Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Jun 162026
 


El Greco St. Paul and St. Peter 1595


US and Iran Agree On Peace Roadmap, Israel Rejects All Terms (RT)
Trump Details Iran Deal At G7: No Nukes, Conditional Sanctions Relief (ZH)
Trump Scores Once-Elusive Peace Deal With Iran, Easing Oil Prices (Ben Whedon)
President Trump Attends G7 in France – This One Will Be Ridiculous (CTH)
So, What Do We Know? (Rabobank)
Yes, Trump’s Iran Deal Is So Much Better Than Obama’s (Margolis)
SpaceX Erupts In After Hours Trading, Hits $3 Trillion Market Cap (ZH)
Why Did the Smartest AI in the World Just Go Dark? (Stephen Green)
Anthropic Races To Defuse Trump’s Fable 5 U.S. Export Curbs (ZH)
Monsters Far and Near (James Howard Kunstler)
No Friends for Comey; Judge Rules No Amicus Briefs (Alan Wooten)
Ukrainian Military Hooked on Drugs – Deutsche Welle (RT)
Starmer to Ban Under-16s From 10 Social Media Apps Including X (DS)
Starmer Announces Social Media Control System to Protect “Children” (CTH)
Newspaper Dailies Killing Their Editorial Pages (Tim O’Brien)
You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s Gone: The Tragedy of John Cleese (PJM)

 


 

 


 


“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly rejected the deal terms that pertain to his country’s invasion of Lebanon..”

US and Iran Agree On Peace Roadmap, Israel Rejects All Terms (RT)

The US and Iran said they have agreed on a memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the conflict, which began on February 28 with a joint US-Israeli bombing campaign and prompted Tehran to close the Strait of Hormuz to most shipping. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told US President Donald Trump that Israel does not consider itself bound by the Lebanon-related provisions of the agreement with Iran and will not withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon, according to Ynet. The US-Iran agreement will reportedly be formally signed on Friday in Geneva, Switzerland.


Iran has said the document would focus on ending the war and reopening the strait, while the two sides would have 60 days to negotiate the future of Iran’s nuclear program. Trump wrote on Truth Social that he ordered “the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz” and the end of the US naval blockade of Iranian ports. “Let the oil flow!” he added. Trump later clarified that the waterway, which carries around a quarter of global seaborne oil and LNG shipments, would reopen after the agreement is signed.

The talks were repeatedly stalled and delayed, with both sides accusing each other of making unacceptable demands and citing a lack of trust. Most recently, Iran threatened to suspend the negotiations over Israel’s continuing strikes in Lebanon. In an effort to prevent the talks from collapsing, Trump reportedly demanded that Israel halt the attacks during several heated phone calls with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Here are the latest developments:
• Iran will reportedly reopen the Strait of Hormuz, halt uranium enrichment, and renounce nuclear weapons in exchange for the release of $25 billion in frozen assets, sanctions relief, an end to the US naval blockade, and a $300 billion reconstruction package.
• Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has called for an end to Israeli military actions in Lebanon, saying during separate phone calls with his Turkish, Iraqi, and Egyptian counterparts that all hostilities must cease.
• Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has said the IDF will not withdraw from southern Lebanon despite the reported terms of the agreement, warning that it will respond “with full force” if Iran attacks over its operations against Hezbollah.
• The EU has welcomed the reported deal, with foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas saying it could create “much-needed space.”
• Oil prices fell sharply on the news, with US WTI crude dropping 4.7% to $80.83 a barrel and Brent crude falling around 4% to $83.77, the lowest levels since March 4, shortly after the US-Israeli operation against Iran began.

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Los of people saying this is not a real deal. Guys, this is Trump, who became a billionaire trading in a cutthroat market.

Trump Details Iran Deal At G7: No Nukes, Conditional Sanctions Relief (ZH)

CNBC is reporting that a deal between the US and Iran has been electronically signed by Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. According to an unnamed US official, the US-Iran MOU provides for the ‘immediate’ reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, however – while President Trump said earlier that ships were beginning to move, the US official then said that reopening the strait would ‘take time’ due to mines, and that we can expect an increase in strait traffic over the next 1-2 weeks.


Trump addressed reporters and allies at the G7 summit in France on Monday, just hours after a major interim agreement with Iran that includes a 60-day ceasefire, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and strict limits on Tehran’s nuclear program. Speaking alongside French President Emmanuel Macron, he repeatedly underscored that preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon was the central achievement of the deal. “The main thing is that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. “They fully agreed to that with strong policing powers.”

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2066554436361625702?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2066554436361625702%7Ctwgr%5Ed07c7ee8629e2f04914139007d93a8e708c22577%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Firan-offers-60-day-toll-free-hormuz-transit-100s-ships-await-reopening

He then compared it to the Obama-era JCPOA, calling the earlier agreement “a horrible deal for the United States” that had put Iran on “a road to a nuclear weapon” while sending billions of dollars to Tehran. Trump was also sharply critical of past U.S. cash payments to Iran, describing the $1.7 billion withdrawal from banks plus tens of billions in additional spending as a failed attempt to “bribe them to make a deal that didn’t work.” On the current arrangement, Trump stressed that any sanctions relief would be strictly behavioral and tied to compliance rather than granted simply for signing. He noted improved relations with Iran’s current leadership and reported that the Strait of Hormuz is already partially open, with mines being cleared and commercial shipping set to resume fully by Friday.

Markets reacted immediately, with stocks surging and oil prices posting their biggest drop in some time. Trump also called for an end to fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, saying the long-running conflict “should NOT be tough” to address and that “we have to have a little talk with them.” Less than 24 hours after the Iran developments, he revealed he had already spoken with both President Zelensky and President Putin, describing the conversations as “very good” and expressing optimism that progress could be made to stop the bloodshed in Ukraine, where he noted roughly 25,000 people are dying each month.

Details of the MOU will be released over the next 24-48 hours, though one US official said that the MOU contains ‘possible’ $300 billion in reconstruction funding.

Ghalibaf notably came into public view for the first time in weeks in April to lead the Iranian delegation in talks in Islamabad with US Vice President DJ Vance – marking the highest-level contact between the two foes since before the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Trump
President Trump on Monday claimed on Truth Social that commercial ships loaded with oil are transiting the Strait of Hormuz followinmg an announced deal to end hostilities with Iran. “Ships are starting to move, many loaded up with Oil, out of the Strait of Hormuz,” he wrote. “They are going along the Southern ‘Highway,’ which is totally safe, secure, and pristine. There are other areas of travel, also!!!”

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“The terms of the agreement were unavailable as of Sunday night, but a top Pakistan mediator said both sides have declared the immediate and permanent termination of all military operations.”

Trump Scores Once-Elusive Peace Deal With Iran, Easing Oil Prices (Ben Whedon)

President Donald Trump has unveiled a deal to end 47 years of hostilities with Iran, bringing months of U.S.military operations to an end and opening the Strait of Hormuz in a one-two punch certain to ease oil prices ahead of the midterm elections.”Let the oil flow!” Trump declared Sunday on social media after completing the deal on his 80th birthday and the day the U.S. began its 250th anniversary celebration with an historic UFC Freedom 250 mixed martial arts fight on the White House South Lawn. A signed ceremony was set for Friday in Switzerland.


“The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll-free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines.” Trump said the U.S. Navy would immediately end the blockade of the strait, which it maintained for several weeks in response to Iranian interdiction of oil tankers. Other details about the deal were not available as of Sunday evening including those on a key sticking point – whether Iran will wind down its nuclear enrichment program.

However, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, a top negotiator in the peace negotiations, said the sides have declared an immediate and permanent end to military operations including those in Lebanon. Prior to Sunday, Trump claimed nearly 40 times since the start of the war on Feb. 28 to be close to a deal with Iran or to have reached some measure of consensus with the Iranian government, according to CNN. The war began with joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Speculation abounded throughout the conflict that the Iranian regime might succumb to internal pressure or face an incursion from Kurdish forces, though it appears to have emerged with the core of its government intact.

Trump has said he started the war to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon, after negotiations on that matter failed. Other objectives, he said, were to destroy Iran’s missile capabilities and navy and to ensure the Iranian regime could no longer fund or direct “terrorist armies” outside its borders. Sharif also said Sunday that a signing ceremony would occur on Friday. Pakistan was a critical mediator in negotiating the original ceasefire agreement, which managed to hold despite intermittent bouts of live-fire attacks by nearly every combatant faction. “With the agreement now in place, mediators will facilitate a series of meetings this week,” he also said.

“These pre-implementation discussions will lay the foundation for the technical talks and the official signing ceremony.” The deal and the Friday signing ceremony already represent something of a moved goal post, considering Trump previously stated that the signing ceremony would take place Sunday and insisted upon that timetable until early Sunday afternoon.Plenty of time remains between Friday and the present, however, and if prior alleged deals are any indication, any number of potential developments could upend the agreement. On Sunday alone, Trump fumed over Israel launching strikes on Lebanon in response to an attack by Hezbollah, asserting that the Israeli response jeopardized a peace agreement.

Fighting in Lebanon was a sticking point for the Iranians, who repeatedly insisted that the original ceasefire was meant to include Lebanon. Trump repeatedly pressed Israel to abandon continued conflict in the country against Hezbollah, leading to considerable tensions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. How Israel, considered the United States’ longest and most loyal Middle East ally, will respond to the agreement announced Sunday is also a factor to consider going into Friday. Public opinion has been decidedly opposed to the war throughout the conflict and opinions of Israel have soured dramatically. The disruption to oil sales has also led to higher gas prices, which in turn, contributed to dropping approval numbers for the Trump administration.

But the news of an agreement is likely to soothe markets, especially if maritime commerce fully resumes through the strait, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes. Such a development could conceivably result in falling gas prices and potentially higher approval ratings for the administration. The war will apparently end without a complete, so-called “regime change,” for which war hawks repeatedly advocated. Iranians staged large public demonstrations against the regime weeks before the start of the war that resulted in thousands of reported deaths. However, public opinion still was not in support of the U.S. overthrowing the Iranian government.

At one point, Trump stated that the U.S. had attempted to arm anti-regime dissidents in Iran by supplying them with weapons through Kurdish factions, though he said the Kurdish groups merely kept the weapons for themselves. The long-term implications of the war for the U.S.’s presence in the Middle East remain somewhat unclear. Numerous Gulf State allies expressed frustration with the U.S. during the conflict over its limited ability to supply interceptors for their own defense as the Americans struggled to intercept Iranian strikes on Israel, U.S. bases, and allied nations. Iranian forces, for their part, repeatedly stressed to neighboring nations that aiding U.S. operations against them made those nations valid targets for Iranian counter-operations.

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For Trump, the G7 is like Gulliver among the lilliputters.

President Trump Attends G7 in France – This One Will Be Ridiculous (CTH)

The G7 was originally constructed as an assembly for the U.S, Japan, Canada, Germany, Italy, France and the U.K. However, in the past several years it is abandoned it’s limited economic purpose and agenda and morphed into an assembly of nations far beyond the original intent.


Now we watch the ridiculous assemblies of dozens of nations who come under the guise of the G7 to discuss everything from cow-farting mitigation to the best weapons and techniques to fight the Russians. The economic focus of the G7 is entirely lost. This will never be more evident than the current apex assembly of leaders brought together at the invitation of Emmanuel Macron in France. Watch and you’ll see how geopolitically ridiculous this has become.

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A bankers’ view of war?!

So, What Do We Know? (Rabobank)

A deal is struck and the parties are reportedly set to sign on Friday of this week. Markets are jubilant after an agreement was confirmed by US, Iranian and Pakistani sources, but not without first being threatened by Israeli strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon which prompted a telling-off by Donald Trump on Truth Social where he told everyone “don’t blow it”. Brent crude is down more than 4% this morning to be dealing around $83.72 at time of writing and a rally in bonds late last week has carried over to this morning with Aussie and Kiwi sovereign curves both seeing notable bull steepening.


US equity futures portend the printing of a healthy green candle when markets open later today, but there’s still a lingering sense that we’re not out of the woods yet. Aside from the Israeli strikes on Hezbollah over the weekend, and the lesson of experience that the IRGC doesn’t need much convincing to return to fighting, we learned this morning that despite Donald Trump’s declaration that the strait is now open the strait will actually remain closed until the official signing occurs on Friday – ostensibly to provide time for mine clearing operations. Needless to say, a week is a long time in Middle East geopolitics.

Nevertheless, markets are rallying on the vibe right now but what is actually in the deal will be the critical points – and there is still plenty of fog of war surrounding terms. So, what do we know? Firstly, the agreement is not really a ‘deal’ at all, or even a deal to have a deal, but rather a memorandum of understanding staking out a framework to discuss a deal over the next 60 days.

War is supposed to cease on all fronts – including Lebanon, Hormuz is supposed to open and the US blockade lifted within 30 days in a kind of oil-for-oil exchange that we have flagged here many times. Iranian sources are claiming that Hormuz transits will occur under Iranian auspices, whereas the US side is still saying no tolls. Axios reports comments from US sources that sanctions relief will follow the re-opening of Hormuz, but there seems to be disagreement over the release of frozen funds and Iranian sources are claiming reparations of some form up to $300bn in value would be payable. If true, that really would be the full enchilada of TACOs and would see the US agreeing to a set of terms that had it restart bombing only a few weeks ago.

On the other hand, it could be the case that the terms are actually much more favorable to the US and that the Iranians are simply trying to save face. Crucially, there appear to be no guarantees on the nuclear issues aside from a promise from Iran not to seek a nuclear weapon and to engage in talks over the next 60 days. Given that the nuclear program was the entire casus belli in the first place, we still see plenty of scope for this to all fall in a heap. The US midterm elections are 81 days after the expiry of the 60 day negotiating period. Could we see a few more can-kick extensions over that time? Announcing the conclusion of the deal, Donald Trump posted to Truth Social “Ships of the world, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

Start your engines indeed, because the race is now on to restock the global energy supply chain while we can. So, at the risk of being a party pooper, could this be one of those instances of buy the rumor sell the fact? Perhaps there is no greater bear indicator than the fact that the New York Knicks just won the NBA playoffs. The last time they did that was in *checks notes* 1973, just before the Yom Kippur oil embargoes became the biggest energy shock in history up to that point. The Knicks basically top-ticked the market back then with one of the deepest bear markets of modern history (down more than 40% peak to trough) following their victory.

That brings us to SpaceX, where the largest IPO in history just raised $75 billion at a hefty valuation last week and minted another $2trillion market cap company after the stock rallied almost 20% in its first day of trading. His 42% ownership stake combined with other holdings now makes Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, a financial milestone event that feels a bit like the topping out of the Sears Tower as the world’s tallest building in – ahem – 1973.

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I don’t think Obama ever really protested Iran having nukes. Their delay tactics worked great on him. Plus he sent planes full of cash.

Yes, Trump’s Iran Deal Is So Much Better Than Obama’s (Margolis)

President Donald Trump announced Saturday that the United States has reached a peace deal with Iran, and the contrast with what Barack Obama handed the world in 2015 could not be starker. “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday. “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” The naval blockade on Iranian ports has already lifted. The Strait of Hormuz is open. And for the first time in a long time, there’s an actual framework that puts nuclear weapons permanently off the table. Results are happening. Oil prices have dropped, and the market is up.


The deal, currently structured as a Memorandum of Understanding, extends a ceasefire for 60 days while both sides work toward a comprehensive permanent agreement. A formal signing ceremony is set for June 19 in Switzerland. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi confirmed from Tehran that a halt to military operations, including in Lebanon, took effect Sunday. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also confirmed the agreement, saying it followed “intensive talks.”

Now let’s talk about why this matters, because the media is going to spend the next week trying to muddy the waters. But make no mistake about it: this is clearly a better deal than Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That was the official name of the deal that the left told us was a historic diplomatic achievement. Under that agreement, Iran kept its advanced centrifuges and retained the right to keep enriching uranium.

Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst broke down exactly why that was so dangerous. “During the Obama administration, it allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium,” Yingst explained. The enrichment process takes uranium ore through a series of chemical conversions until it becomes hexafluoride gas, which is then spun in high-speed centrifuges. Do that process enough times and you move from low-enriched uranium to 20%, then 60%, then 90%, which is weapons grade, a process, he explained, could take weeks or even just days.

“And so allowing the Iranians to keep advanced centrifuges and then enrich uranium eventually closer to weapons-grade material, set them on a path toward a weapon, because that is a process that is needed to create a nuclear weapon, even if they weren’t doing it at that moment,” Yingst continued. “This agreement does not allow the Iranians, according to this senior administration official, to keep any of their enriched material.”

The inspection regime under Obama was a joke, too. Under Obama’s nuclear deal, Iran could delay inspections of suspicious undeclared sites for up to 24 days through a multi-step dispute process, giving critics reason to worry that evidence could be concealed before inspectors arrived. That concern was amplified by Iran’s long history of exploiting diplomatic delays while advancing its nuclear program.

Obama’s crappy deal relied on the expectation that Iran would comply in exchange for sanctions relief and other benefits. Trump’s framework assumes Iran will seek opportunities to cheat and ties any rewards to verified compliance. And, of course, there will be consequences for violations. Obviously, the next 60 days will tell us a lot. But right now, the Strait of Hormuz is open, a naval blockade is lifted, and global oil is flowing.

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“.. retail investors have now bought almost as much SPCX over the last two sessions as they bought across the entire US stock market last week.”

SpaceX Erupts In After Hours Trading, Hits $3 Trillion Market Cap (ZH)

Update (9:00pm): just a few minutes after the initial post, the squeeze is accelerating and SPCX hit just shy of $230, or $3 trillion in market cap, surpassing MSFT in value. And what is even crazier, tomorrow SPCX options start trading, which means one good, solid gamma squeeze could send this stock to $400, surpassing NVDA as the world’s biggest company in the process.


Earlier: After a relatively calm first day of trading, the gamma squeeze crew has finally sniffed out that SpaceX’s float makes it a perfect candidate for an OTM-call option driven meltup, and the stock soared ~20% today, adding over $400 billion in market in the regular session. Commenting on the move, Vanda Track earlier noted that SpaceX topped the leaderboard as the most bought stock by retail investors for a second consecutive session, with net buying potentially set to clear $100mn for the second day in a row.

On a net basis, retail investors have now bought almost as much SPCX over the last two sessions as they bought across the entire US stock market last week. In fact, today’s $93.8mn of net buying in SpaceX accounts for roughly 73% of all retail net buying across single stocks so far today.

The one notable development today according to Vanda, is that we’re seeing some appetite return to semiconductor stocks. Names such as MRVL, MU, SNDK and AVGO have all seen some modest buying today amid the rebound. However, retail flows remain selective rather than broad-based, with leveraged bearish ETFs such as SQQQ and SOXS also among today’s most bought securities by retail investors. Vanda’s conclusion is that “the broader message remains unchanged: SpaceX has not sparked a retail buying frenzy across the market. Instead, retail investors continue to direct capital into this one name, while maintaining a relatively cautious stance elsewhere.”

And since momentum elsewhere is fading, retail has decided to double down on the very illiquid SPCX after hours, where its low float has made it a great squeeze candidate by the retail crew, and the stock is now exploding higher, and at last check was trading just over $210, meaning the stock has added $250 billion in market cap after the close – or a total of $650 billion today alone…

… which translates into a market cap of $2.75 trillion or more than Apple’s $2.65 trillion, and just behind MSFT’s $2.97 trillion.

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They’re slowly finding out AI aystems are nigh impossible to keep secret.

Why Did the Smartest AI in the World Just Go Dark? (Stephen Green)

Two of the most powerful large language models in the world just got yanked from service, starting with a national security directive from the United States government during the Friday night news dump. “The U.S. government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees,” Anthropic said in a statement. “The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.” Double emphasis in the original — and, I’d have to add, some claim not all their customers. But stick a pin in that thought for just a moment.


Although the administration failed to give any specific details, Anthropic says it believes the government became aware of a method of “jailbreaking” Fable 5, potentially unleashing the AI from its built-in guardrails against use in developing cyber exploits, deadly chemical synthesis, and other sensitive topics. That’s a big deal. The “Fives” are the latest version of Claude, Anthropic’s enterprise- and government-centric LLM. Fable is the “safe” version available to the public, while you might think of Mythos as the weapons-grade version. Because it is. What separates Fable from Mythos are the guardrails that, as Anthropic put it, are supposed to “greatly reduce the likelihood that Fable is misused for tasks related to cybersecurity (among others).” “

To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws,” the company continued. “Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government.” Since “that perfect jailbreak resistance does not appear to be possible today, Anthropic adopted a defense in depth strategy” by shutting down both “Fives” until further notice. Again, the emphasis is in the original, but let’s come back now to “all their customers.”

Social media is awash in rumors that Fable 5’s underlying code wasn’t just stolen, but it’s out in the wild — successfully uploaded to Pirate’s Bay for anyone to run locally. Provided, of course, they’re in possession of a powerful enough system. While I can slowly run some stripped-down models on the M4 Pro Mac mini right here on my desk, I assure you I couldn’t run Claude. But don’t believe the rumors. Near as I can tell, they’re based on this prank posted to X on Friday.

The attached Community Note reads: “A Pirate Bay search for ‘fable’ returns no relevant results, and further, there is no ‘Other / Models’ category as claimed in the screenshot.”I asked Grok for any other examples, and it came back with this: “Pliny the Liberator extracted and dumped the full ~120k-character system prompt on GitHub shortly after launch. People are using it to emulate Fable-like behavior on Opus 4.8 or other models… but it’s instructions, not the model itself. Useful for prompting, not a full clone.” Good to know.

“The sudden regulatory intervention serves as a stark warning to the enterprise sector: centralized, cloud-based frontier models exist at the absolute mercy of government oversight and vendor compliance,” is how Venture Beat put it, but I’m not entirely sure that’s a bad thing. I don’t doubt that someday, something like Mythos 5 will escape into the wild, potentially setting up a situation like Frank Herbert’s The White Plague. In his 1982 novel, the Dune author postulated what might happen as genetic engineering becomes inexpensive and accessible enough for a deranged individual to create a plague capable of wiping out humanity.

The book’s distraught villain, John Roe O’Neil, nearly succeeds in doing just that. We have extremely powerful tools in LLMs like Fable, and as you know, tools are easy to refashion into weapons.

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Is the US still ahead of China?

Anthropic Races To Defuse Trump’s Fable 5 U.S. Export Curbs (ZH)

Anthropic’s Fable/Mythos 5 ranks number one in the world for model intelligence, widening the US-China gap. The gap may widen further because of “anti-distillation” features, and the models are now under US export control, which has shuttered access to the advanced models.


Late Friday, the US government banned foreign governments, companies, and individuals from using Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after researchers at Amazon demonstrated to the Trump administration that some safeguards on Fable could be circumvented. People familiar with what’s happening inside the Trump administration told The Wall Street Journal that Anthropic sent top officials to the White House and held calls to resolve software vulnerabilities, including the alleged ability to ‘jailbreak’ the model.

Anthropic’s top security staff, including Nicholas Carlini, Logan Graham, and Dave Orr, were sent to Washington on Saturday to speak with senior US officials, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The move by the frontier AI lab aims to resolve vulnerabilities exposed by Amazon researchers. More color from WSJ: “People close to the company and the administration said both parties are interested in resolving the issue and restoring access to the cutting-edge models, but it isn’t clear what a solution would entail. Anthropic technical experts and government security researchers coming together was seen by some administration officials as a key step toward a compromise.”

The weekend discussions continue months of tension between the administration and one of America’s leading AI labs over how new, cutting-edge technologies are used and regulated. The Trump administration has recently taken more steps to control the fast-evolving industry.

A Sunday letter by cybersecurity experts urged the Trump administration to lift the restrictions on the models, warning that such a move could hurt U.S. cyber defenses, create market uncertainty, and weaken America’s AI leadership. However, Jefferies analysts said quite the opposite, noting that “anti-distillation” features and US export control, “which could make it harder for open-source (Chinese) models to catch up.” “US models are improving at a faster pace likely due to compute advantage, but anti- distillation and US export control are new negatives for China AI,” the analysts said.

More from Jefferies: “Open-source models (mostly Chinese) may find it harder to improve given new anti- distillation features and US export control. More importantly, Anthropic introduced anti- distillation features on Fable 5. If Fable 5 detects suspicious distillation activities, it would downgrade the model to Opus 4.8 and notify users. While this seems to be targeting Chinese AI development, we believe this would set back open source progress if all closed-source model developers follow suit.

“Moreover, the US has imposed emergency export control on Fable 5, barring foreigners from using them (including foreign employees of US companies), given loopholes in the cybersecurity safeguards. However, since Anthropic has no tools to limit the use to US nationals only (ie, ID checks?), it has suspended both Fable 5 and Mythos 5 globally until it could come up with a way to enforce that export control.”

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“We used to say that we don’t know what 2050 will look like. Now it’s more like we don’t know what 2030 will look like.” —Jesus Enrique Rosas

Monsters Far and Near (James Howard Kunstler)

You must be thinking that reality is pushing its luck with the president bringing this Iran business — a war, actually, let’s face it — to a favorable conclusion around dinner time Sunday evening (yawn) and then Mr. DJT sliding directly into his seat on the White House lawn to enjoy the special 80th birthday edition of Testosterone Gone Wild, that is, a full card of tattoo-bedizend savages beating the crap out of each other UFC style, like it was a Hooters parking lot on wife-swap night. . . why, it just doesn’t get more surreal than that.


Imagine what Victoria Nuland, Robert Reich, George Stephanopoulis, Elizabeth Warren, and other good folks of that ilk must be thinking. The. . . (Sputter sputter) indelicacy of it all! A freaking peace deal, and now this low-rent spectacle of ultra-violence! Like their whole world had turned out to be the meanest, lowest, most sordid backwater of the Marvel Comics universe where no one has ever heard of chardonney. The ape-men slugging, kicking, gouging, and head-butting each other half to death is one thing. . . but to let the slip the opportunity to continue the Iran War with its downstream emoluments for another nineteen years. . . well, now that is an affront to all that is holy in the sub-basements of Foggy Bottom and the broom closets of Langley.

As you read this on Monday morning the cries for impeachment will be ringing across the District of Columbia like calls to prayer in Mamdani’s Caliphate on the Hudson. Surely, you’ll get more details on the Iran deal as Monday spins out, but the terms look not bad at all for Western Civ in the news media’s early shorthand reports: Teheran pledges no nukes, ever, no how, no way. They will allow their cache of super-enriched uranium to be destroyed. The Strait of Hormuz will reopen promptly, free to international shipping, no tolls, no piratical monkey-business. No more Iran funding terrorist proxy groups. That means you Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and sundry cadres of jihadi maniacs ‘out there’ in the world’s hotspots.

Speaking of which, Mr. Netanyahu felt the president’s wrath earlier on Sunday (once again) when he replied to a Hezbollah rocket salvo out of Lebanon with air strikes. But, hey, everybody knows that Israel always and ever answers every attack against it no matter what, because Never Again. Even Mr. Trump knows that, so the whole flap was a sort of mummery. Obviously, Hezbollah must be anxious to wreck the peace deal, since without Iran’s ongoing largess they will not know where their next meal is coming from, not to mention their next shipment of missiles. If Iran actually complies with the deal, Hezbollah can have no more support. There may soon be no more Hezbollah. (Boo-hoo.)

Which raises the next obvious concern, namely, Iran is not known for keeping its word with The Great Satan (us). There is every reason to believe that the vaunted deal is just another sorry episode of them stringing the USA along, playing us. But Mr. Trump has made it clear he reserves the option to rev up the bombers and “do a number on” the Islamic Republic if they pull a fast one on this.

For its part, Iran is crowing in its own state-controlled press that it has won the war. Iran can say whatever it wants to — world opinion will probably not be fooled — if it makes the people running the joint feel good about themselves losing a war. It’ll be Iran’s actions that matter. There’s a chance, perhaps a low-percentage chance, but a chance nonetheless, that Iran has been persuaded to stop being insane.

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“He is facing two federal counts of threats against the president.”

86 47.

No Friends for Comey; Judge Rules No Amicus Briefs (Alan Wooten)

No friend of the court briefs will be allowed in America’s attempted prosecution against its former FBI Director James Comey in a North Carolina federal courtroom. In the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, Judge Louise Flanagan on Friday gave a one-page order explaining the discretion available to the court and the route she’s chosen. Comey, facing charges tied to his posting of an image of seashells spelling out 86 47 on the Outer Banks, is scheduled for arraignment on Sept. 30 in New Bern and trial Oct. 21. He is facing two federal counts of threats against the president.


“No federal rule of criminal procedure or local criminal rule provides for the filing of amicus briefs before this court,” Flanagan wrote. “It is a matter of this court’s discretion whether to allow. “Defendant and the government are ably represented by competent counsel.” The case is formally known as United States of America v. James Brien Comey Jr. Her order concluded, “Acting within its discretion, the court provides this notice that no amicus brief will be considered. Accordingly, any future motion requesting permission to file summarily will be denied.”

In May 2025, prosecutors say, Comey – a resident of Virginia – posted to social media seashells on the Outer Banks arranged to spell out 86 47 – a commonly interpreted reference for eliminating something (86) and the numerical count (47) of presidents. Comey was FBI director in the administration of former two-term Democratic President Barack Obama, serving from July 29, 2013, to May 9, 2017, when Trump fired him. His Senate confirmation was 93-1.

Comey was infamously investigating Trump ties to the Russian government when he was let go. Comey was deputy attorney general to John Ashcroft during the administration of former two-term Republican President George W. Bush. His career outside of politics includes law professor at Columbia, and time with Lockheed Martin and Bridgewater Associates.

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You betcha. They’re experimenting with new drugs as we speak.

Ukrainian Military Hooked on Drugs – Deutsche Welle (RT)

Drug addiction is emerging as a growing problem among Ukrainian troops as the conflict with Russia enters the fifth year, according to doctors and specialized organizations cited by Deutsche Welle. The report also cites the experience of a former Ukrainian Marine Corps officer who said he became addicted to drugs. Experts reportedly attribute the problem to combat injuries and psychological exhaustion, with many servicemen spending months on the front line without adequate rest or prospects for demobilization.


While narcotics are officially banned in the military, heavy losses, the lack of rotation, and acute manpower shortages forcing wounded troops back to the front before fully recovering are reportedly fueling the problem. According to the report published last week, more than half of Ukrainian soldiers serving on the front line have experience with the use of drugs, alcohol, or a combination of both. “No army in modern history has fought for four years without rotation,” psychotherapist Igor Alferov told Deutsche Welle. He added that when commanders refuse to grant leave, and “there is no one else to do the fighting,” the troops increasingly feel a sense of injustice.

Alferov also cited family problems as a factor, noting that many soldiers have relatives living abroad, causing spouses to drift apart. “She plans to stay in Europe because she sees prospects there for the children, while he remains at war in Ukraine, where every day carries the risk of death,” he said. A former Ukrainian serviceman and patient at a rehabilitation clinic told DW that drug addiction cost him his military career. “I had more than 200 men under my command and took part in a number of successful operations,” he said, adding that his condition deteriorated after being discharged from the hospital and that he eventually “lost control of everything.”

Earlier this year, a local resident rescued from Krasnoarmeysk in the Donetsk People’s Republic, which was liberated by Russian forces in late 2025, told TASS that most Ukrainian troops stationed in the city used drugs delivered by drones in the form of candies wrapped in camouflage packaging. He claimed that intoxicated soldiers often clashed with civilians, with some incidents ending in gunfire. The Guardian reported that many Ukrainian servicemen developed drug addiction, the scale of which is hard to assess due to limited official data, linking it in part to post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety from prolonged combat exposure.

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Social media ban for kids is information control, pure and simple.

Starmer to Ban Under-16s From 10 Social Media Apps Including X (DS)

Sir Keir Starmer is set to announce sweeping reforms tomorrow banning under-16s from 10 major social media platforms, including X, but not the Left-wing platform Bluesky. In addition, he will introduce daily curfews for 16 and 17 year-olds, going further than Australia’s restrictions. The Times has the story: Teenagers will be banned from certain social media platforms and have their daily usage curbed under sweeping reforms to be announced by Sir Keir Starmer on Sunday.


The ban will go further than the one imposed by Australia in December by targeting technology deemed harmful to children, including chatbots and certain features on gaming apps. Under-16s in Australia have been banned from using ten platforms: TikTok, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitch and Kick. It is understood that the UK will follow suit by raising the minimum age on social media to 16, from the average of 13, for the same ten sites. Curfews for older teenagers will be introduced. Daily social media use will be restricted for 16 and 17 year-olds in a move designed to curb unhealthy late-night scrolling habits.

A Government source said: “Keir has been clear we need a game-changer to keep our children — and future generations — safe online.” The reforms, which come two weeks after a public consultation on potential restrictions closed, will stop short of banning the messaging platform WhatsApp and apps considered to have educational value. However, the government will go further than Australia and introduce restrictions on romantic or sexual chatbots after several legal cases involving the AI agents mimicking relationships and encouraging children to take their own lives.

