cyber force is not weather. It is the downstream result of decisions about missions, staffing, and pace — decisions made by people with names and ranks. The Senate Armed Services Committee is reportedly now discussing more mental-health resources, and a House committee has called the rise in suicides a “critical issue.” Congressional attention is welcome, but it arrives after the deaths, not before, and more counselors do not answer the prior question of why the load was allowed to grow unchecked.

    The Lincoln, again — and the same reflex
    If the April food dispute could be waved off as a one-time supply hiccup, August removed that excuse. The outlet MS Now reported — citing about a dozen family members and recordings of meetings between families and Navy leadership — that the Lincoln’s crew was contending with food shortages, long meal lines, broken toilets, mold in the showers, dead laundry machines, missing soap and toothpaste, and collapsing morale after roughly 250 days at sea. The reporting raised safety concerns and, in some family accounts, attempted suicides aboard a crew worn to the bone.

    And the institutional reflex held. A 5th Fleet spokesman allowed that a 250-day deployment “is challenging for the crew and their equipment” but insisted the sailors “remain resilient and ready” and the ship “remains fully capable of meeting all mission tasking.” Fact-checkers still listed elements of the allegations as under investigation. The specific claims are not all settled, and honest accounting requires saying so. But notice the shape of the answer: not “we are pulling this crew home,” not “we failed to resupply them,” but a reassurance that the mission can still be accomplished. That is the tell. When the reflexive priority is defending readiness rather than the readiness of the human beings, you have learned exactly whose welfare sits at the bottom of the ledger.

    Who is accountable
    It would be dishonest to collapse four situations into one conspiracy, and equally dishonest to pretend they are unrelated coincidences that happened to land in the same year across the same military. The truth is structural, and it has an address.

    The common accelerant is a war with Iran now in its sixth month, layered on top of years of high operational tempo — and operational tempo is not an act of God. It is a policy choice about how many missions to run, how long to keep carriers forward-deployed, and how hard to push a cyber force that never appears on a casualty list. Someone chooses that pace. The recurring second thread is the response to evidence: an Army secretary who at least named the failure in writing, set against a Defense Secretary who called firsthand reporting “fake news” and a fleet that answered allegations of a broken crew with assurances about mission capability. A military that cannot admit its people are breaking cannot protect them, because the first step in every prevention program ever written is to acknowledge the problem out loud.

    Driscoll’s daily check-in, viewed from here, looks less like a holiday courtesy and more like a quiet vote of no confidence in everything above it — an acknowledgment that the formal systems have failed and the only thing left is to have one exhausted person watch over another. That may save lives at the margin. It should. But it is a tourniquet, and a tourniquet is what you reach for when the institution responsible for preventing the wound has already let it open. The people who set the tempo, who cut the resupply, who reached for “fake news” instead of an investigation — they are the ones with the authority to actually stop the bleeding. So far, too many of them have chosen to insist there is no blood.

    If you or someone you know is a service member, veteran, or military family member in crisis, the Veterans/Military Crisis Line is available 24/7: dial 988 then press 1, text 838255, or visit VeteransCrisisLine.net. This is a sensitive subject; anyone struggling personally is encouraged to reach out to that line or another trusted source of support

    https://sonar21.com/the-butchers-bill-comes-due-a-military-run-past-its-limits-and-the-leaders-who-keep-saying-everything-is-fine/

    #247374
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    fmr CIA Analyst Larry Johnson: We’re Trapped, How the MIC Ruined the US

    #247375
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Paradoxical Politics of Climate
    Why is it the only environmental cause for which governments have gotten ahead of citizens?
    Josh Mitteldorf
    Aug 14, 2026
    When scientific controversies have major consequences for politics and profits, we’ve come to expect a thumb on the scale of scientific objectivity. The paradox in this case is that the thumb has switched sides.

    In 1965, Lyndon Johnson’s science panel was already warning of an effect on global climate from burning fossil fuels. At the time, the response was just what you might expect. The idea was suppressed, and never gained much traction. Privately, Exxon was studying the issue as a defensive precaution. They had both computer modelers (crude at the time!) and an observational program collecting air samples at sea.

    At the same time that their internal program was corroborating the logic and predictions of the President’s Panel, they sought proxies to negate this narrative publicly. The American Petroleum Institute funded scientists who would muddy the water and sow doubts, just as the Tobacco Industry had used surrogate scientists to deny there was a link between smoking and cancer a generation earlier.

    During the 1990s, the PR battle was joined. James Hansen was writing journal articles and testifying before Congress, while Al Gore was a voice in the wilderness, and the whole story was being suppressed and denied by Big Oil. This is what capitalism does to science. This is the expected norm.

    But starting around 2005, something flipped. The scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming got weaker, and at the same time, the political establishment latched on to the weakened narrative and brooked no debate.

    The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. New funding drew young researchers into climate modeling, and it was all contingent on supporting the narrative of an impending climate disaster caused by fossil fuel burning. Big Oil was no longer suppressing the CO2 narrative; on the contrary, they were joining the choir, advertising their commitment to a carbon-neutral future.