Kanishka Narayan, the online safety minister, has said the government — which will also give 16 and 17 year-olds the right to vote — could block conversations between children and strangers on gaming platforms. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, which was passed in April, gave ministers the ability to introduce measures to restrict harmful features on online services without needing to pass new laws. It is not clear when the ban will come into force or how effectively the government will be able to enforce it.

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Social media ban for kids equals social media control for everyone.

Whatever your age, you have to prove it. How do you show you’re not 12? By proving you’re 48.

“..you now have to prove your age by proving your identity. It is obvious to the non-pretenders that proving your identity is the objective; the ruse to force the mandate is to prove your age.”

Starmer Announces Social Media Control System to Protect “Children” (CTH)

Leftist British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has lost support among the majority of voters within the United Kingdom as evidenced by the shellacking his party took in the recent election. However, as the embattled leader clings to power by telling law enforcement to crackdown on anti-government voices, he extends the control mechanisms under the guise of “protecting children.” If you are a social media user or internet user in the U.K, you now have to prove your age by proving your identity. It is obvious to the non-pretenders that proving your identity is the objective; the ruse to force the mandate is to prove your age. This is the way a grand lie is deployed in order to achieve an objective. ‘All your information are belong to us.’


UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivers a press conference with the announcement from 10 Downing Street. He announces a sweeping ban on social media for children under 16, describing it as a “big step” to protect young people from online harm. Starmer defends the policy as necessary to tackle “addictive algorithms, cyberbullying, and mental health risks.” Britain will follow Australia’s example in raising the minimum age to 16 for sites such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube, and Snapchat.

BIG PICTURE: Australia, New Zealand and Canada all have social media control systems in place. Now, the U.K joins with them. What does Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.K have on common? They are all part of the 5-Eyes intelligence network. This is an IC operation. Don’t lose sight of it. This is a freedom battle against aligned interests that have historically used the intelligence community as their main strategy. From the western globalist perspective, you must always accept their #1 priority is information control. It doesn’t matter what the tool or technique of the day being discussed it, the #1 issue -for them- is to control information.

Look at everything, including and importantly the current AI discussions and debate, through the prism of information control. COVID-19 taught you the lesson. Information control is the objective. Social media restrictions, internet restrictions, the terms ‘mis-dis-mal-information’ etc., the AI race, election systems they can manage, demonetizing or deboosting, CISA, NED, USAID, the payment to “influencers”, media bans, all of it, the sum of every effort, tool and technique is about controlling information.

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“The Dirty Little Secret Behind ..”

“It died because its commitment to wokeness superseded popular attitudes and the business discipline it takes to serve a marketplace.:”

“.. the powers that be at America’s dailies have demonstrated they would rather drive their papers into the ground than betray a core leftist editorial philosophy.”

Newspaper Dailies Killing Their Editorial Pages (Tim O’Brien)

Back in January I chronicled the death of a local newspaper daily, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which at the time was slated to close for good in May. I listed the many reasons for the newspaper’s demise and how it served as a great example of why so many American daily newspapers have expired. The newspaper industry would have you believe that the massive decline in America’s dailies was driven only by changes to news delivery technologies, but it’s much more than that, and yet they are related. Yes, the internet has made the need for an actual paper newspaper unnecessary, but that doesn’t explain why so many of these news organizations continued to decline even as they embraced the internet, social media, podcasting, and so many more on-trend platforms.


My contention in January, as now, is that news consumers get their news from sources they trust. This is common knowledge in the media and communications fields. People pick the source; the source no longer picks them. And we tend to pick sources that agree with our worldview. That’s why you are here on PJ Media, and you’re not right now listening to Barack Obama’s groupies over at Pod Save America. We live in ”media silos” which ensure that no regular listener of Pod Save America ever hears what we’re talking about here, and we never hear what they are saying there, unless of course they say something that ends up going viral on the X platform. More often than not, however, an algorithm looks at what you seem to really like, and it gives you more of that.

In my January eulogy for the Post-Gazette being declared dead by its long-time owner, Block Communications, I wrote: “It died because its commitment to wokeness superseded popular attitudes and the business discipline it takes to serve a marketplace. In short, leadership and staff put their own ideologies first, and they made their product irrelevant to the town they served. And they still have no idea. They openly ridiculed MAGA and the populist movement that put Trump in power in 2016. They did it again in 2020. And they did it again in 2024. Time and again, in big and small ways, they just couldn’t see the formula for success and adapt.”

In the TV world, if Fox News, the major conservative cable news network, is wiping the floor with the lib networks, wouldn’t it make sense to shift a little to the right? The same is true across all media. There is a demand for conservative content. But the powers that be at America’s dailies have demonstrated they would rather drive their papers into the ground than betray a core leftist editorial philosophy. Since January, the Post-Gazette was saved, if that’s what you want to call it. A Baltimore-based nonprofit news outlet called the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism bought the Pittsburgh “daily” at a bargain-basement price.

When making the announcement, Venetoulis pointed to its track record in salvaging local news organizations, and it said it had no plans to cut back on the newspaper’s editorial or distribution schedule. When the purchase was announced, most reports alluded to the likelihood that Venetoulis would be cutting personnel and making other changes. A moral win for the 240-year-old newspaper, but none of this changes the challenges the Post-Gazette faces. People still get their news elsewhere in growing numbers. So, unless Venetoulis makes changes to the product that the marketplace wants, the Post-Gazette will continue to fade in influence.

Speaking of changes, one of the most significant content changes the nonprofit newspaper made was the elimination of its editorial section. In an editorial on May 3, 2026, the newspaper announced it would no longer “support or oppose public policies or candidates for public office.” Hmmm.

Okay, so I get they won’t endorse candidates. Let’s face it, they haven’t had a great track record with endorsements of late (as with almost all other dailies in America), but the obvious reason is this: If a newspaper endorses only Democrats, who lose at the national level a lot, it’s going to lose credibility and alienate the conservatives it needs to attract to its pages. Yet if it endorses a Republican, it will lose newspaper staff, leadership won’t get invited to World Cup watch parties, or may get shunned on Parent-Teacher Night at the private schools where their kids attend. They may even lose their seat on the board of the local opera or symphony.

But why decide not to “support or oppose public policies”? I would think that’s why newspapers exist in the first place. Imagine Ben Franklin’s The Pennsylvania Gazette deciding in the 1770s not to take a position on public policies like the Stamp Act. What good would that have done? Of course, there will be no shortage of opinion in the newspaper. Surely, you’ll find it in the bias that permeates stories presented as “straight news.” You’ll also find actual columns from columnists from time to time, but those will be carefully curated, of course. This will be in keeping with the inherent ideologies at play in the nonprofit management of a legacy newspaper.

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Like so many people who were once liberal and then met woke.

You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s Gone: The Tragedy of John Cleese (PJM)

Over at Instapundit, Ed Driscoll notes a piece by S.D.Wickett, whom I presume to be a British writer. The article is around four years old, but the commentary is still valid. Indeed, the passage of time has moved us closer to the end the author is concerned about. I’d like to draw your attention to an anonymous post on the forum website 4chan, which forms the basis for what I have titled the Tragedy of John Cleese. It goes: “He was a Progressive, Liberal degenerate in 1960s uber-white uber-polite Britain. He could take the p*** out of the people he saw as uptight and repressed while enjoying the clean, safe streets and quiet little hamlets full of those same uptight, repressed, polite-to-a-fault, helpful, white Christian Englishmen.


“The best part was that those same British conservative Anglos were generally pretty humorous about themselves. So, when you made fun of them, they laughed along with you and shook their heads saying ‘Ha! You know, Margie, he’s got a point!’ It was heaven on earth for him, to be a popular counter-culture icon loved by conservatives and liberals alike for being hilarious, but also enjoy the benefits of a strong, stable and homogeneous culture. I’ve been a Python fan for a long time. But even back in the ’70s when they first burst onto the scene, I noticed they almost invariably targeted traditional conservatives — or at least members of the cultural majority. The one exception I can think of appears in the 1979 film, The Life of Brian:

That’s about as prophetic as the Pythons in general, and Cleese in particular, ever got. Since then, that small crack of light has widened, and thereby revealed to the remaining Pythons a lot they’d not faced before. Wickett continues: Now, he’s an old man, staring at a desolate wasteland where in London, Britons are now in the minority. Everyone is suspicious, the hamlets and villages are economic dead-zones. Every week, there’s a new group you’re not allowed to make fun of, no one has a sense of humour anymore. Little girls are being sold as sex slaves, women are harassed in the street and the men are suspicious and surly over their lowered living standards. The sinking realization that the world he made fun of, but loved more than anything, is gone forever and will never come back.


The horrifying conclusion that his own counter-cultural irreverence may have helped to kill it. So, he impotently gripes on Twitter and wonders where the laughter went, when did the jokes stop? Where are those wonderful, repressed and uptight conservatives So now, apparently, Cleese is making a documentary titled Cancel Me on the cancel culture phenomenon that my PJ Media colleagues and I have written about often enough. One really must wonder if he can see signs, however dimly, suggesting he himself has long been part of the problem. Wickett seems to wonder about that as well: “I want to bring the various reasonings right out in the open so that people can be clearer in their minds what they agree with, what they don’t agree with, and what they still can’t make their mind up about.”

He mentions political correctness as if it were new. Something that emerged out of a campus vacuum in the mid 2010s. Yet, its true origin is something far closer to home. John Cleese cut his teeth in the 1960s. As I’ve previously stated, it was a time of revolution, a springboard into hyper-modernity, hyper-liberalism. It was the death of the suit, the family, the stigmatic removal of undesirable and unbecoming behaviour. The normalisation of sex, drugs, and psychedelia. A time of free expression without limits, restraints, or shame. Hedonism without consequences. Pregnant? Just have an abortion. Bored at a party? Here, take this. ‘Only God can judge me, except he doesn’t exist.’

The last fifty years of evidence have finally handed us the bill, and it’s steeper than anyone, including Cleese, wanted to admit back when the dreaming was seen as being without cost. I’ve long maintained that Britain is the canary in this particular coal mine, and that we colonials are only a few stumbles behind them.

Buried inside the 1960s counterculture was the cheerful slogan “God is dead” — lifted, naturally, from Nietzsche’s Parable of the Madman, by people who couldn’t be bothered to read past the bumper-sticker version. Had they done so, they’d have found a warning, not a guide. Nietzsche wasn’t celebrating the death of God; he was outright terrified of it. His point? Without a moral and cultural framework, the foundation under everything crumbles. The social left grabbed that warning, mistook it for a manifesto, and promptly set about proving him correct, both in terms of the Judeo-Christian ethic and the culture that sprang from it.

The cultural rot and the cancel culture springing from it that has Cleese wringing his hands today is exactly what Nietzsche was describing. Shakespeare’s Miranda squealed with delight at her brave new world, blissfully ignorant of what lurked beneath the surface. Cleese and his fellow progressive cheerleaders spent decades doing the same, pompoms and all. Now they stand slack-jawed while Huxley’s ghost is joined by Rush Limbaugh and other cultural conservatives in saying, “See? I told you so.”

Turns out the architects of that brave new world built precisely what we were warned they would. Cleese is getting a masterclass in a very specific flavor of irony: you never know what you treasure until the revolution you spent your career championing shows up to confiscate and burn it. Or as another leftist icon, Joni Mitchel so famously put it, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?” Cleese has a history with the left in the UK, the Labour Party, the Social Democrats, and the Liberal Democrats, but he has changed in recent years. Just this last February, he joined the Restore Britain party, which the Brit pass has laughably tagged as a “far right group.”

The really sad part? He will likely be called out by the far left for finally noting these things and for being open-minded enough to recognize the damage done by the positions he once championed. Did he cause all of this? Of course not. (No single raindrop, however fat and self-important, floods a valley alone). However, he makes a perfect starting point for diagnosing what led us to this pass. Will he ever own his role in it? Please. Red pills don’t get easier to choke down when you get older — they get harder. So, John Cleese, I’ll borrow from Bruce Willis here: “Welcome to the party, Pal.”

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Jun 152026
 


Robert Campin A man 1435


Trump Announces Peace Deal with Iran Is Complete (Margolis)
Trump: Hormuz To Reopen Friday After Signing Of “Great Peace Deal” (ZH)
Iran Reveals Draft Of Trump-Touted MoU To Be Signed Sunday (ZH)
Scott Jennings Hammers CNN Panel Over Elon Musk Trillionaire Status (Amy Curtis)
Bakari Sellers Calls Elon Musk a White Supremacist (Margolis)
Elon Musk and the Politics of Envy (Tim O’Brien)
Carney: “Middle Powers” Can Collectively Counterbalance U.S. Global Power (CTH)
Pompeo Unmasked (CTH)
Buttigieg Joins the Calls to Take Over the Supreme Court (Turley)
‘Birth Tourism’ Networks Around the World Exploiting the U.S. (Salgado)
Puffy Putin Peril: The West’s Latest Attempt To Scare Itself (Amar)
Thinking for Oneself: Schopenhauer on Reflection vs. Regurgitation (Eskeldson)

 


 

https://twitter.com/BarronTNews_/status/2065789421379572045?s=20 https://twitter.com/Real_RobN/status/2065854007722311794?s=20 https://twitter.com/FarmGirlCarrie/status/2065912335248826563?s=20

 


 


What a way to spend your 80th birthday! He did it! Hats off. So many people wanted him to fail even if it was against their own interests, just to spite him.

Trump Announces Peace Deal with Iran Is Complete (Margolis)

On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that a peace deal with Iran had been finalized, immediately lifting the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports and reopening the Strait of Hormuz to global shipping. The region that has defined American foreign policy anxiety for decades just changed dramatically — and it happened on Trump’s watch. “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, offering “congratulations to all!” He followed that up by authorizing what he called the “toll-free opening of the Strait of Hormuz” alongside the simultaneous removal of the naval blockade. Then, in classic Trump fashion, he added, “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”


Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif confirmed the deal in a statement of his own. He announced that “the Peace Deal between the United States of America and Islamic Republic of Iran has been REACHED” after what he described as “intensive talks.” He continued, “We would like to thank the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran for their commitment to finding a diplomatic solution to the conflict. We would also like to extend our sincere appreciation to our brothers in this mediation effort, the great leadership of State of Qatar, for their support in reaching this agreement. I would also especially thank the visionary leadership of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Republic of Türkiye for their immense contributions in this regard.”

A formal signing ceremony is scheduled for June 19 in Switzerland, with mediators facilitating preliminary technical meetings this week to lay the groundwork.Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi confirmed the deal from Tehran’s side, saying an immediate and permanent halt to war and military operations — including in Lebanon — would begin Sunday. He also made clear that Iran would respond if the other side violates its commitments and that the next phase of negotiations hinges on Iranian assets being unfrozen. Make no mistake about it, Tehran is going to test the limits of this thing. That’s what Iran does. But the framework is there, and the verification mechanisms matter.

Vice President JD Vance laid out the significance on Sunday on Fox News. “Three things that I think are important for the American people just to appreciate about what this deal does for all of us as Americans,” Vance said. “Number one, this is the immediate opening of the Straits of Hormuz and, of course, the lifting of the naval blockade that we’ve had on Iran along with it. The number two thing that it means is that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, and not just pursue a nuclear weapon, but procure or try to buy a nuclear weapon as well that’s built into this agreement.”

The third element, Vance explained, depends on Iranian compliance. Still, the upside is enormous. “If the Iranians comply with this deal, it is going to fundamentally transform the Middle East for the next 50 years,” he said. “It’s going to end the war. It’s going to make the Middle East more investable. It’s going to mean a lot of prosperity, lower energy prices for the American people. This region of the world has been a basket case for my entire life and longer than that.”

Obviously, there’s still work ahead. And there’s reason to be skeptical of Iran because this is a regime with a long history of buying time while running out the clock. But, we aren’t sending them plane-loads of cash in the dark of night, or giving them a path to nuclear weapons, as Barack Obama did. And that’s the key here. Trump built in verification. Vance was explicit that the benefits flow only if Iran delivers. The approach is trust nothing, verify everything, and tie every concession to compliance. That’s exactly the kind of deal the Obama-era Iran agreement was never structured to be.

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“Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, also confirmed: “that the Peace Deal between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran has been REACHED.”

Trump: Hormuz To Reopen Friday After Signing Of “Great Peace Deal” (ZH)

“This Great Deal will bring Peace and Security to the whole Region. Many presidents have tried to make Peace with Iran, and all have failed before me. The Leaders of the Region have, for the first time, found a President who can help them achieve real Peace. With the opening of the Strait upon the signing of the Deal on Friday, for purposes of mine removal, oil will flow on both ends again for the Region, and the World!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.


The timing of the peace deal is critical. The world was approaching a dangerous energy cliff, with strategic petroleum reserves being quickly drained to offset lost Gulf production and stabilize physical markets. Still, even with a deal in place, energy flows through the strategic maritime chokepoint will not normalize overnight. It will likely take several months, if not quarters, to clear the backlog, restore shipping confidence, de-risk insurance markets, and bring regional production and export flows back to pre-crisis levels. As for damaged energy assets such as those in Qatar, it’ll take years to get production back to pre-war levels.

Deal Confirmed By Trump, Pakistan PM, Just Ahead Of NY Futures Opening. Just 30 minutes before futures open in New York, President Trump announced on Truth Social that a “Deal” with Iran is now complete. “Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll-free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” Trump said.

Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, also confirmed: “that the Peace Deal between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran has been REACHED.”

Sharif said, “The official signing ceremony will be on Friday, 19 June in Switzerland.”

Israeli journalist and Iran affairs correspondent/analyst for Israel’s Channel 14 reports that hardliners in Iran, including IRGC forces, will not derail the peace deal.

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From the lead-up to the accord.

Iran Reveals Draft Of Trump-Touted MoU To Be Signed Sunday (ZH)

Bloomberg and Reuters are reporting Sunday some fresh details on Iran’s version of what the MoU to be signed – which President Trump says will happen today (albeit remotely) will inlcude. “A draft of the US-Iran memorandum of understanding included diluting highly enriched uranium within Iran and the release of $25b of Iran’s frozen assets, Reuters reports citing a senior Iran official it didn’t identify,” writes Bloomberg in the latest. This includes:


• Final deal to be discussed in the 60 days following agreement by the two sides
• Also includes Iran immediately reopening Hormuz Strait to all commercial vessels and US lifting its naval blockade
• Tehran in draft agrees that will neither produce nor acquire nuclear weapons
• To maintain the nuclear status quo until final deal is reached, including by not enriching uranium and not expanding nuclear facilities

One potential major complication to the two sides actually signing is what’s happening in the Beirut suburbs, which the Israeli Air Force has just struck for the first time in about a week:

Provocative Israeli military actions previously effectively torpedoed prior Washington-Tehran attempts to get back to the negotiating table. Will the same hold-up happen again? Pro-Israel supporters and lobbyists in the US have been raging against what they see as a ‘failure’ of a deal, and ‘capitulation’ to Iran on kicking the can on the nuclear issue… not least among them is on display in the following:

The usual caveats which proved all prior ‘deal imminent’ headlines to be premature and wishful thinking still apply. Some latest from Iranian state media according to Al Jazeera: “Iran’s Fars news agency, citing a source close to the negotiating team, is reporting that Iranian officials were discussing the ceasefire points with the Qatari mediators in Tehran. The report added that the deal is yet to be finalised and “no agreement will definitely be signed at the time Trump announced”. The comments were made to the agency prior to Israel’s deadly attacks on Lebanon’s southern suburbs today.

Sunday Iran Deal (or rather: MoU Remote Signing) Expected Sunday, per Trump. President Trump said Saturday that an interim U.S.-Iran deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and wind down the four-month conflict could be signed as soon as Sunday. However, Tehran has pushed back on that timeline, signaling that no final decision has been made while Iranian officials continue to review the terms of a potential memorandum of understanding. “The Deal is scheduled to get signed tomorrow, and immediately after it is signed, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN TO ALL,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Saturday, while claiming that Iran “no longer wants a Nuclear weapon.”

The president continued, “At the appropriate time, when all is calm, we will go in and get the Nuclear Dust, buried deep under the powerful sunken granite mountains, thanks to our beautiful B-2 Bombers and their brilliant pilots, and downblend and destroy it, whether in Iran, or the United States.” Pakistan and Qatar are mediating, with technical talks expected to follow any signing and last up to 60 days. The MOU is structured as a step-by-step framework, meaning the Hormuz maritime chokepoint will reopen first, followed by economic rewards for Iran as conditions are met.

Pakistan, which has served as one of the mediators, is preparing to sign the peace deal electronically, followed by technical-level talks next week, according to Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. He said those talks would last two months and focus on Iran’s nuclear program. Meanwhile, the Iranian media outlet Fars News Agency reported earlier that Iran has not made a final call on a potential MOU with the U.S. Iranian authorities are still reviewing the political, legal, and technical details, with no final decision announced as of Sunday morning.

The urgency behind securing an MOU to reopen the Hormuz chokepoint is clear: the world is drifting dangerously close toward an energy cliff. Strategic petroleum reserves are being drawn down rapidly around the world to offset the loss of Gulf production, while China’s weakening fuel demand is helping to offset some of the broader supply shock. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi made clear Friday that Iran understands that terms related to its nuclear program will be finalized within 60 days of the initial agreement being signed. So in essence, this means Iran could get its wish of pushing nuclear negotiations back, only after the hot conflict has clearly ended. Iran has long sought to separate the issues of a final end to the war from consideration of its nuclear program.

Energy markets priced in de-escalation last week, with Brent crude futures sliding as much as 5.1% Friday and European gas dropped as much as 8.4% after Trump canceled planned new strikes on Iran. IG’s weekend markets are pricing in a 50 bps decline in Brent crude when futures open on Sunday evening. But throughput traffic through the Hormuz chokepoint remains far below pre-war levels, and a vessel was struck off Oman on Saturday. Normalization could take weeks, if not many months. Bloomberg noted, “Roughly 140 ships passed through the narrow chokepoint each day before the conflict erupted.”

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“If Elon Musk had never gotten involved in politics, and never supported Trump, he’d be getting ticker tape parades right now for building this amazing company and sending rockets into space..”

Scott Jennings Hammers CNN Panel Over Elon Musk Trillionaire Status (Amy Curtis)

While Leftists melt down over Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire, they’ve demonstrated that they don’t understand how value works, or stocks, or how the economy works. Scott Jennings pointed out a very obvious truth: if Elon Musk were a Leftist, this wouldn’t be an issue.



“Are you saying because Elon Musk exists and is a wild success that that is somehow to the detriment of all the people you’re mentioning?” Jennings asked. “Elon is creating an environment where entrepreneurship, where success, where building is celebrated.” Then came the truth bomb. “The only reason anybody’s mad about this, let’s just be honest, is because he supported Donald Trump for President,” Jennings said.

“If Elon Musk had never gotten involved in politics, and never supported Trump, he’d be getting ticker tape parades right now for building this amazing company and sending rockets into space. It’s all political, and the people who should love Elon Musk hate him for that reason.” “But do you agree that one person should have control of American policy?” asked Gina Hinojosa. “That’s what money does.”

“It’s all about access to the United States,” she continued, “It’s not just about Donald Trump. There are races all across the country where he has access on policy.” “Call me when you’re made about Soros,” Jennings said.Do people with money have more influence in politics? Does CNN have a chyron for this? That’s how it’s always been. If money influenced policy, we’d have President Ross Perot. Hillary Clinton raised $770 million in 2016 and Kamala Harris raised $1.6 billion for her campaign.

Clean vehicles, clean energy sources, space exploration, and Internet access via Starlink. Those are just some of his achievements and contributions. Bingo. If he funded Leftist causes and politicians, this wouldn’t be an issue.

It doesn’t matter what the narrative is today, as long as the Democrats can scream and whine about the “oligarchy” and against Donald Trump, Republicans, and anyone who isn’t their political ally.

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Sure.

Bakari Sellers Calls Elon Musk a White Supremacist (Margolis)

A CNN panel meant to discuss extraordinary wealth lurched far off the rails Friday night when one commentator went into full-on slander mode on Elon Musk, who became the world’s first trillionaire this week. He’s been getting attacked from the left for his success because that’s what the left does. Well, that and fantasize about spending other people’s money, which is exactly what CNN contributor Cari Champion started with. “If you spent a million dollars every single day, it would take you more than 2700 years to spend a trillion dollars,” Champion said.


“What you could effectively do with a trillion dollars is get rid of global poverty. You could end world hunger, you could cure major diseases like malaria, and you could completely transition the global energy sector to renewables. The fact that he has this type of money only tells me that his power will be more prevalent and that I could not — I cannot guarantee someone like this man would use his power for good.” Then Bakari Sellers took things further. After blaming Elon Musk’s influence for USAID cuts that he claimed killed thousands of women and children, Sellers leveled a charge that sent the panel into a frenzy: “Elon Musk is a white supremacist who believes in things like the —”

Criminal defense attorney Arthur Aidala jumped in. “Oh, boy,” Aidala said. “I wasn’t even finished a sentence,” Sellers shot back. Scott Jennings had a warning ready for Sellers. “You may need a lawyer when this is over,” he quipped. Sellers pressed on. Musk “believes in things like the Great Replacement Theory,” he said. But Aidala pushed back hard. “Considering we have about 12 defamation cases in my office right now,” he said, “before you start throwing things around like someone’s a white supremacist — I would win that case.”

He’s right. Democrats and the media often label mainstream conservative arguments about immigration and electoral incentives as “great replacement theory” and imply racism, but it’s not like Democrats haven’t made the very argument that, because of declining birth rates, the United States needed immigration to sustain population growth and the workforce. “We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a good future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in 2022. But I digress.

In fact, Jennings cut through the whole exercise with a few pointed questions. “I’ve been listening to liberals count and spend Elon’s money for him,” Jennings said. “This envy, jealousy, hatred of success. Why is it immoral? Why is it wrong for somebody in our system — our capitalist system, in the greatest nation on earth, to go out and build a company — build companies, build technologies, go into space, aim to go put a colony on Mars, give internet to half the world. All the things he’s doing. Why is any of this wrong or bad? Why would we want to discourage entrepreneurship? Why would we want to discourage anybody building anything? That is the nature of it.”

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“Since the signs were pre-printed and funded by the usual funders of anything good for America …”

Elon Musk and the Politics of Envy (Tim O’Brien)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know by now that with SpaceX’s Initial Public Offering (IPO), Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire. The implications of this for all of us and our grandchildren are many and far-reaching. Of course, the left has found a way to narrow it all down to one simple idea: “His money is our money, or it should be.” That’s not the way they say it. What leftists actually are saying is he doesn’t pay enough in taxes. Why? For the sole reason that he’s rich. If you’re a leftist, rich people are never paying “their fair share.”


This is the politics of envy, and if you study the vast majority of leftist messaging at any time on any topic, envy is a critical component. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if the Democrats, and the left at large, decided to quit being jealous of the right, the left would die as a movement in less than 24 hours. Envy is the lifeblood of leftist politics, and Musk is merely their latest, biggest, and most convenient target. But it’s worth being reminded that to the left, you are no different than Elon Musk. Let me explain. The left is miserable when you’re happy. It feels entitled to be the only source of your happiness, but it has no desire to make you happy. Rather, it simply wants to control how happy it will allow you to be.

You saw this during the COVD-19 pandemic when the left rationed aspects of your previous life to you in small portions. The desire to control you in this way came from a fear that you might find a way to be happy in spite of conditions, in this case a pandemic. The thoroughness with which arbitrary measures were taken to deny you the simplest of pleasures was rooted in envy. Around the same time and in the same environment, Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the whole entitlement movement accused you, if you were white, of having “white privilege” and and said that you don’t deserve to be happy. Instead, you should feel guilty because some on the left are unhappy.

The “white privilege” guilt trip was not only one of the purest forms of the politics of envy, but it worked to get leftist and otherwise weak white people to voluntarily surrender their happiness. At some point, almost all leftist politics comes back to envy. And so, when Musk took SpaceX public and the company’s value skyrocketed (sorry, I couldn’t help myself), the left fell back on its most core strategy – the politics of envy. Leftist billionaires and their pawns were well prepared to opportunistically try to capitalize on Musk’s good fortune with protest signs, messaging, and rent-a-mobs ready to go.

A union representing leftist college professors showed up alongside all the other envious union members, paid protestors, and disgruntled leftists, complete with their pre-printed signs. They were there to air their grievance that someone was having a good day and just might be happy. Their signs alone showed an extremely high level of financial illiteracy and ignorance regarding just about everything related to the SpaceX IPO. They read: “Billionaires are a scam”; “Elon is stealing your pension”; “Overthrow the oligarchs”; “This billionaire is stealing from you”; “Elon is stealing your 401K”; and, of course, “Stop Elon. No Trillionaires.”

Since the signs were pre-printed and funded by the usual funders of anything good for America, we can only assume that the evil strategists on the left conceived of these messages because they knew the phrases would appeal to their illiterate base. First off, how could Elon making money from willing investors represent him stealing your pension? There is no relationship at all, and there can’t be. The money Musk and everyone else made from the IPO came from the market, not from unwilling American citizens or taxpayers. It came from institutional investors through mutual and index funds, universities, large pension funds, and millions of willing individual investors. People invested because they hoped to make profits at some later point. The protestors either don’t understand that, or they pretend not to.

Another sign that actually sidesteps all rational thought is the one that says Elon is stealing your 401(k). The truth is, the SpaceX IPO very likely already helped your 401(k), and if it didn’t, it soon will. Many, if not most of the big mutual funds are riding on the fortunes of a handful of companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, maybe Tesla, and Alphabet. SpaceX just joined the club. That means if you have a 401(k), it’s in your best interest to want SpaceX to do well. That can only grow your retirement savings. And then there’s that argument the left makes when it has no argument: “Stop Elon. No Trillionaires.” Why? I mean, really, why? What’s the point? If someone else becomes rich and it has no effect on you, why should you even care? I mean, other than pure jealousy.

That post from Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) is rich, literally. She’s playing upon jealousy and envy to encourage more taxation, but only of the rich, so we’re told (for now). They play this “lower effective tax rate” game to try to pretend Elon doesn’t pay a ton of taxes, which he does. Also, like the financially illiterate protestors in New York, Jacobs is drawing no distinction between income, which is taxed, and assets like stock, which only convert into taxable money if you sell shares. What makes Jacobs’ post curious is that she is one of the richest people in Congress. She’s got an estimated net worth of $76 million, and she didn’t earn any of it. She was born into it.

If ever there is such a thing as privilege, she’s got it. Her father is billionaire Irwin Jacobs, who founded semiconductor company Qualcomm. So, when she demonizes Elon for being a billionaire, or now a trillionaire, she’s pretty much demonizing her own daddy, and she’s not doing herself any favors. She just wants you to think she’s one of the good kind of millionaires. What’s obvious is she wants you to feel like a “have not,” and she wants you to hate Elon simply because he’s a “have.” Something Jacobs did not do and would not do is acknowledge all those who have immediately benefited from the SpaceX IPO. A lot of leftists are making money here. The University of North Carolina, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Virginia bought in early and have huge stakes in the company.

According to Fortune, “In total, more than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees are expected to become millionaires in the IPO.” My colleague, David Manney, reported on how some of Musk’s loyal employees at different levels of the company will be rewarded. SpaceX counts 22,000 employees at the moment, and all of them pay taxes. The average salary of SpaceX employees is $155,000-$176,000, according to the company. All of these people pay local, state and federal taxes. Many, if not most, pay property taxes. Those who just made millions each on the IPO will ultimately pay a collective billions more in federal taxes. That means more money headed into the local, state, and federal piggy banks.

Over time, millions of individual investors will make profits on their SpaceX stock at some point, and they will pay taxes on the profit. The point is, the government will see its share of cash from the IPO, and it didn’t have to do a thing except sit back and wait for the profits to roll in. Yet, Democrats like Jacobs and the rest of the left somehow want you to feel like only Musk is the beneficiary of the IPO. That’s not stopping the left from engaging in envy porn. Check out this post from millionaire Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), decrying the rich as she rides in the back of her limo. Or this common refrain that attempts to blame Musk for people putting themselves on government entitlement programs that you, the taxpayer, pay for anyway.

In other words, people getting free stuff are big mad that Musk is winning. Since he’s making more money, naturally, they want more free stuff…just because. That poster blamed Musk for just about every economic challenge anyone in America could face, but one thing he posted that deserves to be addressed is this notion that Musk is getting federal handouts to make his money at SpaceX. As though he’s running a non-profit that doesn’t reward the federal government. His rockets are the delivery system for satellites that protect our national security, among many other things. Oh, and remember the time NASA couldn’t rescue those astronauts, so Musk had to bail out the government?.

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I feel like I’m in the Shire (but of anti-heroes).

The Little People flock together

“Carney Affirms that “Middle Powers” with Same Ideological Construct Can Collectively Counterbalance U.S. Global Power..”

Carney: “Middle Powers” Can Collectively Counterbalance U.S. Global Power (CTH)

Making his ninth trip to Europe since become prime minister 15 months ago, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney once again outlined his governing model to combat a U.S. administration that he claims has fractured the globalist norms. During his press conference with Micheal Martin, Ireland’s taoiseach (Prime Minister), Carney once again built upon the idea of “middle powers” uniting together in common ideology against U.S. dominance until such a time as the U.S. government can once again return to a leftist ideology.


The specific objectives become clear about halfway through the presser today as Carney notes the importance of grouping nations together who agree on climate change, energy controls and the green agenda. Canada’s alignment with Europe is seemingly centered on the net-zero carbon model. This perspective makes sense from Carney as it is the same priority he’s carried since his time as governor for the Bank of England. WATCH:

As the former Governor of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada, Carney used his platform to position climate change as a systemic financial risk. He then championed the view that private capital must be the primary tool to force an economic energy transition. [Post-COVID this was known as “Build Back Better.“] President Trump’s perspective and the majority American view on climate change and energy development is against the core professional effort of Carney and the banking interests he has always represented. This becomes very important to understand as the U.S-Canada conflict is about to hit an inflection point.

HISTORY: Through the “Net Zero” Banking Alliance (NZBA) Mark Carney pushed banks to agree with policies and protocols that forced them to set lower lending targets to high-carbon industries and clients. The goal was to force companies to ‘decarbonize’ or find themselves starved of capital. While working at the Bank of England and Canada Carney famously warned multinational interests and insurance companies, most of which were centered in London, that fossil fuel assets that did not fit the net-zero industrial model would become “stranded assets” worth nothing because they could not be capitalized or insured. This threat signaled to multinationals that any investment in a project that was against the “Paris Climate Treaty” was a bad financial risk.

This approach endeared Mark Carney to King Charles III, who is himself a major climate alarmist. Unfortunately, U.S. politicians -particularly during the Trump first term- accused the Carney banking/finance and insurance alliance of operating an illegal banking cartel to choke the larger American energy sector. Facing legal threats over antitrust violations, in combination with obvious violations of fiduciary duty, NZBA has to strip out its strict, mandatory lending restrictions. Slowly banks began retreating from the net-zero alliance.

Regional and national banks began citing the economic necessity of supporting traditional energy companies, and energy security became more important than adherence to voluntary restrictions on carbon emissions. This angered Carney as his life construct was under pressure. Carney then entered Canadian federal politics and sought to downplay his ideological climate agenda. However, all of his energy policies essentially come from the same mindset of opposition to fossil fuels.

The disparity in energy production is the core issue inside the details of the USMCA. The United States and Mexico are both aligned with low-cost fossil fuel use, which is particularly important for large scale industrial manufacturing (steel etc.). Whereas Canada doesn’t want the dirty jobs and wants only to focus on electricity production.

You can make electricity from windmills, solar farms and nuclear power. However, you cannot make iron, steel or aluminum without fossil fuels. In scientific fact, part of the largest global irony is because it’s impossible to make windmill components, solar panels or nuclear power equipment without using fossil fuels.

In the video below, while he was a banker you can see Mark Carney admitting on tape: When voters blocked his ESG plans, “We” (Central Bankers) shifted into the position of “Regulators” to work around the voters through the back door of finance and insurance. They manipulated fossil fuel production and prices by withholding lending and insurance.

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“One month later we were in beginning of SARS-CoV-2, which we now accept in hindsight was a U.S. military and intelligence operation..”

Pompeo Unmasked (CTH)

Many of you will likely remember December 29, 2019, when Secretary Pompeo, Joint Chief’s Mark Milley and Secretary Mark Esper flew to Mar-a-Lago to inform President Trump about military strikes they had just conducted in Northern Syria and Iraq. At the time of the strike, President Trump was negotiating the exit of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and even having direct talks with the Taliban which was proclaimed as controversial by the traditional war machine elements in DC. The action by Pompeo, Milley and Esper did not align with the moment based on Trump’s ongoing effort.


President Trump made no comments about the strike they carried out, nor did President Trump post anything about the events. In fact, President Trump made Pompeo, Milley and Esper stand at the podium and inform the media and public. CTH said at the time nothing about this made sense. Our suspicion was that Pompeo, Milley and Esper had acted unilaterally without approval. Events later on indicated our suspicion was accurate. One month later we were in beginning of SARS-CoV-2, which we now accept in hindsight was a U.S. military and intelligence operation utilizing a virus created in a Wuhan, China biological lab. The global response to the virus was a combined military and intelligence operation.

The most excessive ‘western’ reactions to the virus were carried out by New Zealand, Australia, the U.K and Canada, all five-eyes countries. The November 2020 election result was specifically an outcome of the virus and fraudulent mail-in ballots. It’s also worth remembering that in 2016 the Trump-Russia collusion material originated from the U.K via former intelligence operative Christopher Steele and the Fusion GPS network in the U.S. That’s the context for last week Mike Pompeo paying tribute to his old friend in British intelligence who worked with him as CIA Director following the 2016 election of President Trump.

Mike Pompeo – Within hours of being announced as the nominee to be the U.S. Director of the CIA, I received a hand-delivered message on MI6 stationery congratulating me on my nomination. It was signed simply “C” in green ink. Legendary. I shared it with my son and even he thought I was now cool! More than that, this note, from Sir Alex Younger, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service of the United Kingdom, confirmed what I already believed: the work that the CIA and MI6 did together mattered, that the partnership was critical, and that two leaders focused on the mission could save lives and provide tools for our nations to deter our adversaries.

Alex’s passing this week brought back so many memories of our time in service together. He flew to Langley to see me the day I was confirmed. We brought our two senior teams together in the UK to plan and coordinate and build in the first several weeks of my time on duty: making clear to them all that this relationship was more than special – it was critical for the security of our two countries.”

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“Drinking the Court-Packing Kool-Aid..”

“This Nike School of Constitutional Law is catching on with a wide array of pundits and professors. Just do it.”

Buttigieg Joins the Calls to Take Over the Supreme Court (Turley)

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg apparently got the message this week that he cannot hope to win the Democratic nomination without promising radical measures, including the packing of the Supreme Court. After denouncing the current Court as “rogue” for not ruling as the left has demanded, Buttigieg endorsed the plan of Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren to pack the Court to reverse adverse constitutional interpretations.


For years, the Supreme Court had a liberal majority that overturned dozens of long-standing cases. That was not viewed as the work of a rogue court. Yet, even as President Donald Trump attacks this Court for ruling repeatedly against him, liberals are now demanding court packing. As the party becomes more radicalized, any candidate expressing doubts over radical demands like court packing is unlikely to make it out of the primaries. Accordingly, “Mayor Pete” is reaching for Court-Packing Kool-Aid. In making his pitch to the Rainbow PUSH Coalition convention, Buttigieg knew that he had to offer some radical bona fides. He decided to offer up the Supreme Court:

“We have to do [something] with the Supreme Court, that is now a rogue Supreme Court. To see them eviscerate the Voting Rights Act is to see them reverse some of the most important progress this country ever made, wiping out Black political representation, but also wiping out part of what actually is great within the complex American story.” That description is part of a campaign of disinformation about the Court’s recent decision to end racial gerrymandering. The Court reaffirmed that the Voting Rights Act would be used to prevent any intentional racial discrimination. It banned states (almost entirely Democratic states) from engaging in racial discrimination to guarantee election results based on the race of the candidates.

He then thrilled the crowd by promising to pack the Court to guarantee the results that he and they are demanding. Declaring that it is “time to think big,” Buttigieg explained: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that there have to be nine Supreme Court justices. That one doesn’t even take a constitutional amendment. It just takes a readiness to set up a court that fits this country. We could have 13 seats matching the district structure of the federal judiciary, but also a process that makes it less partisan.” Buttigieg appears to be referring to the circuit system, not the district court system. What is most striking is that he promises to reverse decisions on issues like racial gerrymandering by packing the Court, but then says it will make the Court “less partisan.”

The whole point of adding four new justices selected by the Democrats is to create an instant majority to their liking and to reverse past rulings. Years ago, I wrote an academic piece on the possible expansion of the Supreme Court, but there is a world of difference between that and a court-packing plan. Under my proposal, the court’s expansion would take almost two decades to ensure that no president could pack the court. Various Democrats have been pledging to not only impeach Trump (and a long list of other figures), but to pack the Supreme Court as soon as they regain power.

James Carville declared, “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F— it. Eat our dust. Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.” This Nike School of Constitutional Law is catching on with a wide array of pundits and professors. Just do it.

Years ago, Harvard professor Michael Klarman laid out a radical agenda to change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.” However, he warned that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described.” Therefore, the court must be packed in advance to allow these changes to occur.Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder has put packing the Supreme Court front and center, explaining, “[We’re] talking about the acquisition and the use of power if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.”

At base is a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the Court. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) not only renewed her previous call to pack the court but said the court was illegitimate for rendering decisions against “widely held public opinion.” Former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said the court “defies the will of the people.” Reporter John Haltiwanger insisted that “the court is clearly not representative of the U.S. public. It’s supposed to be the people’s court.”

In reality, the court was never meant to be that. It was meant to be the Constitution’s court, designed to stand against everyone and everything except the Constitution. In a system designed to protect the minority, the court (like the Constitution) is counter-majoritarian in much of what it does. With the Supreme Court removed as a barrier to the left’s radical agenda, Democrats could indeed fulfill the objectives laid out by figures like Klarman to ensure they never lose power again.

That will make the 2028 election the most consequential election for our constitutional history in decades. The outcome will most immediately decide the fate of an institution that has been a stabilizing force for centuries. Even though this Court has ruled against the Trump Administration on a variety of key issues, the left is still demanding that it either yield to all of their demands or face a hostile takeover. On our 250th anniversary, these reckless and radical voices remind us that (as Benjamin Franklin warned us) this is our Republic if we can keep it.

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” Incidentally, Western and Northern Africa are two areas where Islam dominates the countries.”

“And if the Supreme Court does not make the right decision on birthright citizenship, we might as well kiss our country goodbye.”

‘Birth Tourism’ Networks Around the World Exploiting the U.S. (Salgado)

The U.S. State Department has uncovered sophisticated and dangerous “birth tourism” networks from West Africa, Europe, and North Africa exploiting our current unconstitutional “birthright citizenship” system. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is one of the biggest abusers of our idiotic “birthright citizenship” system, but plenty of other bad actors around the world cash in as well. Contrary to the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment, America now says any child born on our soil is automatically a citizen, even if his parents just flew into or walked into the country. Unsurprisingly, this has for years encouraged abuses.


Besides the practice of “anchor babies,” where illegal aliens give birth in America and use their new citizen kids to keep the family here, there’s also “birth tourism.” From The Daily Wire: In West Africa, a U.S. embassy uncovered a “sophisticated birth tourism network” wherein more than 100 foreign nationals were using fraudulent documents to obtain visas and secure U.S. citizenship for their children. The State Department shut down this birth tourism network and revoked the foreign nationals’ visas. State is also coordinating with local authorities to “systematically identify and cut off any similar operations.” Incidentally, Western and Northern Africa are two areas where Islam dominates the countries.

“Under President Trump, the State Department is defending the integrity of U.S. citizenship by ending illegal birth tourism schemes,” The Daily Wire quoted the State Department. “No foreigner is permitted to obtain a visitor visa for the primary purpose of acquiring U.S. citizenship for a child by giving birth in the U.S.” This is why the upcoming Supreme Court decision on birthright citizenship is so important. The Daily Wire went on: A U.S. embassy in Europe found that more than 400 suspected birth tourism cases had occurred since 2024.

In this case, investigators traced the birth tourism to at least six companies that were coaching applicants on what to say in their visa interviews, arranging housing, and setting up delivery plans. State again shut down the process, revoked the visas, and permanently banned “several fraudsters from traveling to the United States ever again.” An embassy in North Africa revoked more than 100 visas for “birth tourist” parents who came to the United States specifically to give birth to children who would get U.S. citizenship. State Department consular officers worked with law enforcement and used data analytics to identify the networks abusing the visa system in this case.

“A U.S. visa is a privilege, not a right,” the federal department said. “The State Department is taking action around the world to stop this abuse, dismantle birth tourism networks, and hold accountable those who try to scam our system.” But even all these networks are small beans compared to the vast CCP apparatus for helping loyal party members come to the United States to give birth to kids who become automatic citizens of our country, even though many of them are then raised back in China. You can read more here. Up to a million Communist Chinese could be voting in United States elections by 2030, thanks to this huge “birth tourism” industry.

And if the Supreme Court does not make the right decision on birthright citizenship, we might as well kiss our country goodbye.

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“Headlines about the Russian president’s looks and ‘erratic’ behavior are a symptom of terminal Russophrenia..“

Puffy Putin Peril: The West’s Latest Attempt To Scare Itself (Amar)

You can’t argue with a man observing the obvious: We are living in unusually perilous times. In the Middle East, for instance, the Israeli-American infernal duo have been on a rampage of war, state terror, all-purpose devastation, and genocide that, as a bonus, has also brought the world economy to the verge of cardiac arrest by clogging one of its vital fossil fuel arteries. Indeed, that particular risk is so obvious that even Germany’s less than brilliant Friedrich Merz has long spotted it.


In the Far East, Taiwan is currently ruled by a government so hell-bent on antagonizing their fellow Chinese on the mainland that Taipei’s political reflexes seem almost as perverse as those of Berlin. In the West, you have the German elite which can’t find enough billions to fork over to Ukraine when Kiev and friends blow up Germany’s vital pipelines and lethally cripple its already ailing economy. In the East, there is Taipei, getting really, really angry when the Philippines and Japan start negotiating away Taiwan’s maritime Exclusive Economic Zone. Angry, that is, at Beijing.

And in the EU, that “garden” of “values” that really is a swampy jungle of eternal confusion and corruption, the catastrophe that in its foreign policy is now obvious enough for several European bigwigs to gang up on the abysmally, ragingly incompetent Kaja Kallas. Her tenure as de facto EU foreign minister has been so breathtakingly blundering that her employers aren’t merely itching to kick her out but thinking about, in essence, abolishing her job.

Being so horrible at something that you won’t just get fired yourself but take it down with you – perhaps only the Baltic Girl Boss Wonder could pull that one off. But then, maybe it’s really all just another power grab by EU’s German queen (of the absolute kind) and US viceroy (of the submissive kind) Ursula von der Leyen. Either way, frightful insanity abides. We could add more scary and grotesque evidence, but things are clear enough: It’s a grim picture all around. So, fair enough if you feel like being a big sad downer and doom monger. Where it gets weird is when you get your scare priorities all upside down.

Granted, from a hapless NATO-EU European perspective, Russia may look a little unsettling: after all, once you have waged years of proxy war, sanctions, and propaganda war against it, who knows what the mood is really like in Moscow? As a good NATO-EU apparatchik, you certainly would not, because you have displayed the foresight of a gnat by proudly not talking – or listening – to the Russians. So, when you feel a little insecure, that might really be your bad conscience calling (in a merely professional, not moral sense, which you are likely to lack).

But, generally speaking, the worse the stupidities and mistakes you have produced but keep repressing, the higher the price. Old Sigmund Freud called it “affective debility.” In essence, it means that lying to yourself makes you dim. And once you are BS’ing yourself for years as if there’s no tomorrow, you’ll turn positively imbecilic.

That’s the only way to explain a fresh wave of transparently hysterical scare mongering about Russia in the West, in particular, this time, in Britain. Thus, on the occasion of the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), centrist mainstream flagship The Independent came out with a fascinating piece of fiction masquerading as analysis. Under the clickbait title “‘Puffy-looking’ Putin is acting weirder than ever – and that should chill us to the bone,” readers were treated to a highly imaginative horror tale about, in essence, a terrible loose cannon in the Kremlin pondering staged incidents and nuclear terrorism and ready to blow up the world or at least Europe or perhaps just Britain because Russia is losing the war. Also, he looks “puffy”!

All of this backed up (not really) by yet another statement from a high British military officer that things are dire as never before in (his) living memory. He and his comrades in arms – plus a few tweedy spy gents and dames – produce these Cassandra screams at least twice a month; it seems to be a standing order.

Indeed, there is such an inflationary over-production of men and women in khaki and with stiff upper lips crying big bad Russian wolf that even Politico has already produced at least one ‘best of’ collection, gathering “The 5 doomiest Russia warnings from Britain’s military chiefs.” Perish the thought any of this may have anything to do with fattening defense budgets and driving up the obscene profits of His Majesty’s military industrial complex!

Generally speaking, The West has a rich tradition of declaring Russia vanquished, its president Vladimir Putin at death’s door or on the verge of being regime-changed away, and, of course, Ukraine (and, really, the West) on the cusp of winning the war. And, at the same time, of predicting that Russia will attack all of Europe, likely tomorrow. Notwithstanding occasional and intriguing anomalies, when a NATO commander (from Trump’s US, of course) lets slip a fragment of truth, such as that actually Moscow is not looking for conflict.

In short, we are speaking about the severe and very sad but also funny mental condition already well known as Russophrenia: the afflicted live with an imaginary Schrödinger’s Russia occupying their suffering minds, a Russia that is always simultaneously half-dead and yet so alive and kicking, it’s about to roll into their living room on a tank.

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Don’t learn from books, learn from life!

Thinking for Oneself: Schopenhauer on Reflection vs. Regurgitation (Eskeldson)

Arthur Schopenhauer’s argument is that thinking for oneself is better than regurgitating information from books and that the two produce very different effects in a learner. In the beginning of his essay, he compares the difference between regurgitation and reflection (or critical thinking) to two different libraries. Regurgitation is represented by a disorganized library with books all over the floor, furniture, shelves, or wherever else they have been mislaid. Similarly, someone who exclusively regurgitates information may have jumbled facts in his mind and will not have a clear picture of anything specific, despite learning (allegedly) so much about that thing. In the public domain essay “On Thinking for Oneself,” Schopenhauer shows us some men who appear to know so much about specific countries from travel books, but they cannot form their ideas into a gestalt to describe those countries as a whole. They cannot see the bigger picture because they were habitually exposed to only small bits of information.


Billie Pritchett writes, “Wouldn’t it be better for someone to discipline his mind by being instructed in the fundamentals of a subject, and then begin thinking within that framework?” as he recognizes an objection that Schopenhauer’s readers likely had in his day. The framework of other people’s observations on a given subject appears to be useful and airtight, but Schopenhauer believes it is more rewarding to learn that framework after doing critical thinking of one’s own. As he puts it, “the mind is deprived of all its elasticity by much reading, as is a spring when a weight is continually applied to it,” and “the surest way not to have thoughts of our own is for us at once to take up a book when we have a moment to spare”; furthermore, “the truth acquired through our own thinking is like the natural limb; it alone really belongs to us.”

After being spoon-fed material from book after book, someone will lose the ability to creatively solve problems and will learn to rely on others’ mental pictures exclusively in the effort to comprehend a subject. That person will essentially forget how to figure things out for himself. All of humanity will benefit from spending time reflecting on their thoughts.

Schopenhauer anticipated another likely objection: “What if all you get from your own thinking is the same material that has already been discovered and published by another person, or several other people, many times?” If someone tries hard to solve a problem himself, but finds out later that his solution had already been a well-publicized discovery, Schopenhauer would still appreciate the mental effort the person used to come to that conclusion. He would call that “small volume” of experimentation “valuable.”

Schopenhauer’s broader philosophical point is that the human mind forms a sort of stabilizing structure to make sense of an irrational, crooked world of “vicious little men.” People are so entwined in their self-centered desires that they “commit atrocities” to get their way and generally only use reason to justify their actions. The human mind must form a force of good intellect and strong moral character as a guard against falling into these irrational ways, according to Schopenhauer. Critical thinking is a way to strengthen the mind and develop good character traits (i.e. diligence), so it should be encouraged by all means. Regurgitation may become fuel for selfish desires (i.e. laziness) because of how easy and mentally painless it is, so it must be discouraged.

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Jun 142026
 


John Singer Sargent Corfu-Lights and Shadows 1908


President Trump ‘Utterly’ Defies Age As He Turns 80 (Earle)
Trump Says Iran Peace Deal To Be Signed Sunday (ZH)
Hillary Clinton Fears Revolution Preventing US From Being A Rainbow Nation (ZH)
Trump Announces Strike on Tren de Aragua Leadership with Venezuela (CTH)
Trump: We Got Another One -And This One Is HUGE (Sarah Anderson)
Russia Is Single-Handedly Standing Against The West: Putin (ZH)
Carney in France 3 Days Early for Trump Strategy Session with Macron (CTH)
Why Have I Spent a Decade Focusing on FISA (CTH)
Leftist Judge Blocks ActBlue Lawsuit to Protect Democrat Candidates (Margolis)
“It’s Just Me”: The New Hunter Biden Seems Strikingly Like the Old (Turley)
400 Businesses, $6 Billion in Fed Contracts, No Physical Addresses (Salgado)
A Villainous Blueprint For Managed Poverty (Veronique de Rugy)
The Suicide Of Europe: Historic EU Migration Pact Goes Into Force Today (RMX)

 


 

https://twitter.com/RealAmVoice/status/2065601982237176076?s=20 https://twitter.com/playmatejaylene/status/2065419827263774941?s=20

 


 

I looked up and down for an article that simply congratulates Trump on his 80th.

Not that he wants to be 80.

Very hard to find. This, from the New York Post, was the only thing that came up in a Google search for “Trump”, “birthday”.

I still don’t understand why people dislike the man so much.

 


 


‘I don’t know where he gets the energy’.

President Trump ‘Utterly’ Defies Age As He Turns 80 (Earle)

President Donald Trump on Sunday will become the second octogenarian to occupy the White House – and his admirers told The Post he still has plenty of spring in his step. “At least to date, he has seemed to utterly defy age,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), 55, who ran against Trump for president a decade ago. “I don’t know where he gets the energy that he displays, but he is up early in the morning and late at night,” he added. In a chamber where Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, 92, is the senior-most Republican and third in line to the presidency, Republicans who work closely with Trump insisted age is nothing but a number.


“He calls me at sometimes 2 o’clock in the morning,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). The 74-year-old lawmaker quickly added: “I mean, just because you’re 80 doesn’t mean you’re falling apart. For some people it does — but other people are fine.” “Age is relative,” agreed former Sen. John Breaux (D-La.), 82, who served three terms in the Senate – including two years alongside Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), who retired from the chamber at 100. “I knew people who were senile at 40, and I knew people in their 70s that were contributing members of the Congress. It depends on the individual, and you have to judge an individual not by the chronological age, but by their ability, and some are great at 80, and some are not so great at 40.”

And he’s not slowing down, said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, 82, a longtime Trump advisor who drew some life advice from the president. “President Trump, in the Kissinger tradition, has gained in stamina as he has gotten older. He is so interested in the wide range of things he is achieving that he has no time to get older,” he said. “His life invigorates him and fits what we now know about longevity. If you have a big goal, like what you are doing and have friends you live longer, healthier, and with more energy. All that fits President Trump.”

Trump keeps a vigorous schedule, regularly fielding questions from reporters during marathon press events and posting on Truth Social about war and peace during odd hours. “If there’s one thing I know about President Trump, it’s that nothing slows him down,” said Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), the former White House physician who tended to Trump after Thomas Crooks shot at him in Butler, Pennsylvania and wounded his right ear. The president plans to spend his birthday at a UFC fight organized on the South Lawn of the White House before jetting to France for the annual G7 meeting.

Eldest son Donald Trump, Jr. and his new wife Bettina, son Eric and wife Lara Trump, daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner all were set to join him for the bouts. Democrats are relishing the opportunity, for a change, to poke at the age of the other party’s standard bearer. Former White House spokesman Andrew Bates questioned Trump’s memory regarding inflation, despite Bates’ ex-boss, former President Joe Biden, delivering a 2024 debate performance so bad his wife thought he was having a stroke. “But you have to give it to him that a White House ballroom is the ultimate senior arts and crafts project,” he quipped.

Trump has been fatalistic when speaking after numerous attempts on his life. “I wasn’t worried. I understand life. We live in a crazy world,” he said after Cole Thomas Allen allegedly opened fire at the White House Correspondents Dinner in April. “It’s not a number I like, but I’m here nevertheless,” he said in a video posted Thursday by Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz. But if he frets about aging, he can turn to White House Physician Dr. Sean Barbabella’s memo after his latest visit to Walter Reed Medical Center. It proclaimed him to be in “excellent health” and estimated his cardiac age as “approximately 14 years younger than his chronological age.”

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That was the birthday present Trump wanted for himself.

Trump Says Iran Peace Deal To Be Signed Sunday (ZH)

President Trump said a long-awaited deal to end the war in the Middle East is scheduled to be signed on Sunday, paving the way for the opening of the strategic Strait of Hormuz. In a statement issued through Truth Social, President Trump first took a shot at President Obama: “Barack Hussein Obama’s Deal with Iran, the JCPOA, was an easy, beautiful, smooth road to a Nuclear Weapon, which Iran would have had six years ago, and would have used long before now.”


Then explained why his deal is different: “My Agreement with Iran is the exact opposite, A WALL TO NO NUCLEAR WEAPON! In fact, they no longer want a Nuclear Weapon, nor will they have one, either through purchase, development, or any other form of procurement. The Deal is scheduled to get signed tomorrow, and immediately after it is signed, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN TO ALL.” Building relationships: “Our relationship with Iran is a much different and better one than previous Administrations have had. Unlike Obama’s Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in payments to them, including 1.7 Billion Dollars in green, cold cash, no money will exchange hands. We look forward to working with Iran, and the entire Middle East, long into the future.

About the nuclear dust: “At the appropriate time, when all is calm, we will go in and get the Nuclear Dust, buried deep under the powerful sunken granite mountains, thanks to our beautiful B-2 Bombers and their brilliant pilots, and downblend and destroy it, whether in Iran, or the United States. Hopefully, this process will all work out quickly, easily, and smoothly.If it doesn’t, we have the ultimate alternative, hopefully never to be used again!

Trump’s statement, however, ran counter to Iran’s foreign ministry which indicated earlier in the day that the deal would not be signed Sunday, according to state media reports. We shall see …

Iran Peace Deal Signing Expected Within 24 Hours, Technical Talks To Follow, Pakistan’s Sharif Says

After Friday witnessed a rare moment of agreement between Tehran and Washington saying that indeed a peace deal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is indeed ‘very close’ – there’s been more color issued by Pakistan. The country’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said that the United States and Iran have agreed to the final text of the agreement, but that curiously Pakistan is now preparing for an electronic signing expected within the next 24 hours. Is this going to be history’s first Docusigned peace agreement?

Sharif further indicated this signing will be followed by technical-level ` talks this upcoming week - but this is definitely where the proverbial devil will be in the details. Contained within the MoU signing will reportedly be an extension of the April 7 ceasefire by 60 days, during which the Strait of Hormuz would gradually reopen - or we should say that this is at least the very optimistic version of things, given that Tehran still insists that its military is in control of the Strait, which the Pentagon has flatly rejected is a a reality. So Iran is seeking to hold on tightly to its obvious geographic leverage, while the US is rejecting that this is the case at all.

Another interesting possibly point of contention - but which looks to be merely papered over for now - is the status of the nuclear file, which has long been a major point of fierce contention. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi made clear Friday Iran’s understanding that terms dealing with the country’s nuclear program would be finalized in the 60 days after the initial agreement is signed. So in essence, this means Iran could get its wish of pushing nuclear negotiations back, only after the hot conflict has clearly ended. Iran has long sought to separate the issues of a final end to the war from consideration of its nuclear program.

Importantly Araghchi indicated the two sides could extend the 60-day period further, and a yet a lot could go wrong in such an extended interim. Still, it remains that Washington - and certainly the American public - doesn’t have the appetite for an escalation that would lead to a boots-on-the-ground scenario complete with full regime change operations (and this means almost inevitable nation-building).

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Most Americans don’t want to live in a Rainbow Nation.

Hillary Clinton Fears Revolution Preventing US From Being A Rainbow Nation (ZH)

The word “Democracy” is thrown around frequently within progressive circles as a call to arms; a rallying cry based on a fraudulent narrative of patriotic duty. Throughout the entirety of Joe Biden’s first and last term, the political left painted conservatives as a threat to democracy. Anyone who opposed pandemic mandates, compelled vaccination, open borders, mass immigration, gender ideology in public schools etc., was labeled a danger to society.


The inherent fallacy being that leftists (and by extension Democrats) represent the majority of the nation. However, this notion has been consistently debunked by multiple elections, polls and the fact that the vast majority of liberal movements have been exposed as astroturf funded by NGOs. If Democrats actually cared about democracy, they would listen to the actual American majority, instead of waging a propaganda war on the majority in order to manufacture a false consensus. And, the majority of Americans do not support multicultural or “intersectional” ideology. The liberal vision is on the decline and that’s a good thing.

Not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton disagrees. At the first Rainbow PUSH Coalition conference since the death of Reverend Jesse Jackson in February. Pete Buttigieg and Hillary Clinton took to the stage in front of a small audience in Chicago this week to sell their Utopian future, but mostly they slandered the Trump Administration. Their rhetoric continues to echo the message of the Biden era, that conservatives want the end of civil rights and voting rights in the US. Buttigieg asserted that the Trump Administration was “corrupt” and “corruption is bad”.

The former DOT Secretary makes no mention of the fact that he shares a stage with Clinton, widely known as one of the most corrupt politicians in recent American history. While Democrats spend endless media time trying to tie Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, it’s the Clinton Family that is well documented as being truly friendly with the globalist pedo pimp. Around 90% of Epstein’s political contributions went to the Democratic Party including multiple donations to Hillary Clinton. None of his donations went to Trump.

Buttigieg faced extensive backlash for his handling of the pandemic lockdowns, including his avid support for draconian mandates which were ultimately found to be useless in stopping the spread of covid; and all over a virus with a 99.8% average survival rate. He continues to echo the party line, calling for rigging of the Supreme Court to ensure Democrat supremacy.

Buttigieg is expected to run in the 2028 Democrat primaries for President. Though, he lacks any mainstream popularity and, like most Democrats, he continues to campaign as if he’s running against Trump even though Trump is leaving office. Clinton, on the other hand, seems less concerned with Trump and far more concerned with the larger conservative and anti-woke movements which have left Democrats stunned and bewildered. Clinton calls these movements a “counter-revolution” which she believes is undermining the liberal order established over the last several decades. Clinton fearmongers with the usual rhetoric, claiming that civil rights and voting rights are under threat.

She is ostensibly referencing the end of redistricting using race-based gerrymandering, which exclusively worked in the favor of Democrats. But, this was enforced by the Supreme Court, not Trump or the MAGA movement. Clinton is also a vocal opponent of the Save Act, which would make proof of citizenship a requirement for voting in the US (a bill which is supported by around 80% of American voters). Her comments on the “Rainbow Nation” might be confusing for those who don’t understand what this entails. Jackson used “Rainbow” to describe a broad coalition of “marginalized groups” (Black Americans, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, LGBTQ+ people, low wage workers, etc.) uniting for political power and social justice. His organization commonly promotes Marxist “intersectionality” and multiculturalism.

Clinton has made similar anti-populist statements in recent months, arguing that the rise of American conservatism has the potential to break apart the liberal west. At the Munich Security Conference in February, she participated in panels on what they call the “West-West Divide”, warning of democratic backsliding on human rights (including women’s and LGBTQ+ rights), and authoritarian dangers. Clinton called for civil rights and grassroots networks to counter the weakening of liberal institutions. She made the same call for popular opposition in Chicago.

“We have to reconstitute the movements that moved us forward, that made it possible to claim we were trying to get to that more perfect union. They were not led by politically elected officials. They were led by clergy, they were led by business leaders, they were led by civic organizers, they were led by young people. So we don’t need to have a bunch of elected officials leading this new movement. We need to have it be from the bottom up, the grassroots, coming back to get organized and move forward again.” In other words, if they can’t win (or steal) the elections and if they can’t gain the majority approval of the voters, then they will turn to mob actions to disrupt reforms and force the public to accept woke ideology anyway. Democrats only romanticize democracy when it works in their favor. When it doesn’t, they completely abandon it.

Read more …

Venezuela as the 51st state?

Trump Announces Strike on Tren de Aragua Leadership with Venezuela (CTH)

President Trump announces a deadly strike on the leadership of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang with support from the interim Venezuela government.