    Is this a cause for celebration? A rare case of government and industry prioritizing environment over profits and people over corporations? Is government action on climate a hopeful light against the dark background of GMO crops, deforestation, and microplastics in our brains?

    Call me a cynic; I suspect that the climate narrative has been joined to a more sinister agenda.

    What is the scientific status of the CO2 / global warming narrative?
    It’s complicated. Yes, human activity is having an effect on global climate. The effect is much smaller than natural variations over the last 200,000 years since man has been on the planet, but is a visible signal in the data. There is no doubt that CO2 as a percentage of the air we breathe has steadily increased over the last 100 years. Whether there has been a corresponding increase in global temperature is more difficult to determine, because averaging temperature readings from thousands of sites around the world can be done in many ways. But it seems true that there has been a 1oC rise during the time that reliable measurements have been available. The net result is probably a boon for life on earth. But computer modeling of climate is a very uncertain science, and published models today are politically influenced in the direction of maximizing alarm.

    Historically, there is a strong correlation between atmospheric CO2 and global temperature, but the reason is not the greenhouse effect. You have probably noticed that a can of warm soda bubbles over when opened, much more than cold soda. That’s because water holds less CO2 as it warms. When the earth warms, CO2 comes out of the oceans into the air, and when the earth cools, CO2 comes out of the air and into the oceans. This is a much bigger effect than the greenhouse mechanism. It runs in the same direction, but cause and effect are reversed.

    When CO2 in the atmosphere rises, land-based plants grow faster, and the base of the food chain supports richer ecosystems.

    H2O has a far larger effect on global temperature than CO2. Cloud cover is the biggest variable in the earth’s albedo, the amount of sunlight reflected back into space before it has a chance to heat the ground or the air. It takes only a small change in the earth’s cloud cover to overwhelm a much larger proportional change in greenhouse CO2. There are complex interactions between CO2 and cloud cover, interactions in both directions that we do not yet understand well enough to make accurate computer models. This is the main reason that current climate models do not have predictive value.

    Historically, humans, along with other life forms, have thrived during warmer periods in earth’s history, and ice ages have driven sharp population declines. Warm temperatures mean that more of the earth is habitable, and more CO2 means that plant growth is goosing the base of the food chain.

    There are cycles of about 100,000 years — we don’t understand the cause — in which temperatures rise gradually, then fall precipitously and another ice age begins. We are presently at the end of one of these cycles. Temperatures are warmer than they have been in the last 100,000 years, and this was true before humans started burning fossil fuels. It was only 12,000 years ago that all of Canada and half the US were under glacial ice several kilometers thick. That is actually the norm of the last million years. It will happen again. One possibility is that anthropogenic “global warming” has actually forestalled the next ice age.

    Interviewed by Danny Jones, Danish Prof Henrik Svensmark tells how he lost his tenured job and his funding for bucking the preferred narrative about global warming. Prof Svensmark studies correlations between earth’s temperature and various astronomical events, especially solar storms and cosmic rays. That was sufficient cause to derail his career.

    This kind of scientific censorship is almost always associated with corporate profits or a political agenda. But climate alarmism seems to be bad for corporate profits. Is there a possible political agenda?

    Three years ago, I speculated about the mother of all conspiracy theories. Is someone trying to bring down the global economy, shrink the food supply creating misery and starvation? I asked whether inscrutable projects and improbable disasters could be part of an agenda.

    New legal pressures threatening the already-impossible economics of small farming. [link]

    Grain silos that caught fire or happened to be right under a small plane that fell out of the sky. [link]

    Hurricanes contrary to usual weather patterns in Acapulco [link] and Asheville [link]. (FEMA interference actually made the situation worse.)

    Earthquakes in Turkiye, Venezuela, and Haiti. [link]

    Simple train derailment turned to ecological devastation in East Palestine, OH. [link]

    A barge that executed acrobatic maneuvers to bring down a Baltimore link in the N-S shipping corridor of the Eastern US.

    “Wild” fires in Lahaina, California, Canada, and now across southern Europe. [link]

    What in heck are chemtrails? [link]

    A pandemic seeded by bioweapons, used to justify a toxic genetic “vaccine” that killed more people than the virus. [link]

    And now, a suicidal war against Iran that has shrunk the world’s supply of petroleum, natural gas, and the fertilizers on which so much of world agriculture has become dependent. [link]

    Viewed in this context, I ask whether steering The Science™ in support of a climate horror movie could be part of an agenda to justify restrictions on travel and consolidation of housing as part of Agenda 2030. Do they want to keep us poor and dependent so we have no time or energy to organize opposition to their agenda? Who is doing this? Is it a conspiracy of power-hungry sociopaths? Demons? Extra-terrestrials? My ontology is stretching to try to understand such evil.

    https://mitteldorf.substack.com/p/paradoxical-politics-of-climate

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