TRUTH SOCIAL – “At my direction, the United States Southern Command delivered a swift and lethal kinetic strike to successfully execute Niño Guerrero, the infamous leader of Tren De Aragua, one of the most bloodthirsty Terrorist Organizations on Planet Earth. Before I returned to office, Joe Biden opened our Southern Border to millions of Illegal Criminals, and allowed this foreign army to rape, maim, and murder American Citizens with total impunity. During my Campaign, I pledged to expel these monsters from our Country, and bring Justice to the families of those they slaughtered, including the precious 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, 22-year-old Laken Reilly, and countless other beautiful souls. With this action, the United States Military has brought retribution for them, their families, and their loved ones.

Early in my Administration, I delivered on my promise to designate Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, deport thousands of evil criminals, and wage war against the Cartels, who have long been waging war against our Citizens, while weak leaders left America helpless and defensive. This action was coordinated closely with our friends in Venezuela, with whom we are working very well. As a result, Tren de Aragua terrorists no longer have safe haven in Venezuela or anywhere else and, under my leadership, we will find these vicious murderers and drugs lords anytime, anyplace, and send them to the depths of hell where they belong. GOD BLESS AMERICA!”

~ President DONALD J. TRUMP

Venezuela’s government released a statement confirmed its participation in the operation and revealed it took place in the southeastern state of Bolivar. “During the operation, clashes occurred with members of criminal groups, resulting in the death of Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, alias ‘Niño Guerrero,’ the leader of one of these criminal organizations,” according to the statement.

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“..Just in case you need a refresher, Nicolás Maduro claimed TdA didn’t exist, but the reality is that he was using the members as his own henchmen..”

Trump: We Got Another One -And This One Is HUGE (Sarah Anderson)

On Friday night, Donald Trump announced that the United States, along with our “friends in Venezuela,” took out another very, very bad guy. This one is a big one. Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, aka Niño Guerrero, was the kingpin of c (TdA). He started out as a local thug, with a rap sheet full of homicides, robberies, and other crimes, but he turned a stint in prison into one of the biggest criminal organizations in the world. Here’s what I wrote about him in April 2025:


“But TdA actually dates all the way back to 2014 when a man named Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, aka Niño Guerrero, was locked up at Tocorón Prison, which is located in the Aragua state of Venezuela. According to the State Department, ‘During his time there, Guerrero expanded the influence of Tren de Aragua from extorting prison inmates and bribing prison guards to assuming the overall control of the Tocorón prison as well as the control of gold mines in Bolivar State, drug corridors on the Caribbean coast, as well as control of some of the clandestine border crossings between Venezuela and Colombia.’

The BBC reported that because of Guerrero’s growing power, the jail essentially turned into a luxury resort and included a zoo, nightclub, and swimming pool. ‘Families of inmates moved into the compound. Inmates had access to a makeshift bank, a betting shop, a restaurant, and a baseball diamond, while their children could marvel at flamingos and ostriches in the animal enclosure.’ Meanwhile, Guerrero came and went as he pleased, reportedly living ‘like a king.’ He had his own floor in the prison, complete with personal bodyguards. He also had no major rivals or opposition, which helped him grow TdA throughout Venezuela. It eventually made its way to the Colombian border. By 2018, it was spreading through other South American countries, including Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, and Brazil.

Leaders in these countries reportedly put pressure on Venezuela to shut it down. In 2023, the country’s government reportedly sent 11,000 soldiers and police into the prison to take control and after the fact, they claimed it went off without a hitch. However, Guerrero, who is currently 41 years old, wasn’t there — though it took Venezuela some time to make this information public — and a manhunt began across numerous South American countries. As of last summer, the State Department, in conjunction with Colombian National Police, have offered up to a $5 million reward for information leading to Guerrero’s arrest, as well as an additional $7 million for the arrest of two other TdA leaders.”

Just in case you need a refresher, Nicolás Maduro claimed TdA didn’t exist, but the reality is that he was using the members as his own henchmen, sending them to the United States and other countries to wreak havoc and even reportedly having them kill some of his enemies. Joe Biden’s open-border policies played right into the Maduro regime’s hands, while Trump and Marco Rubio designated TdA as a Foreign Terrorist Organization almost immediately when Trump began his second term.

The fact that our “friends in Venezuela” played a role in this (and let’s face it, they — and by “they” I mean “acting president” Delcy Rodríguez — really didn’t have a choice but to play ball) is an incredible turn of events from what was going on in that country just five or six months ago. Anyway, I won’t rehash the whole TdA story, but you can read more about it here: The Truth Behind Tren de Aragua. So what happened exactly? Here’s what Trump posted on Truth Social:

“At my direction, the United States Southern Command delivered a swift and lethal kinetic strike to successfully execute Niño Guerrero, the infamous leader of Tren De Aragua, one of the most bloodthirsty Terrorist Organizations on Planet Earth. Before I returned to office, Joe Biden opened our Southern Border to millions of Illegal Criminals, and allowed this foreign army to rape, maim, and murder American Citizens with total impunity. During my Campaign, I pledged to expel these monsters from our Country, and bring Justice to the families of those they slaughtered, including the precious 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, 22-year-old Laken Reilly, and countless other beautiful souls.

With this action, the United States Military has brought retribution for them, their families, and their loved ones. Early in my Administration, I delivered on my promise to designate Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, deport thousands of evil criminals, and wage war against the Cartels, who have long been waging war against our Citizens, while weak leaders left America helpless and defensive. This action was coordinated closely with our friends in Venezuela, with whom we are working very well. As a result, Tren de Aragua terrorists no longer have safe haven in Venezuela or anywhere else and, under my leadership, we will find these vicious murderers and drugs lords anytime, anyplace, and send them to the depths of hell where they belong. GOD BLESS AMERICA! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth also confirmed the news that Guerrero was killed: As did SOUTHCOM Commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan:

Guerrero was reportedly hiding out in Bolívar state, specifically the mining area around Las Claritas at a TdA compound. I can’t express what a big blow this was to TdA, and to organized crime and drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere in general. I’m sure the lefties in the U.S. will be besides themselves over it, but if my social media and communication with my Venezuelan contacts are any indication, most of the sane people in Venezuela, in Latin America, and in the United States are celebrating this almost as much as they did the capture of Maduro in January. They just want to know if Diosdado Cabello is next. Let’s hope.

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Should he have seen this coming? Be more suspicious? He suggested making Russia part of the west.

Russia Is Single-Handedly Standing Against The West: Putin (ZH)

“It was they who carried out the coup d’etat in Ukraine, which forced us to take the people of Crimea under protection. When they started the war, they started bombing Donetsk using warplanes” – Putin in a fresh address to Russian service members came out swinging, giving a familiar lesson in recent history. And quite provocatively, he emphasized that Russia is now practically fighting against the entirety of the collective West in the Ukraine conflict in the Friday remarks. “Russia is standing against the so-called Collective West single-handedly,” Putin said, state media cited, and he noted that the ‘special military operation’ he ordered to stave off NATO encroachment is revealing itself to be “exceedingly high-tech.”


“The NATO nations are all, without exception, ramping up efforts to do all they can to orchestrate actions against Russia,” he added, sate media continued. He stressed that Moscow did not initiate the Ukraine conflict, but that the Western allies and their hegemonic expansion and meddling did. He perhaps for the first time acknowledged some pain inflicted on Russia due to Ukraine’s long-range drone waves, which for months have been inflicting serious damage primarily on oil and energy sites: Now, Western nations have set out to “inflict a strategic defeat on Russia,” but “this is not something that can be done,” Putin said.

“The enemy is expanding the use of [kamikaze] drones… trying to strike at our morale, trying to break up Russian society… and cause economic damage,” he noted, stressing that “they will not succeed.” These drones have grown more long-range in their targeting and increasingly effective, as Russia’s anti-air defense – which are set up primarily to intercept higher flying and faster inbound missiles or jets – seem powerless.

Or rather, if Ukraine sends 100 drones on Russia on any given night, at least dozens are bound to make it through, the recent pattern has shown. But Putin also seems to be strongly suggesting that Western intelligence is assisting Ukraine’s drone mayhem on the Russian populace. Earlier this month, the Putin-hosted St. Petersburg Economic Forum came under significant drone attack from Ukraine. Videos revealed that international dignitaries entered the venue against the backdrop of thick black smoke from drone hits on oil and other facilities.

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“.. strategize with President Emmanuel Macron the best way to defeat Godzilla Trump.

Carney in France 3 Days Early for Trump Strategy Session with Macron (CTH)

The media frame the early arrival of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as part of a bilateral discussion ahead of the G7 which begins on June 15. However, those who have followed the nuance of geopolitics well understand Mark Carney is in Paris early so that he can strategize with President Emmanuel Macron the best way to defeat Godzilla Trump. There is a certain irony that amid the G7 only one economy is growing, the USA. EU leaders including U.K Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron himself are all barely hanging on to power with almost no public support.


Historically, Macron always tries to reposition his domestic lack of support by focusing on international affairs. Macron and Carney have one nemesis in common, President Donald Trump. Emmanuel Macron is famous for scheming subtle ways to overcome his own inadequacy, and hosting the G7 puts him in the spotlight. Mark Carney is coming back to Europe after previously giving a speech in Davos calling for a collective alignment of middle-economy nations to stand united against the terrible Trump. There is little doubt the pontificating duo has any other topic other than Trump in their scheme and planning folder.

Factually the G7 is a joke now, with likely around 15 to 20 countries showing up. The G7 used to be the USA, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.K. Then they added the EU, which brings three more Brussels figureheads, and if the last G7 in Canada is any indication of the intention, there will likely be at least a dozen more showing up. This G7 is deemed critical due to the issues of Iran and Ukraine, in combination with President Trump’s international reset that has diminished the economic status of Europe significantly. Trump doesn’t chase the climate change agenda, and that is another policy disconnect from the rest of the group.

Macron wants to avoid the G6+1 narrative that has come to define the assembly in the era of Trump because France needs to be seen as a coequal within the group. However, in reality in addition to the USA the only other country that matters in this new geopolitical framework is Japan; all other nations are a mess of globalist chaos, domestic political trouble and economy shrinking energy problems. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and French President Emmanuel Macron need to position themselves as the leaders of the anti-Trump movement. Thus, they get together three days in advance to figure out the best way to diminish Trump’s appearance. That’s really what this early bilateral nonsense is about.

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A key that fits in many doors?

Why Have I Spent a Decade Focusing on FISA (CTH)

My dearest friends, I have not spent a decade focusing on FISA or the ‘702’ issues because defeating the pending surveillance state has been the priority; that is an ancillary matter against powerful financial interests. No, the core of my focus has always been on what FISA (702) represents. FISA (702) et al, is a tool, a key per se’. A key that unlocks a data library. We debate control of the key, but do not spend enough time focusing on the data library itself and what it represents. I’m not even sure if President Donald Trump is fully aware of this or not, but I am generally confident that DC insiders understand the potential.


The NSA database is essentially a library of information about activity. It is a storage box of metadata and within that data there is a sub-set, a flow of information related to election activity.Behind that part of the issue, with that thought in mind, you now have an expanded perspective of why the ODNI would be involved in election type investigative activity. The DNI is above the NSA Director. The ODNI is an access point to the data library. Tulsi Gabbard as DNI has a vested interest in all the data housed within that vault. Congress stood jaw agape at the appearance of DNI Gabbard in Fulton County, Georgia, without actually recognizing what stakeholder interests are represented by the content in Fulton County election warehouses.

Essentially, the NSA data vault shows XXX activity, and the factual paperwork supporting XXX exists in physical warehouses. The data is within a digital library. The factual paperwork is on the ground. Now, pause for a moment and understand the digital library is one aspect. Access to that digital library is an entirely different kettle o’ fish. The lockbox to open the digital record is accessed using the recently discussed 702 pathways. As presented for several years, the FISA (702) key is simply a tool. The tool is needed to unlock the data. Arguably, if you cannot access the data there is no reason to capture it. As a result, without FISA (702) there is no collection, because there is no need for metadata collection. Understood?

As a consequence, FISA (702) is not about foreign stuff as it relates to the common discussion; instead, it is the baseline of the entire data capture. Understanding this takes you to a mental reset. The capture is never discussed (see Edward Snowden -vs- James Clapper), we only see debate on the access. So, if you take your thinking back to the data collection itself, then you ask what is in that massive digital vault we call the NSA library. There’s a lot of stuff in there, including all of the electronic data that surrounds elections. All of that data can be filtered permitting a granular look at election outcomes and all the background electronic communication that comes attached to it. [Hence, the DNI stakeholder interest in Fulton, County.]

FISA (702) essentially represents the authority, the key that unlocks the ability to review the data. Think very carefully. If the database contains the digital records of elections, and if those digital records show manipulation of election data, then anyone accessing that massive library would represent a risk. How many people in DC are in elected office as a result of election manipulation? Now, does the recent display of extreme concern from specific people in congress start to take on a new context?

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“There’s just one problem with that claim. Paxton’s investigation into ActBlue started in Dec. 2023. Talarico didn’t enter the Senate race until Sept. 2025…”

Leftist Judge Blocks ActBlue Lawsuit to Protect Democrat Candidates (Margolis)

A federal judge handed ActBlue a get-out-of-jail-free card on Thursday, blocking Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton from pursuing a lawsuit against the Democrat fundraising platform. District Judge Richard Stearns decided the lawsuit was political. Specifically, Stearns concluded Paxton filed it to retaliate against ActBlue for raising money for his U.S. Senate opponent, James Talarico. Stearns wrote in his decision, “The lawsuit in Texas is undoubtedly an adverse action. And having previously found bad faith, the court agrees with ActBlue that the evidence in the record compels the conclusion that, far from protecting Texas consumers, the action was filed in retaliation for ActBlue’s fundraising on behalf of Talarico, Paxton’s current political rival for the Senate seat.”


There’s just one problem with that claim. Paxton’s investigation into ActBlue started in Dec. 2023. Talarico didn’t enter the Senate race until Sept. 2025. That’s nearly two years before the “political rival” Stearns claims Paxton was targeting even announced a candidacy. And the judge knows this, because his own ruling says so. The factual background section of that same ruling tells a different story. Stearns wrote:

ActBlue is a prominent fundraising platform for Democratic candidates for public office, amassing as much as $19 billion in donations, mostly from small contributors, since its founding in 2004. In December of 2023, Paxton began investigating ActBlue with the stated purpose of determining “whether ActBlue’s operations are compliant with all applicable laws.” The next month, he served ActBlue with a Request to Examine (RTE) to be conducted at ActBlue’s headquarters in Somerville, Massachusetts. Think about that for a second. Stearns literally acknowledged in his own ruling that the investigation began in late 2023, well before Talarico was a candidate. But he still “concluded” it was retaliatory? What a joke.

Here’s the real problem. The lawsuit itself has real substance. Paxton alleges ActBlue violated Texas law by misleading consumers about its fundraising practices. The platform told Congress in 2024 that it had stopped accepting donations via gift cards and foreign prepaid debit cards, only to quietly resume accepting gift card donations afterward. That’s a serious allegation, with nothing to do with Talarico. None. Nada. Zilch. It’s about whether ActBlue lied to Congress and, in the process, broke state consumer protection laws.

Paxton had already been pushing on this at the federal level. In 2024 (again, before Talarico was even a candidate), he filed a Petition for Rulemaking with the Federal Election Commission, to close the fundraising loopholes ActBlue exploits. This was a sustained, multi-front legal effort that predated Talarico’s Senate announcement by nearly two years. Reuters left all of that context out of its report on the injunction. Convenient. Paxton will obviously appeal the ruling. “Texas has every right to enforce its own laws to protect our citizens, and we will continue to fight to hold ActBlue accountable,” he said on X.

Good. Because what Stearns did here goes well beyond bad legal reasoning. ActBlue has funneled billions into Democrat campaigns, and now gets judicial protection the moment a state attorney general tries to examine whether its practices are even legal. The platform told Congress one thing, did another, and a federal judge decided the Republican who noticed was the real problem. Stearns isn’t applying the law. He’s running interference for a fundraising machine the entire Democrat Party depends on to stay competitive. If ActBlue’s practices hold up under scrutiny, it has nothing to fear from Paxton’s lawsuit. A judge swooping in to kill that scrutiny tells you exactly what this ruling is actually about: helping Democrats.

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He needs money.

“It’s Just Me”: The New Hunter Biden Seems Strikingly Like the Old (Turley)

Hunter Biden is once again reinventing himself with the help of an ever-enabling media and the Democratic establishment. The media is full of reports that people are rediscovering Hunter and finding him strikingly honest and refreshing. In his pitch, he assures viewers that now “it’s just me” and not some team of advisers. The problem is that, for some of us who have been critics of the Bidens for decades, there is nothing new about the new Hunter other than a podcast audience.


For the record, I have been a critic of the Biden family for decades as one of the most corrupt political families in U.S. history. Joe Biden and his family have been influence peddlers and self-dealers since his time in the Senate — enriching themselves with positions and shady dealings. Hunter Biden was the ultimate personification of that corruption — both financial and moral. He spent his life attacking those who tried to investigate his dealings, including filing ruinous lawsuits against individuals who would not yield.

At the same time, he spent lavishly with money that he acquired by leveraging the access and influence of his father. Some of this conduct continued during periods of sobriety as well as addiction. That includes his disgraceful record with regard to his daughter Navy Joan, whom he fought not to recognize or support. Hunter has repeatedly sought to reinvent himself with the help of an army of advisers. His current pitch is that everything that he did for literally decades was because he was an addict and that he is now proud and unafraid. The problem is that the facts do not fit the pitch. Hunter was cashing in on the family business from the moment that he emerged from law school. He was entitled and eager to use his father to enrich himself.

For a party that often seems on a recurring loop of mantras condemning white privilege and entitlements, Hunter Biden would seem the last person that the left would embrace. However, the use of his identity as a recovering addict is drawing crowds and accolades. He presents himself as a virtual sage as a result of the struggle. I have previously expressed sympathy for Hunter’s recovery and credited him for writing about it. However, his honesty about addiction is notably missing in his account of his influence peddling and corruption. He prefers to focus on how he spent the money and not how he got it.

We’re missing accounts of his strong-arming of foreign figures, such as BHR Partners CEO Jonathan Li. In the summer of 2019, Li wired $250,000 to Hunter Biden from Beijing, with Joe Biden’s Delaware home listed as the beneficiary address. There were diamonds as gifts, lavish expense accounts, and a sports car, in addition to massive payments that Hunter claimed were “loans.” There are messages like the one to a Chinese businessman , openly threatening Joe Biden’s displeasure if money is not sent to them immediately. In the WhatsApp message, Hunter stated:

“I am sitting here with my father, and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the Chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.” Hunter puts all of these dealings and his attacks on critics into a deep memory hole while thrilling liberal audiences as the liberated voice of reason.

Hunter continues to twist history to fit his needs. In an interview with Gov. Gavin Newsom, Biden explained how his infamous pardon was simply proof of “how much you know my dad loves me.” He said that his father “chose me over his legacy.” That last point may be the only unassailable point from his interviews. However, Hunter notably stuck to the same carefully crafted narrative put out by his family in interviews on the pardon — insisting that it was made necessary by Trump’s election to protect him from retaliation.

Hunter told Newsom: “My dad said that he wouldn’t give me a pardon and he was absolutely 100% genuine about it…he said it at a moment in time where he thought that he was going to be the next president of the United States and there would be a Justice Department that would treat me fairly…It would have been like having a gun to my family’s head for the next four years at least, so that’s why he pardoned me. It’s a really incredibly rational decision and a really difficult decision.”

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The fraud in the US is staggering.

400 Businesses, $6 Billion in Fed Contracts, No Physical Addresses (Salgado)

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Andrew Ferguson exposed yet more horrifying details of the mass taxpayer funding fraud network in the U.S.


Ferguson said on Fox News that there are many tools and laws at hand for the federal government to use in identifying, investigating, and eliminating fraud, but the previous administration wasn’t interested in using them. In fact, the Biden-Harris administration deliberately removed fraud guardrails. Now, the FTC, the General Services Administration (GSA), and other federal entities have found that “400 businesses, with contracts worth $6 billion, originally allocated by the Biden administration, didn’t even file physical addresses at their businesses. That’s a statutory requirement.”

Ferguson emphasized, “You’re not supposed to be able to get any money from the United States government unless you put down a physical mailing address, and they just didn’t do it. And so [we], with the GSA, in conjunction with the [White House] task force, issued letters to these businesses, it says you have 30 days or we’re cutting you off. There’s still $3 billion unpaid on these contracts as of today.” That would be a fair amount of money we would save. “And that’s just a drop in the bucket over at the Justice Department,” Ferguson added.

The DOJ has “gotten indictments and convictions just in the last week worth almost half a billion dollars. We started turning off Medicaid and Medicare dollars to providers that [it has] become clear are fraudulently charging the government with our partners at HHS.”

For too many years, Ferguson declared, “dishonest citizens, and tons and tons of foreigners and foreign governments, have been putting their hands into the pockets of ordinary and honest Americans and taking that money from them, and President Trump is the first president to take this problem seriously, and that’s why the task force is being successful.”

Fox’s Kayleigh McEnany asked Ferguson if a single Democrat governor had shown any initiative in helping to identify fraud. Ferguson answered, “No, in fact, all I’ve heard from Democrat governors until early this week was, ‘The fraud isn’t a problem. This is all a hoax. This is all a distraction.’ Now, of course, it’s clear that they understand the political pain that the empire of fraud, that [Gov.] Gavin Newsom has constructed in California, is gonna cause California Democrats, because this week, he had the attorney general of California and the governor touting all the work they’re doing on fraud, total bull crap.”

In reality, Ferguson stated, “They have been sitting on top of tens of billions of dollars in known fraud for decades, and doing nothing about it, and not just doing nothing about it, they have been facilitating it. Let me give you an example of this. The government sends tens of millions of dollars to the states every year to fund their Medicaid and Medicare fraud fighting units. Hawaii, just since 2021, has gotten millions and millions of dollars from the federal government to fight Medicaid fraud. Do you know how many convictions they’ve gotten since 2020? Zero.”

That’s why the federal government temporarily decertified Hawaii for Medicaid funding. We need to make these fraud-loving Dems feel the financial pain.

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Piketty.

A Villainous Blueprint For Managed Poverty (Veronique de Rugy)

Writer and philosopher Ayn Rand was often accused of inventing cartoonish villains.Rogues like Ellsworth Toohey in “The Fountainhead” would scheme to seize the global economy’s commanding heights in pursuit of a distorted sense of justice.But the people who hold such ideas don’t just appear in cartoons or in Rand’s novels. Enter Thomas Piketty and company. In early June, Piketty – the French economist whose work on inequality has made him something of a rock star even while being serially challenged for methodological errors, data imputations and cherry-picked baselines – and his large team unveiled what can only be described as a villainous plan.


It’s a comprehensive program for global managed decline dressed up in the language of climate justice and equality. The plan is far too ambitious for most nations to accept. But given the influence of Piketty and his circle of economists on U.S. wealth taxes and prominent global policy proposals, we should take its underlying ideas seriously. Piketty’s plan would cap GDP per capita in wealthy countries at roughly $69,000, far less than America’s current $94,430.The plan would also limit annual global economic growth to between 0 percent and 0.5 percent. Monsieur Piketty would allot only 0.115 percent annual growth to the U.S, whose GDP has expanded by more than 3 percent on average since 1930. This would hurt not just the billionaires but every American.

The plan would mandate an international three-day work week and reduce construction activity by 70 percent, manufacturing by 87 percent and even leisure-sector activity by 58 percent. There would be massive and punishing trade actions against noncompliant countries. It envisions a “Global Justice Fund” financed not by taxing carbon but by global wealth and income taxes. This fund would be 20 times the size of current development aid and would be administered by a new international bureaucracy answerable to heaven knows who.

Don’t be fooled by Piketty’s training as an economist. This is not economic thinking. Consider the utter inconsistency of relying on a vast stock of wealth (mostly from the U.S.) for redistribution while suffocating long-term growth to near zero. Much of the value of the assets needed to finance this scheme would be destroyed. It is also disqualifying to claim that sub-Saharan Africa will grow at 4 percent if we crush the economies that provide the capital for its investments and buy its exports. Let’s ask the uncomfortable question: What would it require to enforce Piketty’s plan? About this matter, he is conveniently vague.

Confiscating something on the order of 10 percent of world GDP and redirecting it through a newly created supranational body does not happen by asking nicely. You cannot restructure the global economy at that scale without a coercive apparatus that dwarfs anything in human history. The mechanism must be authoritarian. It would require a world government with the power to tell billions of people which jobs they may and may not hold, what they may build, what they may eat and how many hours they are permitted to work. And to what end?

“Climate change” is an insufficient answer when Piketty’s entire edifice is built on a discredited foundation. The report relies on a baseline from the “RCP8.5” climate scenario that projects Earth warming by as much as 4.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. But last month, the UN’s own climate panel officially retired RCP8.5 (always a high-end estimate) as “implausible.” A more central projection is around 2.7 degrees Celsius. Replies to Piketty’s X feed pointed this out immediately. His response, as far as anyone can tell, has been silence.

That leaves the inequality argument. Worldwide income inequality is nearing a 150-year low, but Piketty insists that radical redistribution of wealth is essential for the Global South. And where have billionaires and wealth been popping up fastest in recent decades? Embarrassingly, data from Piketty’s World Inequality Database confirms that it’s in South and Southeast Asia and East Asia. These are the exact Global South regions that have spent recent decades rescuing hundreds of millions of people from poverty through market-directed economic growth.

A core confusion of the degrowth ideology is its conflation of inequality and poverty, in fact two very different things. Reducing inequality by making everyone poorer is not a victory for the poor. The billions of people still lagging in the global income distribution have one realistic path out: growth. Dynamic, market-driven, property-rights-protected growth is the only proven path to prosperity. It’s also the path to environmental improvement, which costs money.

Degrowth is the ultimate luxury belief. It’s dreamed up by tenured professors in Paris and progressive think-tank pundits in Brussels. These are people who already have high incomes, comfortable apartments, generous health care and pensions and whose ideas would pull up the ladder on billions of poor people. Rand’s villains always insisted they were acting for the greater good. They always had elaborate plans. They always needed just a little more power to make it work. And they thought little about the terrible burdens their plans would impose on ordinary people.

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They have condemned their children to bitter fights.,

The Suicide Of Europe: Historic EU Migration Pact Goes Into Force Today (RMX)

Six years ago, in 2020, French political leader Marine Le Pen described the Migrant Pact, which was then in the planning stages, as the “suicide of Europe.” She said it would bring 60 to 70 million new migrants to Europe, as Remix News reported at the time. Europe is about to find out just how prophetic its critics have been. On June 12, the highly contested EU Migration Pact officially came into force, instantly triggering a sharp political divide across the continent. Brussels is already signaling a hardline approach toward resistance; the bloc’s own EU Migration Commissioner recently admitted that the Union is preparing a “crackdown” on member states that refuse to comply with the new relocation directives.


At the heart of the controversy is the pact’s mandatory migrant quotas, framed by Brussels as “burden-sharing.” In practice, critics argue this distribution system allows nations like Germany and France a convenient mechanism to offload asylum seekers onto Central and Eastern European nations – such as Poland and Hungary – which have historically maintained strict anti-refugee stances.Europe’s anti-immigration politicians are already responding to what they say is a law that will bring disaster to Europe. Le Pen, six years later, is calling for a “constitutional referendum on immigration.”

“Tomorrow, the Migration Pact will enter into force. It will require the States of the European Union to welcome migrants, under penalty of fines. When we come to power, we will propose to the French a constitutional referendum on immigration, the only means to regain control of our migration policy,” she wrote on X. The financial penalties for defiance are severe. Non-compliant governments face fines as high as €21,000 per migrant, potentially costing dissenting nations hundreds of millions of euros. Furthermore, the pact allows for these financial penalties to be adjusted upward in the coming years, which could quickly escalate the cost of non-compliance into billions of euros.

Meanwhile, other establishment European politicians are celebrating the move. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz tried to frame the migration pact as a positive for controlling immigration. “The migration turnaround has been initiated—nationally and at the European level. As of today, the Common European Asylum System applies: better control and order, faster procedures, and a fair distribution of responsibility. The reform must be implemented effectively. This is how our country will benefit,” wrote Merz. Of course, the EU is also trying to sell the pact on social media as well.

The end goal of the EU Migration Pact
Linguistically, the EU’s emphasis on sharing a migration “burden” represents a stark rhetorical departure from the peak of the 2016 refugee crisis. A decade ago, newcomers were widely championed by Brussels as Europe’s future workforce—the doctors, lawyers, and engineers destined to salvage the continent’s aging pension systems. Today, that idealistic language has been replaced by the utilitarian vocabulary of managing a “burden.” Strategically, the pact acts as a political pressure valve. By reducing the immediate concentration of migrants in Western Europe, Brussels hopes to blunt the rapid electoral rise of populist right-wing parties.

Simultaneously, the framework seeks to introduce demographic diversity into Eastern European nations, which EU leadership has long criticized as being overly homogenous and politically conservative. Over the long term, the naturalization and family reunification of these migrants could fundamentally alter the electoral dynamics in these traditionally conservative regions in favor or left-wing and pro-migration parties. However, Central and Eastern European populations remain overwhelmingly opposed to forced relocation. Decades of polling show a deep societal preference for maintaining current demographic structures, setting the stage for protracted constitutional and political gridlock between national capitals and Brussels.

Hungary under new leadership
The EU’s political chess board has also shifted significantly with Hungary’s recent transition of power. Former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, long the most fierce opponent of Brussels’ migration quotas, has been succeeded by Prime Minister Péter Magyar. A report in Euractiv’s newsletter questions “whether some national governments are ready” for the EU Migration Pact, which has “raised questions over whether Brussels will need to crack down on non-compliant capitals.” In an interview, Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner said they are ready to use “sticks” to make countries like Hungary fall into line.

“There are sticks and carrots in the pact. So, you get funding, you get money, only if you apply the pact,” he said. In fact, Euractiv is quite open that Magyar may be more than willing to sell out the public on the issue of migrant quotas. “Péter Magyar, Hungary’s prime minister, once firmly opposed to the EU migration pact, is now keeping his options open. Pressed by the opposition Fidesz to rule out implementation, he sidestepped the question, saying only that ‘there will be no illegal migrants in Hungary’ under a Tisza government,” wrote Euractiv.

This carefully worded distinction leaves the door wide open for the arrival of migrants who are processed “legally” under the parameters of the new EU framework. Unsurprisingly, Commissioner Brunner has lauded the new Hungarian administration’s shift, calling the government “very constructive” and adding, “Our job is to explain the advantages for Hungary and make them visible on a political level.” Certainly, Brunner was smart enough to not frame the new migration pact as the “suicide of Europe” while trying threaten the new Hungarian government. He can be given that much credit.

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Jun 132026
 


David Hockney Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1972
Hockney died yesterday. RIP


Trump Officials; Iran Deal Delivers Peace, Inspections & Hormuz Reopening (ZH)
Iranian Minister Framed Diplomacy As Mere Tactic to Defeat America (Salgado)
Trump Says Iranians Aren’t Dealing ‘in Good Faith’ (Salgado)
SpaceX Blasts Past $2T, Musk’s Wealth Tops Trillion (ZH)
SpaceX Just Made Cafeteria Workers Millionaires (David Manney)
Globe And Mail: “How To Properly Hate” Elon Musk Ahead Of SpaceX IPO (ZH)
Feds Identify 15,500 Sponsors of Multiple Unaccompanied Kids (Salgado)
McConnell and Murkowski Remind Trump What He’s Up Against (David Manney)
The Mullahs and the Lefty-Left (James Howard Kunstler)
Ukraine Conflict Is ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ of Russian Speakers – Candace Owens (RT)
DNI Tulsi Gabbard Releases New Info on 120 US Govt Funded Biolabs (CTH)
US Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra Deserves a Combat Medal (CTH)
England Is a B**ch (Robert Spencer)
Starmer Heads to NATO Weaker Than Ever (David Manney)

 


 

 


 


The war can restart any minute.

Trump Officials; Iran Deal Delivers Peace, Inspections & Hormuz Reopening (ZH)

Bloomberg is out with some specifics, via an unnamed Trump admin official, providing some further texture to what seems the most ‘hopeful’ (emphasis on the tick marks) development concerning a finalized Memorandum of Understanding to end the war and hash out a final deal… It remains that there are a healthy dose of ifs in here… BBG: US Senior admin officials says Iran deal accomplishes core US objectives and deal reopens Strait of Hormuz [Iran has a very different interpretation of this point]; Iran deal guarantees long-term peace in region and includes inspection regime.
  • If Iran complies, will be rewarded economically.
  • Benefits for Iran accrue if they actually deliver.
  • US expects to sign agreement overt next few days.
  • US to get enriched material under Iran deal.
  • Draft agreement also lifts US blockade and leads to dismantlement of Iran nuclear programme.
  • Iranians don’t get anything upon signing agreement.
  • Not quite at finish line yet, but very close.
  • 80-85% confident a deal gets signed.
  • Iran deal is specific about opening Strait and lifting of blockade and moving of enriched material.
  • Will be significant sanctions relief based on how Iran performs.
  • US seen substantial progress in text of agreement.
  • Regional peace agreement is broad.
  • Agreement on specificity over destruction and removal of enriched material.
  • Confident Israelis will get on board.
  • Some Iranians don’t love this deal, but think dissent is quite minimal.
  • Vice President JD Vance has sought to clarify the US position:

Iran is “not receiving any cash” just for signing a deal, Vice President JD Vance said Friday. Vance said in a post on X that he was “seeing a lot of fake information about a potential deal.” “The Iranians are not receiving any cash, and no funds are being released for simply signing a deal or attending a meeting,” he said, adding that the agreement on the table had been structured, “to ensure that the U.S. and its allies’ concerns are prioritized.”

Only if Iran “meets its obligations, then economic benefits will flow to them and to the entire region.” “This deal has the potential to remake the region and lead to lasting peace,” he said. “The president is going to get us a good outcome, one way or the other.” As a reminder, here are the 14-points issued by the Iranian side on Friday:

  1. An immediate and permanent ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon.
  2. A commitment by Washington not to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs and to respect its sovereignty.
  3. A complete lifting of the maritime blockade within 30 days.
  4. A commitment by the United States to withdraw its forces from the vicinity of Iran.
  5. The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days, according to Iranian arrangements.
  6. The suspension of sanctions imposed on the sale of oil, petrochemical products, and their derivatives, while enabling Iran full access to the financial resources generated from them.
  7. The necessity of presenting reconstruction plans for Iran valued at no less than $300 billion by the United States and its allies.
  8. Conducting negotiations within a 60-day period to reach a final agreement that includes nuclear issues, the full lifting of primary and secondary U.S. sanctions, as well as the cancellation of resolutions by the UN Security Council and the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
  9. Iran reaffirms its commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) not to produce nuclear weapons.
  10. A U.S. commitment, during the negotiation period, not to increase its forces in the region and not to impose new sanctions on Iran.
  11. The release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian funds within 60 days, with half of this amount made available to Iran before the start of negotiations and after signing the memorandum of understanding.
  12. The establishment of a monitoring mechanism to implement the agreement.
  13. The approval of the final agreement through a resolution issued by the UN Security Council.
  14. Final negotiations will not begin before the release of half of the frozen Iranian funds, the suspension of oil sanctions on Iran, and the lifting of the maritime blockade.

The final agreement shall be limited to the fate of enriched materials, uranium enrichment activities, the lifting of sanctions, and the reconstruction program of the Iranian economy, while excluding any discussion of Iran’s missile program and support for resistance movements from the agenda entirely. There’s clearly still some seriously daylight between the warring sides, however, so by close of the weekend – or possibly just within the next hours – the reality of the situation is likely to be made known. Via newswires:

Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Says Iran’s decision-making bodies are meeting about the memorandum – State TV.
IRAN CIVILIAN NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS ACCEPTABLE: US OFFICIAL

Pakistan PM: Final MoU Text Has Been Reached Pakistan Chimes In with PM Sharif declaring that “we can confirm that a final, agreed upon text of the peace deal has been reached and Pakistan is now working closely with both sides to finalize the next steps.” Oil drops lower.

SHARIF: FINAL, AGREED UPON TEXT OF PEACE DEAL HAS BEEN REACHED
PRESIDENT TRUMP TOLD ME IN A SHORT CALL THAT HE CONSIDERED IRANIAN FOREIGN MINISTER ARAGHCHI’S POST “VERY POSITIVE” – AXIOS REPORTER

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Any means to fight the infidel…

Iranian Minister Framed Diplomacy As Mere Tactic to Defeat America (Salgado)

Two days ago, the foreign minister of Iran once again issued a series of threats against the United States, framing diplomacy as merely a tool for forcing the United States out of the area and proudly declaring that America would not be safe so long as its troops were within reach of the Iranian regime.


Below is one of Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi’s posts from June 9. The language of victory is important not because the Iranian regime hasn’t been using it throughout this operation (it has) but because Araghchi clearly has absolutely no sense of humility or chastened suit for peace. He is not talking like someone who believes he has to beg for peace on the victor’s terms. He is talking like someone guaranteed “peace” on his own terms.

The language is incredibly ironic when you reflect that Araghchi’s regime came to power by overthrowing the ancient Persian monarchy, massacred 40,000+ of its own Persian people in January, and still has tens of thousands of Persian dissidents in jail. The terrorist Islamic regime is Muslim first, not Persian first. But since we all know that, I will move on to Araghchi’s other threats. Here, Araghchi is lying about the status of the Strait of Hormuz, but the important point is how he frames diplomacy simply as another tool for forcing the U.S. out of the strait and the waters and airspace around Iran. For him, diplomacy is the flip side of terrorism; he will use first one, then the other, always for the same goal.

Araghchi also expressed solidarity again with “Lebanon,” which actually means with Iran’s terror proxy Hezbollah, which continues to fire on Israeli civilians every day. The Iranian foreign minister recently demanded that Israel stop defending itself from despicable Hezbollah terrorism if there were to be any deal. His fellow Iranian leaders have all had similar comments.

It is a major concern that any deal to which Iranian leaders agree will backstab Israel, just as the Gaza deal did — after all, Hamas-sponsoring Qatar and Iran would never agree to a deal if it didn’t put Israel (and America) at a disadvantage. Then again, the Iranian regime has also violated every single deal it ever made with America or international entities, so perhaps they’re just planning to sign something to buy time while they prepare for their next global jihad push.

Araghchi, like all the regime leaders, believes Allah has commanded unending jihad on non-Muslims. That will never change so long as they are in power, and America will still be fighting Iranian terrorists 50 years from now if we don’t obliterate the regime now.

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They’re not.

Trump Says Iranians Aren’t Dealing ‘in Good Faith’ (Salgado)

No one is surprised to find out that the Iranian regime is dishonest, manipulative, and underhanded. Well, President Donald Trump is frustrated that the Iranian regime still is not ready for peace, but of course, he isn’t part of a religion that teaches Jihad is the noblest calling and a shortcut to Paradise, as the ayatollahs are.


As usual, just after Trump announced the final phases of a peace deal, the terrorist Iranian regime leaked fake terms to explode the process and force a redo. Trump posted on Truth Social on Friday, “The terms that Iran leaked out to the Fake News have NOTHING to do with the terms that were agreed to, in writing. What they said, including their weak and pathetic statement on having a deal, bears no relation to the truth. Very dishonorable people to deal with. With them, there is no such thing as dealing in good faith. AMAZING! Also, their totally rebuffed Drone attack last night against Indian Ships leaving the Hormuz Strait is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. They better get their act together, and FAST!”

The entire ideology of the terrorist Islamic regime of Iran is built around destroying every non-Muslim country, but especially America and Israel. We cannot reasonably expect them to change their entire reason for existence because we eliminated a few of their leaders, whom they believe went straight to eternal reward in paradise. Of course Trump wants peace. So do we all. So have we for 47 years. But peace only happens when both sides want it.

As I reported yesterday, one of the supposed peace negotiators, Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi just issued another series of threats this week in which he framed diplomacy as a tool to alternate with terrorism for victory, and wherein he arrogantly challenged Americans to withdraw altogether if they wanted peace. A subsequent report was that Araghchi and Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohamed “Death to America” Ghalibaf approved this deal without consulting Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who rejected it. That would explain the change from yesterday to today.

Trump even excluded our best and only true Middle Eastern ally, Israel, from the deal to entice Tehran, even though this operation against Iran was always a joint one between Israel and the United States. How can there be a deal ending it without Israel? And why would we include countries that never fired on our behalf, like Hamas-sponsoring Qatar and Israel-hating Jordan, or even sharia-devoted Saudi Arabia and Egypt? True, there is no doubt that Iranian leaders would never sign a deal with Israel, but isn’t that part of the whole reason we attacked the regime to begin with — its virulent religious hatred and terrorism? Trump had at one point said that every country signing onto a deal to end the conflict ought to agree to the Abraham Accords with Israel, and it was an excellent idea. Because countries that will not make peace with Israel ultimately will not live up to peace with America.

Americans and Western Europeans learned before World War II that dictatorial governments do not live up to their agreements. And deals made with the fundamentalist Muslim world have never lasted. If Mojtaba and company want to fight to the last leader and die committing terrorism, I say we gratify their wish and protect our interests at the same time by bombing them straight to Hell. Otherwise, the murderous mullahs will be killing Americans for another generation or more.

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I didn’t see any greatly written articles on the IPO.

SpaceX Blasts Past $2T, Musk’s Wealth Tops Trillion (ZH)

Late in the cash session, hours after SpaceX shares began trading around $150, the stock surged to $176.52, up 31% from the $135 IPO price.


Musk earlier…

Valor Equity Partners founder Antonio Gracias spoke to CNBC about SpaceX: “And what we’re building is the entire stack from, energy to compute, to launch to orbital compute.”

The key threshold was $140; above that level, Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on paper. This caused a meltdown among Democrats and their left-wing comrades…

Meanwhile, China-linked Neville Roy Singham’s NGO network appears to be firing up its anti-capitalist propaganda machine, and the timing is no accident. These leftists view Musk as a major threat because he just gained a whole lot of political firepower, with fresh capital that can be deployed into pro-America candidates, causes, and institutions that directly challenge the left’s progressive empire.

Latest from Bloomberg:
• The record-setting IPO attracted more than $350 billion in demand from institutions and retail investors after its debut on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas under the symbol SPCX
• Everyday investors jumped on the stock, but those using Robinhood Markets Inc. encountered glitches in the first minutes of trading that appeared to recede by about 12:30 p.m. in New York
• Shares climbed as much as 31% in their debut, propelling Musk’s wealth even further
• Options contracts on SpaceX will start trading on Tuesday. Demand is expected to be high for the derivatives, which allow investors to bet on future stock moves or insure against a drop

[..] Elon Musk has been minted, well, on paper, the world’s first trillionaire.

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Feel good.

SpaceX Just Made Cafeteria Workers Millionaires (David Manney)

A cafeteria worker at SpaceX may soon have a brokerage account worth more than most politicians who do not have a (D) after their names will earn in a lifetime. Think about that. A company built to reach orbit just pulled thousands of ordinary workers into wealth, not by passing a bill or making a promise, but by building something people wanted to own. SpaceX’s public debut turned into the largest IPO in history. Shares opened at $150 after pricing at $135 and then closed at $160.95. The offering raised $75 billion, pushed the company’s value above $2 trillion, and turned founder and CEO Elon Musk into the world’s first trillionaire. From Breitbart:


Real estate professionals are already experiencing increased interest from SpaceX employees seeking high-end properties. Gerard Bisignano, a partner at Vista Sotheby s, reports receiving recent inquiries from several longtime SpaceX employees, primarily in their mid-30s to early 40s, searching for homes in California s South Bay area. The region includes affluent coastal communities such as Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Palos Verdes Estates, all within close proximity to SpaceX s California headquarters. They seem to be in a state of disbelief themselves that they re suddenly going to be able to, in some examples, buy a home for their parents. They re going to have all this discretionary income that they can really do what they want, Bisignano said.

Bisignano anticipates a buying surge similar to the one that followed Facebook s 2012 initial public offering, when home values in neighborhoods near the company s headquarters increased by 21 percent. He also expects strong interest in second homes in desirable California locations, including Mammoth Lakes, Palm Springs, and Tahoe. It’s incredible what a trillion dollars can do when it comes from invention instead of redistribution. Cue Bernie, AOC, and Fauxcahontas waxing on about Musk’s trillion, but totally ignoring the windfall by so many people. From Reuters:

“For many investors, SpaceX is the closest thing to investing in the railroads during the Industrial Revolution and they are willing to pay the Elon Musk ` premium for that opportunity,” said Seth Hickle, chief investment officer at Mindset Wealth Management in Indianapolis. Analysts and portfolio managers said investors should brace for volatility, particularly early in SpaceX’s life as a public company, due to its small relative float and high valuation. SpaceX’s $18.7 billion in revenue gives the company a price-to-revenue ratio of roughly 112, far above other megacap stocks.

“The question remains is, what happens in a couple of weeks from now. Right now, people want to bid the stock higher because it’s a winner at this point. Whether it stays that way, that remains to be seen,” said Todd Schoenberger, chief investment officer at Crosscheck Management in Washington, D.C. Retail investors received about 20% of the allocation, far more than the typical IPO, with some even celebrating an allocation of one share. SpaceX executives, including President Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen, celebrated at the Nasdaq market site in New York’s Times Square after ringing the opening bell on Friday. Musk held a separate event for employees in Texas.

The richer story isn’t Musk, though he’ll always draw the cameras. The better story is the people our little commies will ignore: the worker who served lunch, the welder who joined before the applause, the engineer who missed birthdays, and the technicians who trusted stock options when cash might have felt safer. Over 4,000 current and former SpaceX employees are expected to become millionaires. The company’s stock-option culture reached beyond executives and engineers to skilled tradesmen and cafeteria workers. Elon Musk’s executive team built the structure, but the wealth didn’t stop in the boardroom; SpaceX gave employees a stake in the climb, and when the market finally rang the bell, many of them were standing on the pad, too.

America hears many lectures about fairness from people who have never launched anything larger than a press release. SpaceX offered a cleaner lesson: ownership changes lives; equity turns workers into partners. Risk, patience, and competence can still beat the tired politics of resentment. A cafeteria worker with shares is a better answer to class warfare than another committee hearing. SpaceX isn’t a perfect company, and the IPO isn’t a bedtime story. The company posted $18.67 billion in 2025 sales, with Starlink making around 60% of revenue, but it also recorded a $4.94 billion net loss after absorbing heavy AI costs. Investors are paying a steep price for future growth, reusable rockets, satellite internet, Starship, and Musk’s larger bet on space-based AI.

Still, risk is the price of motion. SpaceX has changed the launch business with reusable Falcon 9 rockets, built the world’s largest satellite internet network, and kept pushing toward Starship while older institutions moved at the speed of paperwork. The company now launches more than twice a week and serves NASA, the Pentagon, businesses, and homes around the world. The first lesson of the IPO isn’t that every company should be valued like SpaceX. Most shouldn’t, but the lesson is that wealth creation still works when vision meets discipline and workers get a seat at the table.

Washington can spend trillions and leave families poorer, angrier, and more dependent. SpaceX created a trillion-dollar event and sent thousands of workers home with life-changing stakes. A country that still rewards builders hasn’t lost its way. A company that makes cafeteria workers millionaires has done more than reach Wall Street. It has reminded America that dignity isn’t handed down by bureaucrats.= Sometimes, just sometimes, it comes in the form of a stock grant, earned one shift, one launch, and one risk at a time.

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The Globe and Mail is’t even an American paper…

Globe And Mail: “How To Properly Hate” Elon Musk Ahead Of SpaceX IPO (ZH)

Whether it is Elizabeth Warren, left-leaning unions, or Democrat-aligned NGOs funded by dark money, the common pattern here has been an information campaign aimed at Elon Musk to derail the SpaceX IPO. Their motives are very simple: if the game is about power and money, then Musk potentially becoming the world’s first trillionaire on Friday morning represents a direct threat to the progressive empire they have built.


Just as with President Trump, the left has mounted a permanent pressure campaign of ‘useful idiots’ against Elon Musk because he has poured tens of millions of dollars into political campaigns for pro-America candidates – something Democrats, socialists, and Marxists despise. Then, Musk headed up DOGE in early 2025, which resulted in the defunding of USAID – another move by Musk that caused unhinged left-wing NGOs and Democrats to lose their minds.

The anti-Musk crowd was at it again on Thursday, one day before the SpaceX IPO was set to kick off, when a former Wall Street Journal reporter published an opinion piece in The Globe and Mail titled, “SpaceX is set to make Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate him.” Chris Gay, who appears to have a lot of pent-up hatred for Musk, began the op-ed: “Now that the SpaceX initial public offering is making Elon Musk all but officially the world’s first trillionaire, is it okay to despise him just for being one? To broaden the question: are the billionaires associated with widening inequality a bad look for capitalism?”

The op-ed is less about wealth itself and more of a political framing exercise that uses the SpaceX IPO as the catalyst to recast Musk’s soaring fortune as a governance risk. Gay attempts to launder what appears to be hatred toward Musk, centering his argument on democracy, inequality, and political capture. In other words, the target is not simply Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire, but the perceived threat that his capital, influence, and political alignment pose to the progressive establishment’s grip on institutional power.

Gay wrote, “By donating at least US$250-million to the Trump campaign in 2024, this private citizen positioned himself to kill a congressional budget deal more or less single-handedly, and then to create a bogus federal agency: the “Department” of Government Efficiency. He staffed it with college-age technobrats who among other things effectively dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which millions of people depended upon for life-critical assistance.”

https://twitter.com/mattvanswol/status/2065235081564766275?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2065235081564766275%7Ctwgr%5Ea2c3b0940e655a961d87b8a0006ed510c32ebd13%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Freckless-propaganda-and-mail-op-ed-tells-readers-how-properly-hate-elon-musk-ahead

It’s not just Globe And Mail, the globalist Financial Times pushes the information operation to paint Musk as ‘evil’ …

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Don’t tolerate these freaks.

Feds Identify 15,500 Sponsors of Multiple Unaccompanied Kids (Salgado)

Federal authorities have identified over 15,000 individuals who sponsored three or more unaccompanied and unrelated minors in what could be a major child trafficking exposé. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche emphasized the prevalence of child trafficking during the Biden administration. Notably, Townhall has previously exposed how federal officials and partner NGOs knowingly trafficked minors. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin added that some of the children went through unimaginably horrific abuse, sometimes enduring rape hundreds of times.


Blanche said, “Today, we are announcing the indictments of three individuals, Maritza Azucena Cahuec Coc, her brother Carlos Agustin Cahuec Coc, and Gladys Marina Caal Chen. This was out of the Northern District of Ohio. All three are illegal aliens from Guatemala, who allegedly took part in a wide-raging conspiracy to smuggle more than a dozen children into the United States by scamming the system and exploiting the loopholes created by the last administration.”

Interestingly, a Department of Justice (DOJ) press release clarified that Caal Chen once obtained fraudulent sponsorship herself as an Unaccompanied Alien Child (UAC). The DOJ also mentioned the new conviction of Guatemalan Juan Tiul Xi, who fraudulently obtained sponsorship of and sexually abused a child. Blanche went on, “This is one example, one indictment, but it is not unique. There are over 15,500 super-sponsor cases that we have identified along with DHS. And again, these super-sponsor cases are when somebody sponsors more than three children, unrelated, and they’re unaccompanied minors that come in the United States.”

Mullin also emphasized how heinous it is that the Biden administration lost track of 450,000 UACs as part of the border crisis, and that Democrats continue aggressively to try to defund the border officers who are rescuing the abused and trafficked kids. Mullin didn’t mention it, but countless Democrat politicians and activists are also actively shielding pedophiles and child abusers simply because they’re illegal aliens.

The DHS secretary said, “We found 146,000 kids so far. 146,000 kids. We still have nearly 300,000 missing. We’re investigating reports to where some of these kids claim that they were raped 6[00] to 700 times. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you have kids, if you don’t have kids, I don’t care if you’re a liberal, you’re independent, you’re a Democrat, you’re Republican. If you can’t stand for law enforcement to go find these kids, who are you?”

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“..the swamp doesn’t always wear a Democratic label ..”

McConnell and Murkowski Remind Trump What He’s Up Against (David Manney)

President Donald Trump didn’t need a long speech to identify the problem. Sitting in the Oval Office, he named Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) as two Republicans who still find ways to make Democratic priorities easier and Trump’s agenda harder. For voters who watched Trump’s first term get slowed by Republicans with cold feet, the names sounded familiar. McConnell is no longer Senate Republican leader; Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) holds that job as majority leader. Yet McConnell still carries weight on defense spending as chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, and his instincts remain clear.


When Trump needs Republicans to move as one, McConnell too often sounds like a man searching for the exit ramp. Murkowski has made her brand on being the Republican who wanders off at the worst possible moment. The Senate passed a $70 billion immigration enforcement package by a 52-47 vote, funding ICE and Border Patrol through the end of Trump’s term. Murkowski was the only Republican to join Democrats against it. When the country needed border enforcement funding, she chose the same side as the people who fought Trump’s immigration agenda from the start.

The Senate’s trouble didn’t stop with Murkowski. Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) spent time during the same vote-a-rama trying to reshape or redirect a disputed $1.776 billion fund connected to claims of government targeting. From the New York Post: The Senate approved $70 billion to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol through the end of President Trump’s term early Friday, following weeks of delays amid intra-GOP sniping over a $1.776 billion settlement fund meant to help victims of government weaponization.

The 52-47 final vote approving the legislation came just before 5 a.m., after Republicans defeated more than two dozen amendments in a so-called “vote-a-rama,” including one offered by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) that would have redirected payments from the settlement to members of law enforcement who were injured in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Thune urged Republicans to keep the bill narrow so it could survive the House. Even when the bill passed, the spectacle showed how quickly a few Republicans can turn a governing moment into an intramural fight.

Cassidy has already paid a political price for crossing Trump. He lost his primary after years of anger over his 2021 vote to convict Trump during the second impeachment trial. Tillis has also become one of the names conservatives watch when the question isn’t whether Democrats will resist Trump, but which Republicans will help them do it. The memory of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) still hangs over these fights. In 2017, McCain cast the late-night thumbs-down vote that helped sink the Republican healthcare repeal effort, defeating the bill 51-49. Conservatives remember the moment not merely because one bill failed; they remember it because a Republican senator waited until the critical hour to break the promise voters had heard for years.

Trump’s second term depends on speed, discipline, and Republican votes that stay put. Democrats will, of course, oppose him, bureaucrats will stall him, and courts will test him. None of that surprises anyone. The deeper frustration comes when Republican senators campaign as conservatives and then become procedural artists when Trump’s agenda reaches the floor. McConnell and Murkowski aren’t random names in Trump’s complaint; they’re symbols of an old Washington habit: promise the voters one thing, then explain why it can’t be done once power is available. Tillis and Cassidy fit the same warning in different ways; short-termers and lame ducks can become dangerous because they stop fearing the people who sent them there.

Trump’s Oval Office criticism landed because it carried a familiar truth: the swamp doesn’t always wear a Democratic label. Every so often it wears an R, quotes procedure, talks about institutional norms, and waits for the worst possible moment to reappear. Conservatives remember the moment not merely because one bill failed; they remember it because a Republican senator waited until the critical hour to break the promise voters had heard for years. Trump’s second term depends on speed, discipline, and Republican votes that stay put. Democrats will, of course, oppose him, bureaucrats will stall him, and courts will test him. None of that surprises anyone.

The deeper frustration comes when Republican senators campaign as conservatives and then become procedural artists when Trump’s agenda reaches the floor. McConnell and Murkowski aren’t random names in Trump’s complaint; they’re symbols of an old Washington habit: promise the voters one thing, then explain why it can’t be done once power is available. Tillis and Cassidy fit the same warning in different ways; short-termers and lame ducks can become dangerous because they stop fearing the people who sent them there.

Trump’s Oval Office criticism landed because it carried a familiar truth: the swamp doesn’t always wear a Democratic label. Every so often it wears an R, quotes procedure, talks about institutional norms, and waits for the worst possible moment to reappear.

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“Until you are willing to harm the left more than they are willing to harm you, they will win. It’s really that simple.” —Aimee Terese on X

The Mullahs and the Lefty-Left (James Howard Kunstler)

You’ll just have to stand by on whether this war with Iran is over or not, since the Shia true believers’ practice of Taqiyya is a permission structure for lying to infidels (us) when necessary — like, to advance global chaos that will bring the return of the Hidden Imam (Mahdi) to fill the world with justice, and establish Islamic rule. (Got that?) One might wonder, of course, whether the majority of Iran’s people have had enough of the true believers in charge and their true belief in apocalypse.


President Trump’s promise to bring exactly that down on them seems to have had a clarifying effect. The option remains open to “bomb the shit out of them,” as he put it, while keeping their economy in a Macumba Death grip choke-hold. In preliminary strikes Thursday, the US Military might have demonstrated an ability to go after whatever they have left of missile and drone launch sites. In any case, skeptics abound. . . but, admit it, an actual peace agreement would be quite a coup.

It would distasteful most of all to the mass formation lunatics of America’s Lefty-left “Resistance.” Anything that advances our country’s actual interests is hateful to them. In fact, when you think of it, the Lefty-left is in thrall to the same sort of world-ending chaos as the mullahs and their IRGC henchmen. The mullahs have their vision of the post-apocalyptic Islamic utopia and the Lefty-left has its dream of a post-revolutionary socialist nirvana where everyone is equal (except those who are more equal — and get to boss around the rest of us.)

Yeah, it’s an old story here in Western Civ, this recurring drive to level the existing social hierarchy so as to abolish the tendency of some people to do better in life than others. It never works out. It always leads to mass slaughter of some kind. It always ends in rueful disappointment and a return to the free-for-all that is the human project. The outstanding question might be: why do so many in the West continue to believe it?

The current uprising comes out of the strange conversion of Liberalism to Lefty-left Democratic-Socialist Progressivism. Remember, liberalism was pure live-and-let-live, with an emphasis on minimal government intrusion in our affairs, especially economic affairs. The Liberals of Boomerdom — the campus nirvanas of the 1960s — were contemptuous of government generally, but especially the FBI and the CIA. And, of course, the hippie vanguard was socially and culturally all about the freedom to do your own thing. Freedom of speech was a leading concern.

The Lefty-left, as it evolved under Barack Obama and “Joe Biden,” was about rigid intolerance for opposing ideas and maximal government involvement in your life, especially economic and sexual — making a pass at a girl became subject to litigation. The FBI was loosed on dissenters from Lefty-left policies. Juridical sadism became systematized as Lawfare. The Lefty-left constructed a huge censorship apparatus; no more freedom of speech. They used law and regulation to attempt social leveling; no more discipline in school for black kids because . . . racism! Discriminate against Whitey for jobs. . . anti-racism! Election fraud = “our democracy.” You see how all that went?

Turns out, they wanted to use the government to overthrow the government! And the social order it rode in on! Hence, the ten-year-long crusade to destroy one Donald Trump, the peculiar “Gray Champion” of our Fourth Turning, who turned out to be a staunch counter-revolutionary, that is, an opponent of this new Democratic-Socialist Progressive (wannabe-communist) corps of chaos agents.

One schematic way of understanding this dynamic is Peter Turchin’s theory of Elite Overproduction. By the early 2000s, with anybody and everybody going to college, there were not enough job positions in the real productive economy for this spewage of college degree-holding entrees to the Professional / Managerial Class. By this time, coincidentally, the colleges they were graduating from were infested by three generations of Marxist professors — i.e., adults enjoying cozy institutional security, with no experience in the real world, free to indulge in Marxian revenge fantasies and make them the basis of their teaching.

It was the perfect setup for the emergence of a matrix of NGOs and political activist orgs that could employ all these college graduates which the real economy had no place for. And the new hires were pre-programmed in the ideology of grievance, tinged with racial and sexual animus in addition to economic complaint.

So, voila! — America (and Western Civ generally) became infested with these pernicious Lefty-left operations, which became symbionts of the government themselves, many of the orgs dependent on government (USAID) to fund their activities and pay the management. They got scads of additional money from wealthy freelance chaos maestros like George Soros, Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, Reid Hoffman, Neville Roy Singham and others.

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That’s exactly what it is. Carried out by nazis.

Ukraine Conflict Is ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ of Russian Speakers – Candace Owens (RT)

The Ukraine conflict appears to be an “ethnic cleansing” project aimed at removing the Russian-speaking population from the country’s eastern border regions, US conservative commentator Candace Owens has said. Owens made the remarks in an interview with Russian filmmaker and TV host Nikita Mikhalkov during a discussion about the roots of the conflict and the West’s attitude toward Russia. “I think what’s happening in Ukraine is an ethnic cleansing,” Owens said, arguing that it was “obvious” that large numbers of fighting-age men were being killed, and suggested that “the ultimate goal” of those behind the conflict was to move in “other people” to Ukraine’s border regions.


Moscow has long maintained that the conflict stems from the Western-backed 2014 coup in Kiev, which overthrew then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, and the subsequent military campaign launched by the new authorities against Donbass, where much of the population is Russian-speaking and historically close to Russia. Mikhalkov stressed that Russia was not fighting Ukrainians but “Satan,” arguing that Kiev had turned against Russia, the Orthodox faith and the shared history of the two peoples. Since 2014, Ukraine has effectively banned the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and barred the use of the Russian language in virtually all aspects of life.

Owens agreed with the broader religious framing of the conflict, suggesting that “satanic” forces have established a foothold in the West. She pointed to modern France and the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, which included a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper with drag performers and LGBT imagery, as an example of Satanism and a mockery of Christianity. She also noted that “satanic” forces in the West fear Russia because its emphasis on history gives people a different understanding of the world.

Owens linked that idea to several major revolutions, including the French Revolution of 1789 and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which she described as “satanic.” After taking power, the Bolsheviks launched a violent anti-religious campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church, seizing church property, persecuting clergy and promoting state atheism. Owens stated that the West’s continued hostility toward Russia appears to be driven by the descendants of Russian Jewish families associated with the assassination of Tsar Nicholas II and the Bolshevik Revolution.

She argued that in the early 20th century, many of these families emigrated to the West, where they gained influence and power, including in the media, and have continued to promote anti-Russian narratives. Russia has repeatedly argued that the Ukraine conflict was triggered by Kiev’s persecution of Russian speakers in Donbass and by Western efforts to turn Ukraine into an anti-Russian project. Kiev and its Western backers have rejected Moscow’s justification for the military operation, describing it as an unprovoked invasion.

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40 labs in Ukraine alone?! The mind boggles…

DNI Tulsi Gabbard Releases New Info on 120 US Govt Funded Biolabs (CTH)

Moments ago, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released the first batch in a series of declassified documents highlighting 120 U.S. government biolabs that are operating throughout the world. Many of these biolabs are working on weaponized viruses’ and present a significant threat to public safety.


TULSI GABBARD – “Today, I’m releasing never before seen intelligence revealing new evidence of past US government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries, including Ukraine. In support of President Trump‘s Executive Order to end federal funding of dangerous gain of function research around the world, and increase transparency and accountability, ODNI will continue working with partners across the Administration to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain, and what “research” is being conducted.” WATCH:

DNI Press Release: WASHINGTON D.C. — After months of searching through Intelligence Community holdings and files, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard is revealing new evidence of longstanding United States government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries. These biolabs include labs in Ukraine, which may be at risk of compromise due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. For example, the Intelligence Community previously warned that a US-funded biolab in Ukraine likely housed dangerous pathogens and remained vulnerable to longstanding threats of Russian attack, seizure, or damage.

Until now, evidence regarding the full existence and funding of these laboratories had been knowingly withheld from the American people. The information surrounding the existence, history, locations and funding of these US funded biolabs has been intentionally covered up by powerful people falsely, claiming that they do not exist and accusing anyone who says otherwise to be foreign assets and traitors to America. Many of these U.S. government-funded biolabs are currently or have previously engaged in research using hazardous and highly contagious pathogens, in some cases to include dangerous Gain-of-Function research, with very little visibility or oversight.

President Trump understands the serious threat dangerous Gain-of-Function research poses to the American people, which is why he took decisive action on May 25, 2025, signing EO 14292 to end federal funding of Gain-of-Function research around the world.

“Despite the obvious potential for catastrophic global impact research on dangerous pathogens in biolabs can have, politicians, so-called health professionals like Dr. Fauci, and entities within the Biden administration’s national security team lied to the American people about the existence of U.S.-funded and supported biolabs, and threatened those who attempted to expose the truth. ODNI will continue to work closely with partners across the government to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain to end dangerous Gain-of-Function research that threatens the health and wellbeing of the American people and people around the world,” said DNI Gabbard.

DNI Gabbard issued new guidance to the Intelligence Community directing increased collection on these laboratories and facilities overseas. This directive is already providing new details on clinical trials that are underway at these facilities, raising significant ethical, financial, and security concerns regarding these supposed public health initiatives and U.S. national security.

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Will Canada ever be free again?

US Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra Deserves a Combat Medal (CTH)

Watching U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra discussing current U.S-Canada trade dynamics is to be witnessing one man behind enemy lines trying to explain a situation the audience cannot fathom. It really is remarkable. The longer he is assigned to this almost hopeless task, the more he develops an ‘I don’t give a damn‘ attitude, regardless of the audience size. It’s completely understandable.


The Canadian government controls the information available to the entire country. The Canadian media push that skewed information to the entire country. Then there’s Ambassador Hoekstra; the guy with completely different information, trying against all odds to present a viewpoint that is so fundamentally different the audience cannot grasp it. In this video segment all of the dynamics come into play, but that’s not the real value in this capture. WATCH:

What I would recommend to all those who have followed this genuinely bizarre disassociation topic, is to go to YouTube and read the comments underneath this CTV video. I love and respect our Canadian Treepers who are here with us in the CTH branches of discussion. I cannot fathom what it must be like to live in Canada amid this level of social, cognitive dissonance. You have my utmost respect and sympathy.

Within all of the Canadian free trade agreements (FTAs), regardless of nation, there is something called a baseline memorandum of understanding (MOU). That MOU outlines how the trade agreement for goods sold into Canada are contingent upon Canada retaining access to the U.S. market. When the USMCA is dissolved, almost every single FTA organized by the Canadian government that matters, collapses. Canadians have no concept of what is coming.

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“… there’s no mistaking it..”

England Is a B**ch (Robert Spencer)

The news is as appalling, infuriating, sick-making, inexcusable, and earth-shaking, but one thing it isn’t is surprising. The revelation that one of the chief financiers of the principal forces arrayed against Britain, and the West in general, is the British government, is all too much in keeping with the suicidal leftism we have seen from that government (whether the Tories or Labour are in power) for years now. So of course they’re funding ISIS. What else would they do? And the rot is even deeper than that.


The Daily Mail reported Monday that the British government “gave more than £28 billion in taxpayer cash to its enemies over six years, a leaked government dossier revealed last night.” And not just any enemies, either. If the British government had really given 28 billion pounds to its enemies, it would have forked over the dough to Tommy Robinson. But instead, the learned solons in London gave the money to their friends. You know, like ISIS.

The Mail states that “terrorists such as the Islamic State in Syria group, hostile states including Russia and criminal gangs received the vast sum from foreign aid, Covid relief loans and the benefits system, which an expert said was an ‘ATM for terrorists.’” And as these things always do, it gets worse. The report “revealed that Britain helped companies linked to the Chinese military pursue their own research between 2015 and 2021.” The Islamic State, Russia, China, and criminal gangs: all on the British taxpayer dole.

How could this have happened? Pondering that question called to mind a phrase I have not heard in decades, since the days when I was a young Marxist enjoying the benefits of an expensive university education: “Inglan is a b**ch.” (“Inglan” is, of course, Jamaican patois for “England.”) This pungent phrase is actually the title of a catchy little song, the handiwork of a Jamaican “dub poet” named Linton Kwesi Johnson, who has lived in the land for which he has such contempt since 1963 (he is now 73 years old).

Linton Kwesi Johnson penned this classic tune about the miseries of living in his adopted homeland in 1980, and one of my fellow employees at Revolution Books, the Revolutionary Communist Party’s bookstore, introduced me to it not long after that. It never occurred either to her or to me that it was ironic in the extreme for Johnson to be complaining about Britain from Britain; after all, if he hated it there so much, why didn’t he just move back to Jamaica?

For whatever reason, he didn’t, and his choice to remain in the country he calls a “b**ch” has been rewarding indeed. He said in 2018 that he became a “dub poet” as a “way of expressing the anger, the passion of the youth of my generation in terms of our struggle against racial oppression. Poetry was a cultural weapon in the black liberation struggle, so that’s how it began.” He claimed in the same interview that “it was a myth that immigrants didn’t want to fit into British society. We weren’t allowed.”

Without a trace of irony, that same interview notes that Johnson “became only the second living poet to have his work published by Penguin Modern Classics, and was the 2012 winner of the Golden PEN award for his ‘distinguished service to literature.” Another laudatory profile details some of the numerous honors Johnson has received in the UK: “LKJ was awarded the C Day Lewis Fellowship in 1977. He became the writer-in-residence for the London Borough of Lambeth for that year. He went on to work as the Library Resources and Education Officer at the Keskidee Centre, the first home of Black theatre and art. He has been made an Associate Fellow of Warwick University (1985), an Honorary Fellow of Wolverhampton Polytechnic (1987),” and on and on.

Yeah, wow, “Inglan” is really a “b**ch,” eh? Britain didn’t persecute Linton Kwesi Johnson. It didn’t consign him to menial work, or deny him work altogether. Instead, it made him a celebrity, a wealthy, cosseted giant of literature and music. What a b**ch!Laden with honors, treated with unstinting respect and deference in his dotage from the British intelligentsia, Linton Kwesi Johnson is just one of many cultural heroes in the West who hate and denigrate the very cultures that celebrate them. The UK, the U.S., Canada and continental Europe have made revered figures out of numerous people who heap contempt on the native people and their culture and civilization. The situation has advanced to the point that one can hardly expect to have a voice in the culture at all unless one despises that culture.

In light of that, is it really all that shocking that the British government would be handing over taxpayer money to ISIS? This wasn’t just appeasement on the order of “We’ll pay you not to hurt us.” It was an act of self-abnegation of an inferior toward a superior. The British government is filled top to bottom today with people who have raised on the idea that the native culture is rotten. Why shouldn’t they hand over the money British citizens have earned to people who are not tainted with Britishness? The Jamaican transplant Linton Kwesi Johnson, hater of the land that welcomed him, his head bowed down with the weight of his medals and honors, is the symbol of contemporary Britain. And it looks as if he was right all along: “Inglan,” financier of the Islamic State, really is a b**ch.

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Starmer’s roleis to waste away the last bits of respect Englan’ has.

Starmer Heads to NATO Weaker Than Ever (David Manney)

Keir Starmer lost two defense officials in one day, and both men left over the same basic charge: Britain’s defense plans don’t match the danger in front of it. John Healey, the UK defense secretary, resigned today. Al Carns, the minister for the armed forces, followed him out the door hours later. For a prime minister already limping through 2026, the timing could hardly be worse. Healey told Starmer that the government’s financial settlement for defense fell well short of what’s required, writing that Starmer and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves had not committed enough money to keep Britain safe while threats from Russia, Iran, and other hostile powers grew sharper.


The Guardian reviews portions of Healey’s letter and applies their interpretation of the message behind the words. “You have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.” A mere 250 words in, and we get to the crux. Starmer, Healey notes, recognised both the scale of the threat and the need for more funding, based around the defence investment plan (Dip), which had been due this week but is now delayed. Healey then spells out what many in Westminster assumed – that the delay was owing to wrangling with the Treasury, and that Rachel Reeves’s department was blocking the sorts of sums Healey wanted.

Notably more wounding is the notion that Starmer was “unable” to stop this. Healey, it should be remembered, was among four cabinet ministers who spoke to the prime minister shortly after May’s local elections, asking him to consider his future given the heavy Labour losses. Here, Healey does not sound convinced that Starmer has since got a grip on things. Fox News reports that the resignations reached a “seismic” crisis for Starmer. Healey’s departure stemmed from a dispute over the delayed Defense Investment Plan (DIP) — the government’s long-promised roadmap for military investment and readiness — and as NATO allies face renewed pressure from Trump to boost defense spending.

“John Healey’s resignation is a seismic moment for the government and the Ministry of Defense,” Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Senior Associate Fellow Ed Arnold told Fox News Digital. “For the government, it creates a sequence of political headaches in terms of a replacement, and trying to get the Defense Investment Plan published.” Carns, a decorated former Royal Marines officer who served multiple tours in Afghanistan, said he couldn’t defend the spending level in good conscience from the government’s front bench. Starmer quickly named Dan Jarvis, a former British Army officer and Labour MP, as secretary of state for defense. Jarvis brings military experience, which helps.

Still, a hurried appointment can’t erase the sight of two senior defense figures walking away at the same moment Britain needs a steady voice. Governments survive resignations, but they have a more difficult time surviving resignations that confirm what critics already suspected. Starmer won a landslide in 2024 and looked, for a brief season, like a man who had pulled Labour out of exile and into command. Two years later, the room feels colder. Labour took heavy losses in the May 2026 local elections, including defeats in areas the party once treated like family ground. Starmer accepted responsibility and vowed to keep going, but the result fed open pressure inside Labour and gave Nigel Farage’s Reform UK a national opening. From Reuters:

“The main beneficiary was the populist Reform UK party of Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, which gained more than 1,000 council seats in England, and will likely form the main opposition in Scotland and Wales to the pro-independence Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru.” Early results underscored the fracturing of Britain’s traditional two-party system, with the once-dominant Labour and Conservative parties losing votes not only to Reform, but to the left-wing Green Party at the other end of the political spectrum, and to nationalists in Scotland and Wales.

The defense resignations deepen a problem Starmer had already made for himself. Earlier this year, he restricted the United States from using British bases for offensive strikes against Iran, allowing only limited defensive missions against Iranian missile targets. President Donald Trump was dealing with a dangerous Middle East moment, and Starmer chose a narrow lane. He may have thought he was showing caution, but he also reminded Washington that Britain’s help now comes wrapped in hesitation.

Now comes NATO. The alliance meets in Ankara, Turkey, on July 7 and 8, with Secretary General Mark Rutte chairing the summit. President Trump is expected to press allies hard on defense spending, and Britain will arrive with fresh churn at the top of its defense team.

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Jun 122026
 
 June 12, 2026  Posted by at 10:03 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  23 Responses »


Tomb of the Diver, Greek city of Paestum in Magna Graecia, Italy 470 BC


‘They Should Have Made a Deal’: Trump Wants To Seize Kharg Island (Green) f
Trump: Iran Deal Should Be Done ‘Pretty Quickly’ (ZH)
Trump’s 3 Bad Options in Iran (James Rickards)
Bessent To Use Frozen Funds To Reimburse Gulf Allies: ‘Iran Will Pay’ (ZH)
SpaceX Prices Biggest Ever IPO At $135 Per Share (ZH)
After SpaceX IPO, Jefferies Lays Out Five Takeaways For Space Boom Into 2030s (ZH)
Merkel Repeats Call for Crackdown on Free Speech (Turley)
Europe Pondering Its Cashless Economy, Return To Currency (JTN)
Eurotroika’s Terms of Ukrainian Settlement Unacceptable — Zakharova (TASS)
USPS Proposes Halting Delivery of Unverified Mail Ballots (AmG)
Jerry Seinfeld Just Triggered the Left With Three Words (Matt Margolis)
Trump Nominates US Attorney Jay Clayton as DNI (ET)
Professors Behind California Wealth Tax Threaten Action (Turley)
Britain Goes Full Airstrip One (Stephen Green)

 


 

 


 


Could just as easily be a 4-week old headline.

‘They Should Have Made a Deal’: Trump Wants To Seize Kharg Island (Green)

Iran “should have made a deal,” conservative radio superstar Dana Loesch quipped on Thursday, reacting to President Donald Trump’s threat that U.S. forces “will be taking Kharg Island and other oil infrastructure” in the near future. Are we in the endgame now? At last?


UPDATE: Nope. Trump, according to the WSJ, now says he’s canceled the strikes “after Tehran’s leadership and other parties negotiating a deal to end the conflict approved ‘discussions and final points.'” Echoing what I wrote below, whatever went on behind the scenes, Trump’s threat seems to have gotten what he wanted — even if what he wanted was for the talks to drag on while Iran’s economy continues crumbling. But do read the rest of the column because it includes some fun tidbits. Original post follows.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Iran’s official news outlet, Fars, says Tehran has not agreed to the text of any agreement, for whatever that’s worth. And I officially give up! Heh.

LAST UPDATE, I SWEAR: Everything to you need to know (for now) is here: ‘We Just Made a Great Settlement of the War With Iran.’

Kharg Island sits near the northern end of the Persian Gulf — or as Trump might think of it, the Other Gulf of America — almost due east from Kuwait City. It’s only a few miles long, but as you can see from this image I captured from Apple Maps, it’s virtually covered in oil infrastructure. Oil and LNG representing more than 90% of Iran’s energy exports are processed at Kharg, stored in those massive tank farms, then offloaded to supertankers for sale around the world. Tehran could divert to other facilities, but at a comparative trickle.

It’s a single point of failure. Saddam Hussein understood this, and attacked Kharg repeatedly during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988. But Iraq lacked the air power to do much harm, and he certainly lacked the naval power to seize it. The U.S. military has no such limitations. In fact, a report earlier this week revealed that the Pentagon ordered elements of the 82nd Airborne Division to Israel in March for just such an eventuality.

Kharg Island
“A military source involved in war planning tells me the deployment is tied to new U.S.-Israeli joint contingency plans, completed since February, for seizing Kharg Island and carving out coastal territory inside Iran,” Ken Klippenstein wrote. According to his report, the soldiers deployed to Israel are from the 2nd “Geronimo” Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment. The 501st dropped behind Nazi lines in Normandy on D-Day, fought the Battle of Hamburger Hill in Vietnam, was one of the first units sent to Afghanistan after 9/11, spent a year in Iraq during some of the worst fighting there, and much more. In short, the 501st is storied, and its men are badasses. But I digress.

If Trump does order in the Marines, Airborne, or other forces, I suppose it will prove the first real test of American troops against enemy drones. Godspeed, fellas. Trump’s full statement — on Truth Social, of course — reads: “The United States will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, and all other forms of Defense, together with most of its offensive capability, are GONE!), VERY HARD TONIGHT. At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America.”

He finished with the now S.O.P., “Thank you for your attention to this matter!” which I just love. All that said, this could be more of Trump’s bluster, purposely designed to keep Iran’s Remnant Regime guessing, off-guard, and wondering if they’ll ever get a deal before their money runs out. Lowy Institute’s R.N. Prasher this week was hardly the first to ask whether Trump’s “protracted” negotiations are “part of U.S. strategy” to bring Iran “to an economically and logistically weak state where it has no option” but to give up its nuclear program and stranglehold on Hormuz. Despite a moment of impatience I suffered last month — and honestly, hits me at least once a day — Trump likely has turned the Mullahs’ “rug-merchant” negotiation tactics against them.

But that doesn’t mean that Trump hasn’t run out of patience, too, particularly after this week’s downing of a U.S. Army helicopter over the Gulf. Only the White House knows for sure, so stay tuned.

Read more …

Or not.

Trump: Iran Deal Should Be Done ‘Pretty Quickly’ (ZH)

President Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that he had cancelled scheduled U.S. strikes and bombings against Iran, citing rapid progress on a U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding (MOU) aimed at extending a fragile ceasefire and launching formal negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program. In a Truth Social post and a phone interview with the New York Post, Trump said the agreement was “pretty much all wrapped up,” with documents at a “fairly final stage.” He added that he had spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and claimed the deal had received approval at the highest levels in Iran and from multiple regional players, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others. The U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports will remain in place until the deal is signed, with time and location of the signing to be announced shortly.


The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office later confirmed that Trump spoke with Netanyahu this evening specifically about the emerging MOU. According to the readout, Netanyahu expressed appreciation for Trump’s commitment that any final agreement would require the removal of enriched nuclear material, dismantling of enrichment infrastructure, limits on missile production, and an end to Iran’s support for terrorist proxies – even though Israel is not a direct party to the MOU. Earlier in the day, Trump had sharply escalated rhetoric by threatening to seize Iran’s key oil-export hub at Kharg Island and hit Iran “very hard,” a move widely seen as leverage that may have accelerated the diplomatic opening.

“President Trump spoke this evening with Prime Minister Netanyahu regarding the emerging memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Iran to enter into negotiations,” the PM’s office wrote on X. “Even though Israel is not a party to the memorandum of understanding, the Prime Minister expressed his appreciation for President Trump’s commitment that the final agreement at the conclusion of negotiations will include the removal of enriched material, the dismantling of enrichment infrastructure, limits on missile production, and the cessation of Iran’s support for its terrorist proxies in the region.”

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Rickards says Iran is winning. Wonder what he means by that.

He’s OK with Iran having nuclear bombs. That’s his choice. Trump chooses differently. As does Israel.

Rickards draws comparisons to WWII and Vietnam. Is that wise?

Trump’s 3 Bad Options in Iran (James Rickards)

Trump has three ways out of the Iran War. While the choices are all bad for Trump, they are not all bad for the U.S. economy. Some are better than others. Trump’s choice will not only determine the outcome of the war, it will determine the path of the U.S. economy over the year to come.


Choice One is surrender.
Basically, the U.S. would withdraw from the Iran War without having achieved any of its major goals (not that those goals have ever been well articulated by the administration). Iran would still have its highly-enriched uranium (HEU). The Iranian regime, consisting of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei or a successor, would still be in charge. The Iranian people would be largely unified behind new leadership who are younger than the leaders Trump killed. This new group, in their 40s instead of their 70s and 80s, would feel more nationalist and more comfortable in power than their predecessors.

Iran would suffer enormous infrastructure damage, but it can repair and replace those assets over time. Most importantly, Iran would have de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz — something it has threatened but never actually accomplished in the 47 years since the Iranian Revolution.

Choice Two is stalemate.
This is basically the current state of the war. Calling it a ceasefire is a joke. Iran recently attacked the Kuwait airport and Israel. The U.S. bombed radar facilities in Iran. Israel struck Iranian energy infrastructure. Hezbollah and Israel continue to fight it out in southern Lebanon. This is a low-intensity conflict — all sides back off after a few strikes. But it’s not a ceasefire.

The stalemate suits Iran because it gives them time to dig out missile sites, build more drones and receive financial assistance from Russia and China. The stalemate suits the U.S. because it gives us time to rebuild stockpiles of cruise missiles and Patriot anti-missiles.= Most importantly, the stalemate favors Iran because the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Iran can suffer economic consequences longer than the world can do without Persian Gulf oil, liquid natural gas, helium, nitrates and sulfur. It’s a game of chicken, and the U.S. will swerve first because it has more to lose.

Choice Three is escalation.
The logic is simple. Trump won’t surrender, and the game of chicken can’t go on much longer.= Trump will unleash the U.S. Department of War to bomb Iranian infrastructure, including bridges, railroads, key highways and telecommunications. Bombing may include sites believed to hold the Iranian HEU. More extreme versions of escalation could include a special operations mission to seize the Iranian HEU or precision bombing aimed at Iran’s oil export facilities on Kharg Island, or even desalination plants. The idea is to bomb Iran into submission and get the deal Trump wants while avoiding the stigma of surrender.

All three choices will fail. A surrender might be papered over with some kind of memorandum involving an “agreement to agree” in the future, but the world will see it for what it is — just another Iranian stalling tactic that preserves the status quo for Iran and solidifies the rule of a new younger regime. Iran won’t give Trump the satisfaction of saving face because Iran is winning. Trump won’t accept surrender because of ego and the bad optics. Neither side will accept the deal the other wants. So there will be no deal.

Choice Two will fail because the current stalemate is unsustainable. The world has been without Persian Gulf oil exports for almost four months. A combination of Gulf oil already underway in tankers before the Strait was closed, some increased production from the U.S. and Russia and a drawdown of strategic reserves by various countries has kept the global industrial economy going. Those lifelines are running out. There is no more Gulf oil in tankers on their way. Reserves are reaching critically low levels, at which pumps and pipelines begin to break down. The U.S. and Russia can supply some oil to their friends, but there’s not enough to go around.

Time is almost up on the stalemate. Something has to give. Escalation may be attempted, but it will fail also. There is no history of a side being bombed into submission without boots on the ground. Germany tried to bomb Britain into submission during the Battle of Britain, the first major military campaign fought entirely with air forces. It failed. Germany was never able to invade. The firebombing of Dresden did not defeat the Germans. It took D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge and the Red Army marching on Berlin after destroying Warsaw.

The firebombing of Tokyo, which used napalm on wooden structures, did not defeat the Japanese. The atomic bombs may have ended World War II, but that’s an exception that proves the rule. Is anyone up for using nukes in Iran? Ten years of bombing North Vietnam did not win the war in Vietnam. The U.S. never invaded the North in that war. In short, bombing doesn’t work without a land invasion.Invading Iran would be a military undertaking on a massive scale. With 80 million people and a landmass roughly the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi River, Iran would require perhaps 60 divisions organized into six armies and two Army Groups, backed by air power, naval aviation and submarine-launched missiles.

Anything short of that would risk defeat. You can escalate all you want, but it won’t win the war. Surrender would be the best result for the U.S. economy.

Read more …

If Russia/Ukraine is any example; be careful.

Bessent To Use Frozen Funds To Reimburse Gulf Allies: ‘Iran Will Pay’ (ZH)

US Treasury Secretary Bessent announced on X Thursday morning that Washington is moving forward on a plan to compensate America’s Gulf regional allies for damage sustained during Iranian counterattacks on their energy and civic infrastructure. He made clear that any damage to Gulf allies would be paid for with frozen Iranian funds, which Tehran leadership has long blasted as blatant theft. According to Bessent’s latest announcement: “The Iranian regime will lose the zero-sum game it is playing.” The Treasury Secretary listed out the following new policy and plan:


Any damage it inflicts on our allies in the Gulf will be paid for with funds extracted from Iranian Accounts.
Any tolls paid to the Persian Gulf Strait Authority will be offset by funds extracted from their accounts.
Every attack Iran launches will only deepen the economic and financial consequences it faces.

via Reuters – Interestingly, there is implicit here a possible acknowledgement that US forces won’t be able to immediately be able to stop Iran from enacting its toll collection protocol, which it has hinted is being done in coordination – or at least with an ‘understanding’ – from Oman, which itself has come under pressure from the Trump administration of late. Over eighty oil, gas, and vital infrastructure facilities across the Gulf have been hit – with most of the attacks having occurred in March and April – with one recent report estimating up to $58 billion in damage. Iran has sought to justify these attacks as ‘retaliation’ for these Gulf countries hosting American bases during the US unprovoked assault on the Islamic Republic.

An unnamed US official had previously told ABC’s Senior White House correspondent Selina Wang last weekend: “Treasury will utilize all tools available to allow Iranian assets to be made available to our Gulf allies to support rebuilding and repairs for any future damage caused by Iran.” “The Secretary has also directed his team to assess conditions amongst our Gulf allies and request comprehensive estimates of the costs associated with repairing damage Iran has inflicted since the start of the conflict,” the source had added.

Also as part of that earlier reporting, it was revealed: The Iranian assets could include frozen assets and ships the U.S. has seized. The administration is reaching out to Gulf allies right now and asking for their evaluation. This is only likely to further derail efforts to get Tehran and Washington back to the negotiating table. Already the US has balked at Iran’s own insistent it be given reparations for damage done. Iran is meanwhile still demanding that its billions in funds long frozen by Washington be given back as part of a deal. The Trump administration has so far rejected this, at least in terms of its public-facing position.

Read more …

FOMO.

SpaceX Prices Biggest Ever IPO At $135 Per Share (ZH)

While there was little doubt as to SpaceX’s actual IPO price, which due to its novel structure was always going to be $135, and unlike the proposed IPO price ranges as is customary for other initial offerings, moments ago SpaceX (SPCX) made it official when it filed a free writing prospectus (FWP) which confirmed the company sold 555.6 million shares at $135 each, for a total size of $75 billion (excluding the greenshoe), making history with the biggest-ever IPO, launching it into the top ranks of the largest public companies and putting founder Elon Musk on the verge of becoming the world’s first trillionaire.


For context, SpaceX is more than double the size of the previous largest IPO – Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion listing in 2019. The SpaceX registration statement was declared effective June 11. The details of the pricing are shown below. At $135, SpaceX will have a market value of $1.77 trillion. Accounting for employee stock options and restricted share units, the pricing gives it a fully diluted valuation of about $1.8 trillion. SpaceX’s market value will rank it among the top 10 public companies globally, and make it larger even than Musk’s own Tesla. According to Polymarket, there is a 84% chance the IPO closes above its offering price tomorrow, and a 46% chance it rises more than 20%.

SpaceX, which made a net loss of $4.9bn in 2025, is made up of three businesses: space exploration, including its Falcon and Starship rockets; connectivity, such as its Starlink satellite constellation providing high-speed internet access; and artificial intelligence, though its xAI division. Musk’s fan base in the retail trading community is a crucial component of the deal: they have placed more than $100 billion in orders for the stock, Bloomberg reported, far more than the 20% of shares that had been reserved for them.

Yet not everyone is so excited. Noted short-seller James Chanos on Wednesday called it “a hopes-and-dreams IPO” driven by enthusiasm for Musk and artificial intelligence rather than the fundamentals of a company that has yet to post a profit.“The total addressable market for space is infinite,” Chanos, founder of Chanos & Co., said at the iConnections Global Alts conference in New York on Wednesday. “You can build whatever stories you want — colonies on Mars, factories on the moon, data centers in space — to justify the valuation.”

Investment research group Morningstar calculated that SpaceX is worth only $63 a share – half the IPO price – and warns there is “a major disconnect between market expectations and underlying fundamentals”. Michael Field, the chief equity strategist at Morningstar, suggests investors should sit out the IPO and wait for “a more attractive entry point down the line”. “We believe the business has real strengths, particularly in Starlink, but with so many unknown and untested technologies underpinning much of the valuation price, particularly within the AI business, we think the valuation is extremely speculative,” Field said.

Still, even among the skeptic about the company’s current valuation, many acknowledge Musk’s achievements building Tesla and SpaceX into giants – and making money for investors, thanks in part to his loyal retail investor fanbase. Coupled with rule changes that could fast track the stock into benchmark gauges like the Nasdaq-100 Index (if not the S&P where there will be at least a one year delay), demand from passive funds and retail investors unable to buy at the IPO price should set the stage for a solid cohort of buyers for shares of the rocket, satellite and AI company once they start trading.

“It’s probably the most hopeful IPO,” said Kim Forrest, chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital Partners, adding that she doesn’t buy IPOs. Buyers of SpaceX “want to be part of the future,” she said. “And I think that’s oddly hopeful in this time when we’re moving between the poles of greed and fear.”

As Bloomberg notes, SpaceX is the first of three major IPOs expected to capitalize on stock investors’ appetite for the leading AI companies, a seemingly insatiable demand that has propelled benchmark US indexes to records this year despite the acceleration in inflation and economic disruption caused by the war in Iran. Anthropic PBC and OpenAI, two of the company’s AI competitors, are expected to go public as soon as this year and could seek valuations of more than $1 trillion each, so the performance of SpaceX’s stock will be as closely scrutinized by Silicon Valley venture capitalists as it is by Wall Street traders. The deluge of public equity, on top of an $85 billion equity offering from Alphabet Inc. and the potential for other big-tech firms to follow suit, is triggering a debate over whether there is enough investor demand to meet the incoming supply. “

It’s a big deal as a kind of precursor for Anthropic and OpenAI,” said Anthony Saglimbene, chief market strategist at Ameriprise. “When I look at all three of those and the amount of capital that these companies are raising, it tells me that the demand for AI is still very strong even though we’ve seen more volatility. And I think some of that volatility in the market has been positioning around the expectations for these IPOs.”

Read more …

Accountants in space.. Why am I thinking of Miss Piggy?

After SpaceX IPO, Jefferies Lays Out Five Takeaways For Space Boom Into 2030s (ZH)

Friday’s SpaceX IPO will be a defining moment not only for capital markets but also for the booming space industry and Elon Musk’s broader industrial empire, which has catapulted America to the lead in the space race against Communist China and Russia. Ahead of the four-times-oversubscribed SpaceX IPO, we explained to readers how to profit from the incoming data center boom in low-Earth orbit and broke down the mechanics of the IPO in an easy-to-understand format. Next, we want to give readers the opportunity to understand where the space industry is headed to position bullish bets, as this industry will likely have tailwinds for years to come. It’s all about following the money.


We are leaning on Jefferies analyst Aniket Shah’s Wednesday report, which provided a roadmap for understanding the space industry through five easy takeaways. 1. The global space economy has reached $600bn, potentially tripling to $1.8trn by 2035. Commercial activity accounts for 80% and spans satellite TV, broadband, GPS infrastructure, and satellite manufacturing. The remaining 20% is government spending. Within the investable “backbone” of physical infrastructure, state-sponsored spending is projected to grow faster than commercial, rising from $125bn to $320bn (+256%) vs $205bn to $435bn (+212%) for commercial over the next decade. Defense is the fastest-growing category within the space economy.

2. Th e US accounts for 60% of global government spending on space; China ranks second. US government space spending is ~$80bn, more than the rest of the world combined. China spends ~ $20bn, but this figure is not PPP-adjusted, meaning its effective spending power is materially closer to the US than the nominal gap implies. Japan is a notable third player, having designated space as one of Prime Minister Takeshi’s 17 strategic sectors (see here & here). China has similarly identified space as a strategic area in its 15th Five-Year Plan (see here & here).

3. Space Force budget surged 40% in one year, fueled by the Golden Dome program. Golden Dome is a top strategic priority driving the budget surge. Golden Dome is a multi-layered missile defense initiative that integrates space-based sensors, interceptors, and AI-enabled command and control to address ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missile threats. Space Force now commands ~$40bn and the Missile Defense Agency ~$10bn, totaling ~$50bn, far exceeding NASA’s budget ($24.4bn).

4. SpaceX has captured a structural share of federal space dollars. It is NASA’s largest commercial contractor and plays a critical role across launch services, communications, IT, and the broader data layer of the space architecture. The US government has effectively outsourced significant space activity to SpaceX, creating an inextricable linkage between federal spending priorities and the company’s business.

5. US vs China: Moon Race 2.0 is accelerating. The rivalry plays out across three dimensions: lunar programs, global coalitions, and codified policies.

Lunar programs: The US targets a crewed lunar landing by 2028 and a lunar outpost by 2030; China targets a crewed landing by 2030 and an outpost by 2035.
Global coalitions: The US-led Artemis Accords have 67 signatories, while the China-Russia International Lunar Research Station coalition has <20.
Codified policies: President Trump has issued executive orders on Iron Dome for America, commercial space competition, and ensuring US space superiority. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan also prioritizes space competitiveness.

Read more …

Merkel sees the world through post Cold War East Germany eyes. The State decides, not the people.

Merkel Repeats Call for Crackdown on Free Speech (Turley)

The European Union recently announced the first recipients of its new European Order of Merit, the organization’s highest award. The headliner was Angela Merkel, former Federal Chancellor of Germany, who indeed personifies the European Union for both her fans and her critics. For many years, some of us have criticized Merkel as one of the leading forces behind European censorship efforts that have eviscerated the “Indispensable Right.” Not surprisingly, Merkel called for more censorship and attacks on free speech to a thrilled audience of EU bureaucrats and globalists.


In one of the most ironic moments, Merkel declared, “Europe was not handed to us. It was built treaty by treaty, crisis by crisis and by people who chose solidarity over division and cooperation over self-interest.” Indeed, it was not handed to them. As I discuss in my new book, “Rage and the Republic, the EU was formed by design to incrementally get citizens in Europe to give up their national identities and rights: The EEC worked to remove barriers to trade and coordinate national regulations to achieve greater uniformity. As nations conformed to such transnational standards, the final step toward transnational governance became less of a conceptual barrier for citizens, particularly younger citizens…

…The evolution of the EU is a cautionary tale. It began with assurances of marginal coordinating bodies and policies over areas like nuclear power and scientific research. Through this planned incrementalism, each insular move was defended on its narrow purpose while dismissing objections as nationalistic or conspiratorial. That planned incrementalism worked brilliantly in getting citizens to accept transnational governance.

Merkel was critical in that effort. She is blamed for opening the borders to a flood of undocumented immigrants that has caused rising violence and protests throughout Europe. However, her crowning jewel was the crackdown on free speech. She can honestly claim that Germans (and Europeans as a whole) have fewer rights after her public service. She increased the power of government, stripped away free speech rights, and reduced national identities without firing a shot.

Merkel consistently opposed free speech, building a censorship system that gave the government ever greater control over speech. Her decision to first apologize to authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for a satirical poem and then approve the prosecution of the comedian is a shocking and chilling disgrace. Now, she is throwing her support behind a crackdown on “hate speech” on social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube — radically expanding the already broad scope of government regulation of speech.

Merkel declared, “I support efforts by Justice Minister Heiko Maas and Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere to address hate speech, hate commentaries, devastating things that are incompatible with human dignity, and to do everything to prohibit it because it contradicts our values.” Merkel was a driving force in using such subjective standards as “compatibility with human dignity” as a foundation for government-imposed speech controls. Merkel also threatened social media companies, warning they would face a government crackdown if they failed to get rid of “fake news.” Merkel insisted that such postings must be dealt with by the companies or the government will step in.

In her speech in May to the EU, Merkel doubled down on her attacks on free speech as a threat to the world order. She called for the prosecution of American companies for spreading “disinformation” and “hate” online. She denounced the “so-called social media” platforms as still not facing “accountability for lies.” She added, “I can only encourage you to continue regulating social media.”I could think of no better recipient for the first European Order of Merit. No one better sums up EU values than Angela Merkel and her unrelenting campaign against free speech. For globalists who have called for “A New World Order with European Values,” Merkel is the perfect personification of a globalist dream of a world of regulated speech and transnational government.

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Holland: no cash.

Greece: all cash.

Europe Pondering Its Cashless Economy, Return To Currency (JTN)

Sweden has led the way in Europe’s transition to a cashless economy, being among the first to have credit or debit card readers at points of sale – even for something as low-cost as a newspaper so that customers no longer had to dig in their pockets for coins or paper currency. But now, the country that led Europe’s modern march toward a cashless society is among those reconsidering that journey amid growing concerns about cyberattacks, conflict, power outages, privacy and national resilience. Increasingly, policymakers in Sweden and other countries that have been pushing the trend, including Denmark, Estonia, Finland and the Netherlands are realizing that cash still matters.


Most transactions in these countries remain cashless. But the adoption rate for cashless transactions has leveled out, and now the government is creating incentives to stabilize the current level of cash usage rather than letting it fall further. “We now need to think about resilience,” Erik Thedéen, the governor of Sweden’s Central Reserve Bank, said last year. “If everything breaks down, we need to have cash.” Official government guidance in “emergency preparedness” brochures sent to Swedish households recommends citizens maintain at least one week’s worth of cash to be available in a time of crisis. Other early adopting countries are taking similar steps.

Thedéen said the reversal was sparked by a destabilized globe in which exists the threat of an expanded war between Russia and Ukraine, the threat of digital attacks, and signs from President Donald Trump that the U.S. may not come to the aid of its European allies if they were attacked. Thedéen said the country’s advanced digital payment infrastructure could make it more vulnerable.The shift does not mean Europeans are abandoning digital payments. Credit cards, mobile wallets and instant-payment apps continue to dominate everyday commerce, and few expect cash to regain the ground it has lost over the past two decades.

But most of the European Union still trails the northern European member states, where 90 percent or more of all transactions are conducted without the use of cash. In comparison, the European Union surpassed the 50-percent threshold for cashless transactions only last year. Among the European Union’s biggest economies, Italy was the laggard, ranking 21st in the 27-nation bloc in terms of frequency of cashless transactions, while smaller countries including Greece, Romania and Bulgaria remained below 30 percent.

Leaders still see overall adoption rates for cashless transactions increasing even if they level out in the countries that were quickest to adopt them. “The digital euro is not just a means of payment, it is also a political statement concerning the sovereignty of Europe,” said Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank. Cashless transactions are still broadly favored by governments because they reduce the reach of the black-market economy and make transactions traceable. Advocates say they also enhance security against physical theft and increase convenience for shoppers and vendors.

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I never heard of Eurotroika before.

Eurotroika’s Terms of Ukrainian Settlement Unacceptable — Zakharova (TASS)

The Eurotroika (the United Kingdom, Germany, and France) have proposed conditions for a settlement in Ukraine that are clearly unacceptable to Moscow, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.”There is nothing new in the statement of the three European leaders. They tried to promote the same theses back in 2022-2024 in the Copenhagen and Burgenstock formats, supporting the dead-end ‘Zelensky formula’. Those forums have long been forgotten because they discredited themselves, being initially aimed not at peace, but at war,” she said in a statement.


“Dmitry Sergeyevich Peskov, press secretary of the Russian president, also highlighted the contradictory positions of France, Germany, and Britain. With their statement, the leaders pretend to call for peace, but in reality, they are presenting a priori unacceptable conditions, boosting the production of long-range weapons for Kiev, and generally advancing the militarization of Ukraine and Europe,” Zakharova added.

She pointed out that in this way the Europeans are pursuing a course aimed at “preventing the creation of conditions for negotiations on a truly comprehensive, just and lasting peace. It’s noteworthy that they don’t hide it. Two weeks ago, on May 28 of this year, the European Union’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said the following: ‘Europe will never be a neutral mediator between Russia and Ukraine, because we are on the side of Ukraine and protect our own security interests.’ Thus, she admitted that Europe is claiming a place at the negotiating table, in fact, as part of a united delegation of the West and Ukraine against Russia,” Zakharova added.

About the statement of Eurotroika
On June 7, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Vladimir Zelensky held talks on Downing Street. Following the meeting, they issued a policy statement with five basic conditions for starting the settlement process, including security guarantees for Ukraine, the deployment of multinational forces, the continued freezing of Russian assets until full compensation for damage, and an immediate and complete ceasefire.

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Don’t like mail-in ballots? Don’t deliver them.

USPS Proposes Halting Delivery of Unverified Mail Ballots (AmG)

The US Postal Service (USPS) has proposed a new rule requiring states to share voter information related to mail-in and absentee voting. The proposal follows a March executive order from Trump aimed at tightening regulations governing mail-in voting in federal elections. Trump has made election integrity a central focus of his second administration, issuing executive orders designed to require proof of citizenship for voters and combat mail-in voting fraud. The administration has argued that stronger verification measures are necessary to restore confidence in elections and safeguard the voting process.


Several of those initiatives have faced legal challenges. Courts have blocked certain provisions, including proof-of-citizenship requirements, while appeals remain pending. Democratic-led states have also filed lawsuits challenging the administration’s mail-in voting policies. As litigation continues, the Postal Service has moved forward with a proposal directing states and the USPS to coordinate on identifying eligible mail-in and absentee voters. Under the proposed rule, states would submit lists of voters requesting mail-in ballots, along with personalized barcodes assigned to each ballot.

The Postal Service would then return a finalized “Mail-In and Absentee Participation List” to each state’s chief election official. The list would contain the names of approved voters and the corresponding ballot barcodes associated with each voter. Under the proposal, only voters included on the final participation list would be eligible to receive mail-in or absentee ballots. The USPS said the new system would help improve transparency and provide election officials and law enforcement with additional tools to verify election procedures.

“This provision will help determine adherence to federal law and facilitate law enforcement efforts,” the proposal states. “For example, the provided lists will evidence how many ballots have been mailed, and allow law enforcement officials to compare the total number of mailed ballots to the total number of received ballots to detect potential issues meriting further investigation.” Election integrity supporters argue that the process would create a clearer chain of custody for mailed ballots and help identify irregularities that might otherwise go undetected.

The Postal Service issued the proposal May 29, one day after Trump-appointed US District Judge Carl J. Nichols denied a request from Democratic plaintiffs seeking to block the administration’s mail-in voting executive order. Nichols ruled that the challengers failed to sufficiently demonstrate that the order would cause “imminent and irreparable harm.” The plaintiffs have appealed that decision, and the Postal Service proposal remains subject to ongoing legal uncertainty while the broader litigation proceeds.

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“I should ask Larry David. I should have asked his a** too.”

Jerry Seinfeld Just Triggered the Left With Three Words (Matt Margolis)

Jerry Seinfeld walked out of Madison Square Garden on Wednesday after watching the Knicks in the NBA Finals and may have triggered the left more than Donald Trump’s attendance Monday night. As Seinfeld left the arena, TikTok streamer FinesseFave, who was live-broadcasting outside, saw him and approached him. “Oh, Jerry. What up, Seinfeld? What up? Can we get a free Palestine?” Seinfeld laughed. The FinesseFave pressed again. “Can we get a free Palestine? Come on, give us one free Palestine.” Seinfeld kept walking. “It doesn’t exist,” he said.


The streamer turned back to his audience, barely able to contain himself. “Oh my God. That was a f*****g insane clip,” he said. “He said it doesn’t exist.” Then, apparently regretting a missed opportunity, he later added, “I should ask Larry David. I should have asked his a** too.” Here is the clip. Obviously, there was foul language:

https://twitter.com/MaxNordau/status/2065023449450308042?s=20

The clip spread across social media almost instantly, reigniting the familiar cycle of outrage directed at one of the most famous comedians alive. You would think a 71-year-old Jewish man openly supporting Israel wouldn’t be controversial at all. The radical left has other ideas. Here’s the thing: Seinfeld’s position on Israel has never been a secret. After Hamas launched its attack on Oct. 7, 2023, he posted a statement on Instagram that made everything clear. “I lived and worked on a Kibbutz in Israel when I was 16, and I have loved our Jewish homeland ever since,” he wrote. “We survive and flourish no matter what. I will always stand with Israel and the Jewish people.”

Seinfeld’s stance on Israel is well known and consistent. These people confronting him know it too, and think they’re getting him in a gotcha moment. They’re not. During a September 2025 appearance at Duke University, he was, to say the least, unambiguous about his feelings about the Free Palestine movement. “Free Palestine is, to me, just… you’re free to say you don’t like Jews,” he said. “Just say you don’t like Jews.” He also compared the movement to the KKK. “Compared to the Ku Klux Klan, I’m actually thinking the Klan is actually a little better here, because they can come right out and say, ‘We don’t like blacks, we don’t like Jews.’ OK, that’s honest,” he said.

Here is the reality the far left refuses to sit with. Nothing Seinfeld has said is fringe or extreme. A Jewish man supporting Israel, rejecting a slogan he views as thinly veiled antisemitism, and refusing to apologize for any of it is a reasonable position held by millions of Americans. The radical left has drifted so deep into anti-Israel territory that straightforward pro-Jewish expression now reads to them as a provocation worth screaming about.

Let’s be honest, here. Seinfeld has fame, money, and nothing to prove to these bigots. He may be a liberal, but he owes the woke mob absolutely nothing, and he acts like it. That kind of backbone is genuinely rare in today’s entertainment industry, where most celebrities trip over themselves to signal the correct opinions to the right sort of people. Seinfeld doesn’t play that game, and that drives them absolutely crazy. Good for him.

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Didn’t fight very hard for Bill Pulte.

Trump Nominates US Attorney Jay Clayton as DNI (ET)

President Donald Trump on Thursday said he is nominating Jay Clayton, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to be his director of national intelligence. The move comes weeks after former intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard said she is stepping down from the role. Trump, in announcing the decision on Truth Social, wrote that “few people anywhere” in the legal community have as much respect as Clayton, the former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), whom the president also described as “highly respected.” “I encourage the United States Senate to confirm Jay as soon as possible,” he wrote in the post.


Last month, Gabbard announced she was stepping down as the head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) because her husband was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte was named by Trump to serve as acting director in a move that drew pushback from Democratic and some Republican lawmakers. Pulte will serve as the acting U.S. intelligence chief and would take over from Gabbard later in June, Trump said on Tuesday.

Last week, the president told the Wall Street Journal that he would encourage Pulte to downsize parts of the intelligence office, which oversees 18 federal agencies and units. “I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Trump said on June 5, adding that Pulte has broader latitude to make significant changes due to his being the acting head of the ODNI. “You’re less shackled,” he said. “It sort of gives you more power, you know, for a somewhat limited period of time.” Going further, Trump suggested that the ODNI could even be “terminated” in its entirety, noting that a similar downsizing process was undertaken at the Department of Education. “We’ve made the Department of Education much smaller, and likewise, this should be much smaller,” he added.

Trump praised Pulte as a “very smart guy” while speaking to reporters last week and added that he “may find out some things about the rigged elections.” The decision to name Pulte as acting director, however, prompted Democratic opposition to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in a vote earlier this week. “Just voted NO again on a clean FISA reauthorization. We shouldn’t allow the government to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans—especially with Bill Pulte in charge,” Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) wrote in a post on X as the House failed to extend the provision.

Some Republican senators, meanwhile, indicated they would not have voted to appoint Pulte if Trump nominated him. “The Senate doesn’t have any role to play in terms of confirming acting officials, but I see no evidence of any qualifications for that job,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told The Hill about Pulte. Clayton had served as head of the SEC from May 2017 until December 2020. He also served as the head of the prominent law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the largest in the world.

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The combination of California and wealth tax is enough.,

Professors Behind California Wealth Tax Threaten Action (Turley)

There is an interesting controversy brewing in California after four California university professors threatened a political candidate, Richard Lucas, for criticizing them for their roles in the “Billionaire Tax” and sent him a “cease and desist” letter. David Gamage from the University of Missouri, Brian Galle and Emmanuel Saez from UC Berkeley, and Darien Shanske from UC Davis claimed that the public criticism violated anti-doxxing laws by sharing contact information. They are clearly wrong. One of the aggrieved professors, Brian Galle, teaches at Berkeley Law School called Lucas “a clown,” but insisted that sharing public information is unlawful.

Attorney Catha Worthman sent the letter, but has reportedly refused to respond to inquiries after attorneys for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) pushed back on her legal claims and those of her clients. I have long been a critic of such wealth taxes, specifically California’s Billionaire Tax, as economically moronic and legally questionable. The proposal has already cost the state trillions in lost wealth as wealthy taxpayers have fled, taking their businesses and jobs with them. As I discuss in Rage and the Republic, these wealth taxes have a terrible track record and, on the federal level, face serious constitutional challenges. In California, the drafters included a retroactive clause that can also be challenged.

One of the four professors — who Lucas referred to as “the looter dream team” — destroyed the claims of many supporters that this is just a one-time tax. Some of us have written that this is simply the first salvo. Once they succeed in targeting billionaires, the same measure will likely be used for those in lower tax brackets. In a recent debate, Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez admitted that he could not seriously claim this would be a one-time tax, as many in the public have asserted. He said they would have to wait to see if it passes, but it is likely to be repeated, and noted that there may also be a federal wealth tax on the way.

He said: “I don’t think it’s going to be a one-time tax…because you can’t surprise billionaires more than once. Even then, you know, maybe some of them were expecting something like this.So it’s going to be a debate about this time, you know, a permanent wealth tax at a low rate that’s going to last for a number of years.” Saez has publicly taunted the wealthy who are fleeing the state: He noted the move on the left to create a federal wealth tax which has been pushed by Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna.

The legislation, “Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act,” echoes the growing “eat-the-rich” mantra on the left — seeking to replicate a disastrous push in California that has led to an exodus from that state and an estimated loss of $2 trillion in taxable assets. It is also flagrantly unconstitutional. Under the plan, Congress would target 938 billionaires to tap them for $4.4 trillion. That money would then be redistributed as a $3,000 direct payment to every man, woman, and child in a household making $150,000 or less – $12,000 for a family of four.

Now back to the legal threat. I believe that the threatened legal action is wildly off base. Putting aside the fact that this is protected speech, the two anti-doxing statutes, Penal Code §653.2(a) and Civil Code §1708.89, contain clear scienter or intent requirements. They must show that Lucas demonstrated an “intent to place another person in reasonable fear for their safety, or the safety of the other person’s immediate family.” Penal Code §653.2(a); Civil Code §1708.89. There is no evidence of such intent. If simply posting such identifying information is a violation, a significant range of protected speech would be proscribed.

There are ample reasons to criticize this tax and the claims made by its champions. There is a type of self-sustaining pattern on the left in support of such measures. Universities have largely purged conservatives and libertarians from departments, leaving most faculties with professors who run exclusively from the left to the far left.

These professors then added intellectual support for radical proposals like wealth taxes. The media then reports that experts have reviewed and approved the measures. It becomes an entirely closed loop from political groups to academics to media creating a uniform narrative. The ADF wrote a strong letter pointing out the flaws in the claims of these professors under anti-doxxing laws from the lack of intent to the protection of free speech. These professors became public advocates for this ill-conceived plan and, as a result, have drawn criticism for that advocacy.

Lucas was one of those critics: Nevertheless, the professors sent two cease and desist letters to Lucas, requesting that he remove their names and contact information from his website “California Wealth Exodus.” Lucas has remained adamant that he will not remove their contact information.

The site for figures like Galle link to his academic page, as I have done above. We routinely link to such sites for people to look at the background of figures discussed in columns. In the case of Lucas, it is also meant to allow citizens to express their views to those pushing this proposal. In my view, the threat of legal action is fundamentally flawed and would not prevail in the courts. These professors will need to respond to their critics rather than work to silence them.

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”Apple and Google forcibly install age verification on every iPhone and Android device in the UK via app store updates.

No, it can’t be uninstalled.”

Britain Goes Full Airstrip One (Stephen Green)

In George Orwell’s 1984, Great Britain was just a province of Oceania named “Airstrip One” as a none-too-subtle nod to the U.K.’s role as host to the heavy bombers of U.S. Eighth Air Force during World War II.Four decades past the real 1984, and there’s still no Oceania. But Britain looks more and more like Airstrip One as Parliament considers a bill opening up everyone’s smartphone to government supervision — and ja il time for tech execs who don’t submit. You had to figure this was probably coming, right? Right.


Reclaim the Net reports that “Ministers are reportedly drafting a law that would force Apple, Google, and the rest to make it impossible for a child to send, receive, view, or share a single nude image, with the executives who refuse facing up to five years in prison.” That might sound all well and good, but as usual, For the Children™ is little more than the government’s justification for total surveillance. “You cannot block every naked picture someone might stumble across without inspecting every picture, every message, every video call, every streamed film, on every device, all the time,” Reclaim noted, with nudity serving as “the excuse and the unbroken view into your phone is the actual prize.”

The industry term is “client-side scanning,” which sounds much nicer than “a government mandated app that looks at everything on your phone all the time.” And even that sounds better than “Big Brother is Watching You,” which is exactly what it is. As already required by Britain’s Online Safety Act, Apple and Google forcibly install age verification on every iPhone and Android device in the UK via app store updates. No, it can’t be uninstalled. As I reported in January, what this means in practice is that London’s Office of Communications (“Ofcom” in Newspeak) mandates on-device software able to read everybody’s “private” messages in real-time and scan their images, too, before any personal encryption tools come into play.

London pinky-swears that it’ll only look for CSAM and terrorism-related materials, but as the Telegram’s Zia Yusuf put it back then, “the slippery slope is obvious” and “mission creep is inevitable.” The country looking to ban traditional chef’s knives (really!) in the name of safety simply cannot be trusted with this much digital power. Nobody can, really. The way things work now, if you don’t pass the mandatory age check, the iPhone software bars adult websites on every installable browser, and the Communication Safety feature scans every AirDrop, FaceTime, Messages, and photo for nudity, blurring whatever it catches. And the Android filter works in a similar way.

All For the Children™, naturally. But as Reclaim also pointed out, client-side scanning is “a general-purpose content scanner pointed at one target this year and swivelable toward any other the next, a flyer for the wrong march, a banned book, a face the Home Office has taken against.” Now that the software is installed, Parliament can authorize the Home Office to ignore the age check and look for whatever it wants to on literally everyone’s device. That’s exactly what Parliament wants to do next.

Orwell envisioned ever-present two-way telescreens mounted on almost every wall that could only try to monitor everyone all the time. He never envisioned a telescreen that people would pay good money for, carry around 24/7, and trust with their every notion and secret.

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Jun 112026
 
 June 11, 2026  Posted by at 10:12 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  28 Responses »


Andrew Wyeth Clouds and Shadow 1940


Trump Warns: “We’ll Bomb the Shit Out of Them” if No Deal (ZH)
Trump Says “US Will Be Attacking Iran Hard Again Today”, Oil Spikes (ZH)
Trump ‘May Keep Going’ With Strikes As Iran Took ‘Too Long’ With Deal (ZH)
Don’t Panic About Trump’s Iran Strategy Just Yet (Kurt Schlichter)
Former MI6 Spy Alastair Crooke: Iran Takes Its Chances With War (RPI)
The IPO Boom: Where Will the Money Come From? (Michael Lebowitz)
Massive SpaceX IPO Demand Coming From Gulf Sovereign Wealth Funds (ZH)
AI Price Wars Begin: OpenAI Considers “Drastic Price Cuts” (ZH)
Netanyahu Faces Election Chaos as Knesset Moves to Tear Itself Down (Queen)
President Trump Delivers Shocking Response to Question About USMCA Renewal (CTH)
Interesting Names Being Floated for Permanent DNI Role (CTH)
Why America Sucks at Soccer (Rick Moran)

 


 

 


 


I expected a lot of articles, what with the war re-engaging plus the upcoming SpaceX IPO. But…

Trump Warns: “We’ll Bomb the Shit Out of Them” if No Deal (ZH)

Fox News’ Trey Yingst has issued a new reporting update, quickly on the heels of a fresh Trump-ordered bombing of Iran. He says: “I asked the president what will happen if the Iranians don’t sign an agreement that was put forward by American negotiators. President Trump said, ‘We’ll bomb the shit out of them tomorrow night.'” The president declared “we’ll bomb them to rubble” again tomorrow night if there is no deal by then.


US MILITARY SAYS IT HAS COMPLETED LATEST STRIKES IN IRAN

Tonight’s aggression has prompted Tehran to once again declare the Strait of Hormuz closed to “all types of vessels”. Bombs have not yet fallen directly on the capital, but reportedly outside of it. This could quickly change. Importantly concerning Trump’s latest claims, Iranian leadership is denying that it engaged Trump directly tonight. The highlights from Fox’s Yingst:

  • The President told me he spoke directly with Iranian officials tonight who asked him to stop bombing.
  • 49 Tomahawk missiles had been fired by the United States at the time we spoke, along with bombing from fighter jets.
  • Closest target to Tehran was approximately 40 miles outside of the city.
  • Trump added that the bombing will stop shortly, but that if they don’t sign the agreement, “we’ll bomb the shit out of them.”
  • President Trump called this “the most violated ceasefire in the history of the world.”
  • Vice President JD Vance told me the United States is dealing with both moderate and more extreme voices in Iran as part of the negotiation process.

Tasnim is now reporging fresh Iranian counter-attacks on US bases across the Gulf, with multiple explosions being reported at American bases in Kuwait and Bahrain. The IRGC is now claiming to have struck 18 US military targets in two waves.

Bahrain is where a key naval command headquarters is located, and the Iranians are newly claiming a direct targeted strike on the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters. We are once again witnessing the ‘escalation ladder’ ramp up, and negotiations seem in reality nowhere on the horizon. This could be the start of several more days of strikes and counter-attacks to come, as Tehran is not so easily going to come back to the negotiating table, hat in hand. But it seems the White House is still betting on this, though risk and unpredictability are skyrocketing at this stage.

Newly emerged widely circulating video shows an Iranian Cold War-era relic still active:

US Begins strikes on Iran
After multiple previews of the main event, US Central Command said that its forces began launching additional self-defense strikes today at 5:15 p.m. ET against multiple targets in Iran at the Commander in Chief’s direction. “The strikes are in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression.” Local Iran media reported that explosions had been heard in the Iranian towns of Sirik, Manab, Bandar Abbas and Bushehr, while Al Hadath reported than an explosion was heard in the Al-Saban military camp in Aden, Yemen. Additionally, there are unconfirmed reports that retaliatory Iranian ballistic missile launches are already underway, amidst what appears to be the resumption of a new round of U.S. strikes on Iran.

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“There were no immediate reports of casualties in any of the attacks.”

Trump Says “US Will Be Attacking Iran Hard Again Today”, Oil Spikes (ZH)

Oil surged, jumping by more than a dollar with WTI rising above $91 with Brent touching $94 after President Trump vowed to strike Iran again and slammed the country for delaying talks on an interim peace deal, after renewed attacks overnight put further strain on a fragile two-month truce. “We’re going to be attacking them, attacking them very hard,” Trump told reporters at the White House Wednesday. “We hit them hard yesterday, and we’re going to hit them hard again today.”


Trump declined to say what targets US forces would hit in Iran. The president renewed earlier criticism that Tehran has taken too long to negotiate an end to the conflict. “I’ve been working with Iran for a number of months, and they should sign their deal,” he said. “It was just tap, tap, tap, I don’t know what they’re doing.”

Trump said he retaliated against the Islamic Republic for shooting down a US Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran has not confirmed shooting down the aircraft and said it was reconsidering whether to persist with negotiations in light of the US attacks. “The diplomatic process doesn’t happen in a vacuum and to advance any diplomatic process you need a minimum space to be able to move forward,” Esmail Baghaei, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, was cited by the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency as saying. “Wherever necessary, our armed forces will respond to the enemy with authority.”

Trump’s comments came after the two sides once again exchanged strikes, underscoring how high tensions are running and the risk that intermittent indirect talks between Iran and the US may be derailed. The overnight clashes followed a direct confrontation between Iran and Israel earlier this week, but halted after Trump called on both sides to stop. Since almost the start of the conflict, Trump has swung from threats of intensified attacks to touting that a deal is within reach. Even with tensions escalating since last week, he had signaled he wants to contain hostilities and avoid a return to all-out war before the new post.

A White House official said talks are still ongoing and that the US will exert maximum pressure until a deal is reached. Fox News first reported the status of the talks. The semi-official Iranian Students’ News Agency reported that a Qatari delegation arrived in Tehran on Wednesday to discuss the diplomatic process to end the war. The US military said it had completed an operation that saw fighter jets strike Iranian air defenses, ground control stations and radar sites near the Strait of Hormuz. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched missiles on four American targets, including shelters housing F-35 fighter jets and a command center for the US military at Al-Azraq Air Base in Jordan, state-run IRIB News said on Wednesday.

Iran also said it fired drones at the main US naval base in the Middle East, located in Bahrain, and struck Ali Al Salem air base in Kuwait. Kuwait’s defense ministry said it had intercepted projectiles early Wednesday, while Jordan said it had intercepted five Iranian missiles. Tehran said it had exercised its “inherent right to legitimate self defense” and warned regional states not to allow the US and Israel to use their territory as a staging post for strikes on the Islamic Republic. There were no immediate reports of casualties in any of the attacks.

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It’s all he can do?! Is to shorten the timeframe.

Trump ‘May Keep Going’ With Strikes As Iran Took ‘Too Long’ With Deal (ZH)

More strikes coming? Trump is certainly strongly hinting at this, and yet an overall strategic vision still remains murky and ill-defined. Once again he in a short 12-hour period went from hyping a deal being a few days away, to now threatening yet more attack waves on Iran, in wake of last night’s: President Trump said Wednesday that he’s close to ordering more strikes on Iran after the country’s attacks targeting American bases in Persian Gulf nations, according to Fox News’ Trey Yingst. Mr. Trump said he “may keep going” with strikes, which he said would target power plants and bridges, because Iranian negotiators are “tapping the United States along,” according to Yingst. He wrote on Truth Social just before these comments that Iran will have to “pay the price” after taking too long to proceed with negotiations.


Trump: Iran Took Too Long To Negotiation, Now Will ‘Pay’
As part of what the United States is calling its latest ‘defensive strikes’ after Iran shot down an Apache helicopter in the Hormuz region, American forces overnight into the early Wednesday hours targeted “air defense, ground control stations, and surveillance radar sites” – the Pentagon said. Iran confirmed that there were indeed fresh attacks around Bandar Abbas and Qeshm Island, but gave no details on the damage, or info on other strikes potentially conducted elsewhere across the Islamic Republic.

“The operation was a proportional response to recent attacks on U.S. forces and international commercial ships transiting regional waters,” US Central Command (CENTCOM) said. Trump is meanwhile again lashing out at Tehran, claiming its military is now a “complete and total mess” – and yet it keeps responding:

Oil reacts, sensing no peaceful off-ramp or de-escalation on the horizon…

Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan Hit Hard by Iranian Overnight Attack
Tehran later claimed attacks in Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan as fulfilment of its previously vowed ‘retaliation’ – and given these countries host American forces. This marks merely the second time this week the ceasefire was ignored (or rather, shattered – though the White House is maintaining it’s still on) with major tit-for-tat strikes, as each side asserts that it is acting ‘defensively’.

Iran has been saying it’s going to keep up the pressure on Washington and its Gulf allies through both the ‘battlefield and diplomacy’ – with Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei freshly charging that the US is “undermining” the diplomatic process through “contradictory messages, frequent shifts in its positions and demands, as well as repeated violations of the ceasefire.” He indicated that at this point there’s not even the “minimum level of conducive conditions” that is “required in order to carry out diplomacy effectively.” Bahrain and Kuwait got hit hardest in these newest strikes, with reports saying the US Fifth Fleet base came under fire:

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“Now, if the IRGC fired rockets in our general direction, I would unleash unholy hell on them. That’s not how Donald Trump operates.”

Don’t Panic About Trump’s Iran Strategy Just Yet (Kurt Schlichter)

As for military power, we’re holding off on fully exercising it for now. At least, that’s what it looks like to outsiders. I have absolutely no inside information on it, but it’s pretty clear what’s happening. Our forces are watching, rearming, and more importantly, assembling a juicy target list for when the president says, “Go.” One problem with holding back on the “M” is that it makes us look passive to the enemy (and others), even if we’re actually aggressively preparing. The lack of “M,” therefore, can be an “I” issue.


Now, if the IRGC fired rockets in our general direction, I would unleash unholy hell on them. That’s not how Donald Trump operates. We’ve seen before that he is willing to absorb fires that have no substantial effect in order to avoid increasing the military effort, which would be at the expense of the diplomatic, informational, and economic initiatives. In other words, he is choosing to let them shoot rockets at us, which we shoot down, and not retaliate as long as no one gets killed because he doesn’t see it in our interest to go kinetic again right now.

That option is still there, and we have another ace up our sleeve—our loyal friend (the ravings of idiots like Thomas Massie aside), Israel is ready to pummel them when they get uppity. Trump can sit back and look diplomatic, playing the good cop to Netanyahu’s bad cop. At the same time, Trump can make some noises—diplomatic and informational—about Israel not crushing Hezbollah in Lebanon, and then Israel can continue with its righteous work of crushing Hezbollah in Lebanon while Trump gets to shrug, while in the background, you hear the sad trombone. “Don’t blame me—that kooky Bibi is out of control. Oh well!”

Among some of us who generally feel as I do about the need to defeat these creeps, there’s concern that Donald Trump is about to give the mullahs pallets of cash and generally surrender in order to get this whole thing over with. It was not as fast as the Venezuela mission, and now he wants out at any cost. That’s just crazy talk. Some people with whom I often agree are very worried that Donald Trump doesn’t understand that the Iranians are a bunch of liars who will never keep their word.

But here’s the thing—Donald Trump’s not an idiot. He knows they are a bunch of liars who will never keep their word. But he really doesn’t need them to keep their word, because the hypothetical agreement is not the end state he’s after. The end state he’s after is the fall of the Islamic regime via economic strangulation, which will take time. The deal is a deception, a shiny distraction from the real objective.

We keep hearing how Trump doesn’t have time because the midterms are coming and those gas prices have to come down, but it’s the Iranians who better listen to that clock ticking. Trump’s worst-case scenario is that he loses the House. Their worst-case scenario is that they lose their heads, and that’s what Trump’s betting on. Time is on our side, even if too many weak Westerners have forgotten the importance of strategic patience. Life is not MTV; you can’t win if you have the attention span of a gnat on meth. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Tehran won’t fall in one.So, if my analysis is correct—and my bias is that I want it to be correct—then Trump is leveraging all the DIME elements to attain the end state of regime change, but he’s not telling us that.

That’s one of Trump’s things—he never tells people exactly what he’s doing, but his plan is pretty obvious if you don’t panic and take an objective look at what’s happening. He keeps talking about a deal, but it’s ridiculous to think that he’s somehow so eager for any agreement that he would sign his name to something that disgraces him forever. If there’s one thing Donald Trump doesn’t do, it’s let himself be humiliated, and he’s certainly not going to allow himself to be humiliated by this bunch of perverted weirdos. The Iranians think dragging out the negotiations helps them. It does create a pain point for Trump in the midterms, but they’ve got a lot more to lose. He can suck it up. Can they?

Now, I could be wrong about all this. Donald Trump could be eager to sign an awful deal, and that will have him go down in history as a giant joke who allowed these 7th-century pagan fanatics to humiliate him. But does that sound like Trump? When’s the last time he gave in and allowed himself to be humiliated? He doesn’t do that. And the idea that, somehow, he and his advisors don’t see the obvious reality that the mullahs are weasels and they are playing for time is just silly. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. We are constantly hearing about how Trump is supposed to be throwing in the towel, yet the towel never gets tossed. Where is the terrible deal he has allegedly been right on the verge of signing since April? Nowhere. It doesn’t exist. And yes, the clock is ticking, but for whom?

That’s how I interpret his strategy from the outside. Again, it’s probably not what I would do. I would take this opportunity to blow our enemies all to hell. But there’s more than one way to skin a strategic cat. The idea that Donald Trump is flailing and totally lost could be accurate, but it would be out of character and a departure from his now decade-long history of being in the public eye. More likely, he is stretching this out because every day they get weaker, while he can absorb the pain.

All the critiques of Donald Trump and the Iran War depend on either thinking that Donald Trump is an idiot, which is wishful thinking for his opponents, or residual concern that he’s not going to unequivocally win this war. I get the concern that he might be so eager to close this chapter that he cuts and runs, but you must ask yourself something. When has Donald Trump ever cut and run? Why would Donald Trump ever allow not only his own personal humiliation, and not only the humiliation of his country, but the endangerment of his country from these wounded animals who would happily nuke us the second they finished off Tel Aviv?

You might not agree with Trump’s strategy, but he has one. And he’s the guy who got elected, so he gets to set the strategy. It could very well work. Now, is this wishful thinking? Maybe, but his history gives the president grounds to expect some trust. He has never screwed us, and why would he start now to help an enemy he has been railing against for almost 50 years?

So don’t panic. Chill out. Watch what happens. I’m betting on the United States.

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I am not impressed.

Former MI6 Spy Alastair Crooke: Iran Takes Its Chances With War (RPI)

The US war with Iran has moved beyond its initial phase to an emerging new one — one in which Iran implicitly stakes its chances on the next phase being war. Most likely this will be in abbreviated episodes of limited war, but possessing nevertheless a potential to widen regionally, should the US (and Israel) elect to sharply escalate. The new phase involves risk of course, yet Iran holds the high cards of an ability to impose disproportionately heavier damage upon Gulf infrastructure as retaliation for any hurt inflicted upon it — and the awareness that the West is edging ever closer to dropping off the energy “cliff.”


The three pillars underlying this shift are firstly, confidence that Iran will not (and cannot) be shifted from its hold over Hormuz, and that in consolidating its administrative structures there, the reality of Iran’s hold over Hormuz will increasingly be assimilated by states, and reflected in their coming to terms with Iranian-Omani control. Associated with this core principle is Iran’s implementation of escalated deterrence vis á vis the American naval blockade. Any attempt to intercept or attack Iranian vessels or interfere with the Strait’s administration will be met with increasingly harsher ripostes. Ultimately this policy may lead to Iran imposing increasing levels of damage to US naval vessels – another friction point.

On 3 June, for example, the US fired a hellfire missile at an Iranian oil tanker near the Strait of Hormuz. In response, a US-owned (or partly-owned) ship, The Panaya, was struck with missiles. Additionally Iran launched three waves of cruise missiles at the US air and helicopter base in Kuwait from where the attack had originated. Images have emerged of serious damage at Kuwait international airport too (although the cause of the damage remains disputed). The second underlying principle affecting this shift simply reflects Iranian disdain for Trump’s continuous inflating of demands, exaggerated threats (which palpably fall short of US capacities), together with his continual zigzagging and contemptuous rhetoric towards Iran.

The Iranian leadership has concluded, it seems, that compromise will likely not be forthcoming, and that it is better to cut the “negotiations” rather “than continue the pointless bad-faith negotiations with a deceitful and decrepit American regime,” as the New York Times has termed the Iran “negotiations” — suggesting that the “deal chaos” is not a singular glitch by Trump confined to the Iran issue, but rather is a consistent pattern of dysfunctionality repeating itself across virtually all of Trump’s “peace” initiatives.

Behind Iran’s decision to suspend talks however, likely lies the gradually dawning clarity, seeping out from Israeli and American statements and analysis, that the true objective of the 28 February US-Israeli sneak attack was never regime change per se — aiming to swap out Iranian “hardliners” for a “Delcy Rodrigues”-style more moderate leader; but was intended rather, to bring about Iran’s complete destruction and fracturing — an insight that was bound to shift Iran’s calculus.

This insight has consolidated public support for the Islamic Republic hugely, and at the same time has turned the war into an existential struggle to preserve the ethical values of the Revolution. Seen from this optic, there is little for Iran to discuss with Trump, bar some future modus vivendi — as and when, Washington understands that it is boxed in, and that new realism takes a hold.

The third principle undergirding this new phase of conflict is the one enunciated by Iran from the outset of the Islamabad talks: “Ceasefire for all; or ceasefire for no one.” This was again re-emphasised in Iran’s latest ultimatum to Trump: “If the Israeli threats from last week to flatten the Beirut southern suburb of Dahiyeh had been executed, then Iran would have stricken northern Israel hard with its missiles. ‘It was a ceasefire for all – or no ceasefire.”

Trump chose the ceasefire, and subsequent to his call with Netanyahu, announced that it was in effect. He told Netanyahu to cancel his planned bombing of Dahiyeh in south Beirut. In Israel, a massive wave of anger from all sides of the political spectrum attacked Netanyahu at the very notion of curbing any Israeli attacks in Lebanon. Former PM Naftali Bennett accused Netanyahu of “losing control over Israeli sovereignty.” And former PM Yair Lapid said Israel had been reduced to a “vassal state” after the strikes were called off.

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FOMO.

The IPO Boom: Where Will the Money Come From? (Michael Lebowitz)

The media hype surrounding SpaceX’s upcoming mid-June initial public offering (IPO) is immense. The company recently filed its S-1 with the SEC, targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion and a capital raise of up to $75 billion. Some believe its valuation could rise to $2 trillion after the IPO. In its wake, Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (ChatGPT) confidentially submitted IPO registration statements to the SEC. Expectations are that both AI model companies will enter the market within the next 3 to 6 months, with rumored valuations approaching or exceeding $1 trillion each. Stripe, the quickly growing payments company, is rumored to be on the IPO docket as well, with a valuation that could exceed $150 billion. Consequently, the coming IPO boom will have wide-reaching impacts.


The IPO market, which has been stagnant for the last four years, is bubbling with excitement. The headlines surrounding the IPOs are hyperbolic, banker fees are enormous, and social media is teeming with bullish sentiment on how high the new shares may trade after going public. While IPO boom talk is great for clickbait, nobody is asking the most important question. Where will the money come from?

Putting Context To The IPO Boom
To understand the size of the coming IPO boom, some historical context is necessary. Prior to the pandemic, the US IPO market raised approximately $30 billion per year. In late 2020 and throughout 2021, the SPAC boom led to a surge in IPO offerings. Since then, however, as we share below, IPO issuance has been relatively lean.

The 2026 pipeline is shaping up to be the second-largest in at least the last ten years. SpaceX alone is raising up to $75 billion per its SEC filing. Add OpenAI’s expected cash raise of $60 billion, Anthropic at $15 to $20 billion, and Stripe around $10 billion, and the pipeline of known IPOs coming to market is approximately $160-$165 billion. Moreover, the total market valuation of these deals could surpass $4 trillion. Assuming no other deals come onto the market, the four deals would be larger than the last four years’ worth of deals combined.

Dilution vs. Capital Absorption
Some pundits are using the word “dilution” to describe the impact of the IPOs on the market. While not necessarily misused, the term is most often used to describe what happens when a publicly traded company issues new shares in the market, diluting the value of existing shares. Simply, existing shareholders who do not buy new shares see their ownership percentage decline. Given that the expected stock offerings are IPOs rather than add-on offerings by a publicly traded company, the term “dilution” is not appropriate to describe the upcoming offerings. The more accurate term is capital absorption.

Capital absorption is the process by which large new stock offerings pull money out of existing financial markets, as investors sell existing holdings or redirect cash to purchase newly issued shares. While it is true that someone must buy the shares being sold to fund an IPO purchase, that buyer, in most cases, is simply recycling existing market capital rather than introducing new money. Thus, while an IPO is not dilutive to the stock being offered, it is dilutive to the financial markets, as the total investible dollars, in theory, remain unchanged; they just get spread out a little more thinly.

Where Does IPO Capital Come From?
IPO capital comes from three primary sources, each with consequences for existing market participants.

The first is institutional rebalancing. A large asset manager running an equity portfolio that wants meaningful exposure to a new IPO must trim existing positions and potentially use existing cash or raise new funds to create room for the new holding. While selling by any manager is unlikely to create a ripple in the market, because the stocks, bonds, and other assets they sell vary widely, simultaneous selling across thousands of institutional portfolios can have an impact.

The second is retail liquidation. Similarly, individual investors who want to participate in an IPO need cash to do so. Some of that cash may come from savings, but like most institutional accounts, they will raise cash by selling existing equity holdings. Keep in mind that every retail investor who liquidates an S&P 500 index fund to buy SpaceX or another IPO is, de facto, a seller of all of the stocks in the index.

The third source is capital from sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and foreign institutional investors, who are expanding their equity holdings. Often, their funds represent new money entering the financial markets rather than a rotation within them. The participation of these funds might reduce the impact of IPOs on other stocks and financial assets.

The net effect of all three sources is that existing holdings largely fund new ones. At the scale being contemplated in 2026, that rotation is large enough to create a meaningful headwind across financial markets.

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BIG money.

Massive SpaceX IPO Demand Coming From Gulf Sovereign Wealth Funds (ZH)

One week ago, SpaceX kicked off its institutional roadshow, headlined by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who hosted a nationwide “live interactive discussion” with private wealth clients. The latest signal of investor demand comes from the Gulf, where massive sovereign wealth funds are reportedly seeking allocations in the IPO ahead of its expected Friday debut, according to Bloomberg News. The report says Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Kuwait Investment Authority have each placed orders for the IPO worth $1 billion to $5 billion, while the Qatar Investment Authority is also expected to make a significant commitment.


The report continued: “Entities based in the region are already prominent shareholders in Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI firm, and many are sitting on large paper gains based on the billionaire’s targeted valuation of $1.8 trillion, the people said. It wasn’t immediately clear how much of the planned outlay is intended to prevent dilution of existing stakes after SpaceX’s listing.

The interest from the Gulf is part of a broader rush into the deal from global institutional investors, whose orders have exceeded the number of shares on offer. Some have bid for $10 billion or more of stock, Bloomberg News has reported, though the eventual allocations might be smaller. In a separate report, Reuters says the IPO is three-and-a-half to four times oversubscribed, highlighting massive institutional demand for what is shaping up to be the largest listing on record and a defining moment for the space economy.

Elon Musk has joined several Zoom meetings with potential investors, while SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and CFO Bret Johnsen were expected to meet with roughly 300 institutional investors at a Morgan Stanley lunch in Manhattan. Goldman Sachs was selected as the lead bank for the IPO, alongside Morgan Stanley. JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citigroup are also among the 23 banks working on the deal, offering a staggering $75 billion by selling about 555.6 million shares. The planned IPO price is about $135 per share. Why SpaceX’s IPO Is drawing record investor demand…

We offered readers a complete deep dive into the mechanics of the SpaceX offering and how to trade the world’s biggest IPO (read the report). SpaceX’s underwriters have shut off investor access to the offering in China and Hong Kong, primarily due to regulatory and compliance concerns. However, there is a concerted effort by unhinged leftist lawmakers (such as Elizabeth Warren) and left-wing pension funds to delay or deny the SpaceX IPO, mainly for political brownie points. They appear to view the sudden new wealth generated for Elon Musk (and his employees and investors) as absolutely horrifying…

… given that Musk is pro-humanity and seeks to liberate the world’s minds from toxic progressive causes.

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Fighting over limited resources.

AI Price Wars Begin: OpenAI Considers “Drastic Price Cuts” (ZH)

Earlier today, in a report discussing how “AI bills are out of control”, JPMorgan tech guru and TMT salesman, Mark Schilsky wrote that “most of my high level investor discussions focus on one major topic: when will the party end? Put another way, tech investors have made so much money in Semis so quickly that they are looking for potential warning signs that the music is about to stop. Predicting such an end is incredibly difficult. As such, investors are searching for forward-looking indicators that might suggest the AI party is nearing a peak.”


Here, the JPM trader highlighted perhaps the clearest indicator that the music was about to stop: “A slowdown in the growth of the annualized run-rate revenues of the major AI labs. If there is any sort of second derivative ‘kink’ in their growth algorithms, that could portend a future problem for the AI trade.” In response to this, we pointed to just such a “slowdown in the run-rate revenues”, when we showed that the Silicon Data token price index is down for 7 straight days to a level last seen in mid-January, or long before the current agentic craze started. Almost as if it knew something…


Turns out it did: late on Wednesday, with futures surging and Korean stocks erasing a nearly 5% drop and turning green, and euphoria generally back front and center, the WSJ may have burst the AI bubble when it reported that – contrary to conventional wisdom that token prices will magically go to infinity – OpenAI, which has been badly lagging both the revenue and IPO race with Anthropic in recent months – was considering “drastically lowering the prices it charges users” in a panic scramble to regain market share and win back customers from archrival Anthropic.

And so, at a time when there is suddenly a mass realization that token prices had been soared in recent weeks, a wake-up call which JPM lovingly described as follows: “investors have been discussing the possibility that much of the token spend that corporate America is currently incurring is ‘wasted’. Anecdotes from companies like UBER aren’t helping this narrative”, OpenAI is weighing significant cuts to what it charges for tokens. Hilariously, the move would be in anticipation of similar cuts the company expects at Anthropic, which is trying to double how much it charges for its latest model, Fable, which provides at best a very modest modest improvement in performance over Opus 4.8.

In short, we now have a classical deflationary race to the bottom, precisely the opposite of what the profit-strapped industry desperately needs to grow into its gargantuan balance sheets (and massive SPVs); Instead, the AI world is about to get hit with a collapse in both revenues and profit margins, while cash burn goes into full-on incinerator mode. Warning that “business executives have begun to balk at the high prices for AI usage”, the WSJ writes that OpenAI CEO Altman said at a recent event that costs had become “a huge issue.” “I think we’ll have a lot of ways we can help people get more value for less spend,” he said.

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“Last week, the Knesset, Israel’s parliamentary body, voted unanimously on the reading of a bill that would dissolve itself. “

Netanyahu Faces Election Chaos as Knesset Moves to Tear Itself Down (Queen)

Parliamentary governments fascinate me. The idea that a group of legislators can vote, say, “Forget it, let’s tear it all down,” and call a general election at just about any time blows my mind. I listened to a couple of podcasts from The Spectator on Tuesday night that discussed the growing dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Keir Starmer among the rank and file in the Labour Party (and, honestly, across the rest of the country) and how a leadership crisis is brewing among party faithful. It could potentially lead to a call for a general election barely two years after the election that ushered Starmer into No. 10 Downing Street.


Israel could be the latest parliamentary nation to pull the trigger on a general election. Last week, the Knesset, Israel’s parliamentary body, voted unanimously on the reading of a bill that would dissolve itself. The Times of Israel reports: “Following a lengthy Knesset debate, lawmakers early Tuesday voted 106-0 in favor of the first reading of a coalition bill to dissolve the Knesset, potentially triggering early elections. The dissolution bill, which must pass three readings in the plenum to pass into law, had been approved for its first reading in the Knesset House Committee on Monday morning and was immediately referred to the plenum for a vote. No date has been set for the final readings of the bill.

Due to internal coalition disagreements, committee chairman and coalition whip Ofir Katz advanced the bill without specifying an election date, stating that it would be inserted into the legislation only prior to its final two readings. In the meantime, Katz only said that the range of dates will be somewhere between September 8 and October 20.

The potential elections would take place weeks before the already scheduled Oct. 27 general election, which means that this session of the Knesset could dissolve just a few days before a full term. The fractious coalition of parties that put Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu back into office has its tensions after a budget bill failed to address the controversial issue of military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews.

“Israel’s 25th Knesset had been expected to be one of the few to serve its full four-year term,” explains Joel Braunold of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “But while lawmakers successfully approved a budget in March, Netanyahu’s coalition government failed to pass legislation that would exempt ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students from mandatory military service, prompting key parties to call to disband the 120-seat Knesset. Faced with a possible rebellion, Netanyahu’s Likud Party submitted the dissolution bill in an effort to retain some control.”

Netanyahu is pushing for the latest possible date in the hopes that he can deliver legislative, military, and diplomatic initiatives before the election. All of this matters because his party announced that he will run in a general election. “Prime Minister Netanyahu will run in the upcoming elections,” announced the Likud Party in a statement. “With God’s help, he will win.” The announcement came after President Donald Trump complimented Netanyahu in an interview with ABC News. “If Bibi even wants to continue… I don’t know, he’s had an amazing career,” Trump told ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “Does he want to continue? Because you know, he’s a wartime prime minister.”

“We will very shortly win the war one way or the other, and you know he’s a wartime prime minister,” Trump added. “That’s okay, just like I’m a wartime president.” The prospects for a Netanyahu victory don’t look great.

“Regardless of whether the election happens on September 8, October 27, or any date in between, the vote will be critical for the future direction of Israel,” Braunold points out. “How it goes could determine whether Netanyahu cements his legacy in office or potentially in prison. And what happens has the chance of not just shaping the country but the entire region.” Keep an eye on our biggest ally in the Middle East. It might be a bumpy ride for the next few months.

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“It is not shocking to us.”

President Trump Delivers Shocking Response to Question About USMCA Renewal (CTH)

It is not shocking to us. It is not shocking to anyone who has followed this story for the past few years. It is particularly not shocking to you. However, the Canadians are going bananas right now. President Donald Trump responded to a question about the current status of the USMCA trade agreement, or what Canada calls CUSMA. Watch and listen to how President Trump points out that he has no intention of renewing the USMCA. This has been obvious since May of 2025.


I don’t want to say ‘I toldya so’, but….

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Interesting?

Interesting Names Being Floated for Permanent DNI Role (CTH)

According to The Gateway Pundit there are five names being debated for permanent DNI. Qualifying any comment by saying this is entirely speculation, a few have asked me for opinion.Gateway Pundit posits the names: GOP Representative Elise Stefanik, GOP Representative Rick Crawford, current Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Ellis, Vice President JD Vance’s national security adviser Cliff Sims, and former GOP Rep Jason Chaffetz. Names not mentioned in that article include former HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes or former Representative now U.S. Attorney for North Carolina Dan Bishop.


Without being fully transparent about how I am reaching my perspective, here’s my take on these names.I have not seen Michael Ellis in this discussion before. However, he would be a very solid consideration. Ellis is a very straight, non-pretending, deliberate and serious person. With a firm grasp on the problem, Ellis would be a solid option. Current HPSCI Chairman Rick Crawford would also be a solid consideration. As current HPSCI Chairman Crawford has worked with Tulsi Gabbard, and he does have a very firm grasp on the nuances and issues within the current intelligence community.

Dan Bishop’s name has not been mentioned by many, but he would also be an asset in the role. At least he should be interviewed to see if he thoroughly understands the problem and would be willing to confront it. Stefanik might want the job and might be the favorite of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, but I’m not sure Stefanik is strong enough to stand up to the pressure within the overall intelligence apparatus. There’s a general pretending that often comes from DC familiarity as well as willingness to go along with norms and status quo. Stefanik is not a disruptor.

It doesn’t seem like Devin Nunes wants the job, for all of the reasons why a tenured IC person wouldn’t want the job. Jason Chaffetz would be worthless, as he was when Chairman of the House Oversight Committee. I don’t know enough about Cliff Simms to give an opinion.

Ranked: Ellis, Crawford, Bishop.

Concerning: Stefanik, Chaffetz.

Best Route: Give strong weight to Tulsi Gabbard’s recommendation.

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“As late as 2014, Ann Coulter was arguing that the growing popularity of soccer reflected the moral decay of the country.”

Highschools push other sports as the money makers. So if you’re athletic, you don’t play soccer. It’s a girls’ sport.

Why America Sucks at Soccer (Rick Moran)

loomberg published a revealing Morning Consult poll on U.S. interest in the World Cup soccer tournament, which kicks off on Friday. More than half of all U.S. adults say they won’t be watching any of the 104 matches available to stream on Fox One, Fox, F1, and Fox. Just 13% of U.S. adults said they planned to watch any of the matches. Breaking the poll numbers down by generation, Gen Z is the most interested, with 23% “very likely” to watch some of the games. On the other hand, 59% of Boomers are “not likely at all” to watch any of the games.


Playing soccer in the suburbs has been a rite of passage for kids for the last 40 years. But by the time these soccer kids reach high school, most of them have lost interest. Little girls love the women’s national team, which, until recently, was far more popular than the men’s national team. Having dumped much of the political correctness, the U.S. women are once again one of the top teams in the world. They will be one of the World Cup favorites in Brazil next year. The men are better than they used to be, but they are still in the second or third tier of international excellence. This is insane. Billions of dollars go into youth soccer in America, and that might be the problem.

UnHerd:”Landon Donovan — the finest player the country has produced — recently put the blame on American soccer’s youth system. His complaint centers on the win-at-all-costs mentality that seemingly grips the system. Parents and coaches, Donovan argues, “get obsessed with winning just as much as the coaches do because they’ve been told that’s what’s going to get their child to college and professional — and it’s all bulls**t”. In truth, of course, children don’t need to be the next Pelé in kindergarten; they just need to develop a feel for the game that scoreboards can’t reward.

It’s here where the money comes in. Youth sports in America are now a $40 billion industry — and private equity has quietly captured a great deal of it. Firms such as Juggernaut Capital have rolled up hundreds of local clubs into national conglomerates; 3STEP Sports, backed by Juggernaut, controls more than 1,500 events serving more than two million athletes a year. The tactics are the familiar ones of private-equity extraction: junk fees, long contracts, mandatory and expensive travel circuits. What was once an affordable neighborhood activity has been re-engineered into a maximum-extraction machine, with elite youth club soccer now costing many families upwards of $5,000 a year per child.

In Brazil, kids who live on or near garbage dumps play soccer all day, every day. Even in Europe, the game is constantly played by the poorest kids. All of them are hoping to catch lightning in a bottle and get noticed by a scout or youth coach who will take them under their wing and develop their skills. The very best, the very hungriest, and most talented kids are noticed early and brought along in youth programs that the U.S. will never be able to duplicate.

In America, soccer is a game played by suburban kids twice a week and in the occasional tournament. Even the millions of kids who love the game and have dreams of playing in the World Cup are stymied by a youth program that fails them. Every World Cup, enthusiasts proclaim that soccer will take off and become as popular as football and basketball in the United States. They’ve been saying it since 1994, when the last World Cup was played here. It fails to happen not because soccer competes with other sports for attention. It’s something far deeper, rooted in our self-image as a nation.

In 2001, scholars Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman published Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism. ”Nativistic Americans, the authors found, prefer individualistic and militaristic games that mirror the country’s political culture,” writes UnHerd’s Duncan Moench. Markovits and Hellerman argued that American soccer developed along totally different lines from the country’s more mainstream sports. Given the tremendous strength of US nativism, early on soccer was seen as dubiously foreign: both in origin and application. (As late as 2014, Ann Coulter was arguing that the growing popularity of soccer reflected the moral decay of the country.)

Yet as that early hipster fandom implies, the opposite ended up happening. Study-abroad trips are expensive, and far from becoming a blue-collar pastime like basketball, American soccer ultimately remained the purview of white suburbanites. Though the US has grown the technical capacity to compete at international soccer, those in charge of running our youth system have optimized the program to extract maximum revenue from bougie parents — hardly conducive to honing talent.

In other words, U.S. kids aren’t poor enough or hungry enough to have that overweening drive to make it as professional soccer players. Plus, the game’s appeal loses its luster when kids start playing football and basketball. “The raw athletic talent is almost certainly lurking out there, in the immigrant neighborhoods and the public parks,” writes Moench. “It’s just that we’ve built a machine to price those kids out.” Changing that culture is not high on the priority list of suburban parents who want their kids to get into a decent college, not chase a soccer dream around the world.

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Jun 102026
 


John Koch Conversation 1962


Iran Threatens “Decisive Response” After US Begins ‘Self-Defense’ Strikes (ZH)
Oil Surges As Trump Says US Must Respond To Attack On Apache Helicopter (ZH)
Trump Insists US In ‘Final Throes’ of Iran Deal (ZH)
Trump-Netanyahu “Differences”: A Good Cop-Bad Cop Routine (Every)
US Seeking ‘Precise Info’ on Iran’s Enriched Uranium via IAEA Board (Cradle)
Meanwhile, in Gaza, Hamas Is on the Ropes (Hornik)
West Turns Ukraine Into ‘Criminal Empire’ — Russian MFA (TASS)
Trump Makes History at the NBA Finals (Sarah Anderson)
Trump Doubles Down, Bill Pulte Will Takeover as Acting DNI on June 19th (CTH)
Citizenship Free Ride May Be Ending; DOJ Warning Should Reach Omar (Manney)
Data Centers Will Turn Red States Blue (Tim O’Brien)
OUTRAGEOUS: Iryna’s Killer Found Incompetent to Stand Trial (Stephen Green)
How Bill Gates’ Billions Shape US Medical Research (Paul D. Thacker)
AI Agents With Crypto Could Escape And Become ‘Unstoppable’ (CT)

 


 

https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/2063979571062415664?s=20

 


 


“Decisive Response”. They’re just bad poets.

Iran Threatens “Decisive Response” After US Begins ‘Self-Defense’ Strikes (ZH)

Just as President Trump has warned, US Central Command has just tweeted confirmation that the US military began ‘self defense’ strikes against Iran: “U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces began launching self-defense strikes against Iran at 5 p.m. ET today at the Commander in Chief’s direction, in response to yesterday’s downing of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter. The mission is a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression.”= The extent of the latest strikes wasn’t immediately clear but they further undercut an already fragile ceasefire signed in April.


A US official tells Fox that airstrikes targeting Iran are “ongoing” and targets include air defenses and radar installations. IRNA reports explosions in Iran’s Hormozgan province, while IRIB reports aerial attacks in Qeshm, Sirik and Bandar Abbas with six explosions reported in Qeshm The US and Iran have traded attacks several times in recent days even as Trump has said they are close to signing an agreement to bring the conflict to an end.President Trump told ABC News Jonathan Karl: “I think it’s very important to respond. They shot down a helicopter, and we are responding as we speak.”

He added: “This is a response to what they did they did with our helicopter last night, and I believe the response should be very strong, very powerful, and that’s what this one is.”Shortly after the strikes began, IRGC-owned Tasnim News reported that Iran is threatening to retaliate for US’ retaliation:”Iran will respond to US aggression. As warned hours earlier, Iran will deliver a decisive response to the US aggression, which is being carried out under the pretext of an Apache helicopter crash.” Odds of a peace deal are sliding and oil prices are rising (though not significantly).

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Why don’t they attack more Apaches?

Oil Surges As Trump Says US Must Respond To Attack On Apache Helicopter (ZH)

Update (12:45pm ET): following earlier reports that a US AH-64 Apache helicopter had gone down over the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Oman in an unprecedented first of the Iran war, moments ago Trump said on Truth Social that he had “been informed by our Great Military that last night the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache Helicopters while patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz. There were two pilots involved, both are safe and uninjured. Nevertheless, the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack.”

***


Earlier: A US helicopter has gone down over the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Oman in an unprecedented first of the Iran war, Central Command announced Tuesday, after which the two crew members were reportedly rescued by unmanned boats. The Army AH-64 Apache was patrolling regional waters before the downing incident, which is still shrouded in mystery, and which the Pentagon says it is now investigating. However, the Iranians are saying they know exactly what happened – insisting that the Apache was shot down.

“An AH-64 Apache attack helicopter belonging to the U.S. Army was shot down and destroyed by the IRGC Navy near the Strait of Hormuz, after ignoring warnings and being targeted by fired from one of our speedboats,” an Iranian military central command statement has said. The NY Times, among the first to report the downing, underscores the claims and counter-claims concerning what happened: It was not immediately clear whether the Apache was shot down by Iranian fire, experienced mechanical failure or encountered some other problem, said a person briefed on the incident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Central Command said in a statement that the incident was under investigation.

But the Pentagon says the crew was successfully rescued. The unusual rescue by unmanned boats adds another layer of complexity and strangeness to the story. “A Task Force 59 unmanned surface vessel, essentially a drone boat, found and rescued the soldiers,” spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins described to NBC News. The pair of pilots are now receiving medical care, he indicated, after their rescue came within two hours of the aircraft going down. Trump briefly spoke to journalists at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York after watching the NBA Finals on Monday night and he acknowledged the rare crash in the Persian Gulf.

“The pilots are fine. Yeah,” Trump said. “Nobody injured. We are going to issue a report tomorrow. But the pilots are fine.” Apaches, along with A-10 gunships, have been frequently used for low-flying operations in the Persian Gulf and Hormuz region, in order to attack Iranian small boast. As for the Iranian claims of shootdown, it remains a top most plausible scenario, but the Pentagon has not said whether it took on Iranian fire. FOX: American military forces, including U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, the 82nd Airborne Division, and U.S. 5th Fleet assets, helped bring both soldiers to safety.

During earlier operations connected to Epic Fury, other US military aerial assets have crashed or sustained damage over the region – however, the Pentagon has downplayed or rejected efforts to link a number of incidents to Iranian attack, apparently not wishing to give Tehran a battlefield ‘success’ acknowledgement. But many independent pundits have suspected that all along the Iranians have been hitting a lot more American assets than previously disclosed.

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“Asked whether it would be matter of days or weeks, he said it would take “two or three days”.

Trump Insists US In ‘Final Throes’ of Iran Deal (ZH)

The southern Lebanese city of Tyre is being pounded by Israeli airstrikes on Tuesday, despite President Trump’s insistence that Lebanon not come under attack. Israel’s military had hours prior issued an evacuation order for all civilians in the area, amid the unraveling and failing ceasefire. Casualties are already high, coming at a tense moment after starting on Sunday Iran sent ballistic missiles against Israel over its renewed airstrikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut, where it says Hezbollah command centers are located.


The NY Times reports of the growing death toll Tuesday, “At least eight people were killed in the bombardment, and dozens more were wounded, Lebanon’s health ministry said. The Israeli military also targeted towns and villages across southern Lebanon, including areas that were not covered by evacuation warnings, according to the country’s state-run news agency.” So clearly the air raids are expanding, per the report, even after the latest Trump warnings directed at Netanyahu to not do anything that would sabotage a broader Iran peace agreement.

President Trump is still maintaining that Washington and Tehran are in the “final throes” of cementing a deal, and is even suggesting (once again) that an agreement will be done in days: Asked whether it would be matter of days or weeks, he said it would take “two or three days”. Tehran has repeatedly stated any deal should include Lebanon—where Israel has been pressing its war with Iran-backed Hezbollah—and fired missiles at Israel on Sunday. That prompted Israeli retaliation, despite US pressure for restraint. Iran fired another salvo before announcing it was ceasing military action, and hours later Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the “fire on that front is contained”.

Of course, we’ve been hearing that the war is merely ‘days’ away from ending from basically the start of the war. And yet, all too predictably, the two sides keep going up the escalation ladder in an escalation trap. But the White House is saying that it will forge a deal which is good for the American people, whether Israel likes it or not. “Israel may like that, they may not like that — but this is in the best interest of the United States,” Vice President JD Vance spelled out to Fox this week. Escalation: Houthis in Yemen unleash ballistic missile on southern Israel, as Hezbollah sends drones on north…

But in the meantime Lebanon continues to suffer, also as Hezbollah and most recently the Houthis out of Yemen fire projectiles on Israel. According to some of the latest via Al Jazeera: For the residents in Tyre, anybody who is staying behind is in a lot of danger. In the past hour, we’ve seen another Israeli air strike near a Palestinian refugee camp. The strike happened at a roundabout leading into the camp, a very busy location. There’s also a bus station right at the entrance to the el-Buss refugee camp. Initial reports are coming in of a lot of injuries in that attack.

Israel continues to carry out artillery fire on the city, and there are drones flying over Tyre. For anyone trying to get out of the city, the road is quite dangerous. There have been a series of air strikes north of Tyre along the same road people would use to exit. So the Lebanon conflict is escalating, not growing more stable, which doesn’t bode well for achieving a final Iran deal. Tehran has insisted all along that a deal incorporate the Israel-Lebanon situation.

Vance had also said in his latest comments to Fox that “I think where the president has been very clear here is that while Israel obviously has some objectives that it has, the United States’ main objective in Iran is to ensure that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon.” It seems Washington is willing to tolerate some Israeli ‘counter-terror’ action, but only up to a point. Probably the limits will be reached in more renewed bombings of Beirut itself. Tehran has been seeking to impose some red liens on IDF action in Lebanon, and the White House has so far appeared to respond with compromising language.

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They play the press.

Trump-Netanyahu “Differences”: A Good Cop-Bad Cop Routine (Every)

As You Were… But As Who Was?
Yesterday nearly saw a full restart of the Israel-Iran war, apparently pulled back from the brink by intervention from President Trump. After yet another Middle East rollercoaster for markets it’s now ‘as you were’, with oil –so everything else– little changed. The larger issue behind that pricing, however, is the key question – ‘As who was?’


Iran set up its proxy network, centered on terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, to protect itself: if Israel attacked it, Hezbollah would attack Israel. However, Tehran now has to attack Israel, with counterattacks on it in response, to defend its ‘shield’. That’s a huge Iranian strategic setback. As such, Tehran is trying to tie Israel vs. Hezbollah to itself vs. the US to divide the US from Israel, which now have different needs: a deal vs. finishing the job militarily or via regime change. That dynamic has huge implications for when and how this war ends, so for energy, so for markets.

While Israel and Iran say they will stop their attacks, Israeli PM Netanyahu last night gave a public address where he stated: “Iran and Hezbollah are weaker than ever, and we are stronger than ever – but our battle against them is still not finished. In the last 24 hours, Iran and Hezbollah tried to impose a new equation upon us… an equation I find intolerable and unacceptable. They thought they would fire at Israel from Lebanese territory and from Iran – and we would not act. That did not happen, and it will not happen. Not on my watch!… At the moment, we are holding our fire, because after we struck the terror regime in Tehran, it ceased attacking us. In the event that Iran makes the mistake of resuming attacks on us – we will respond with overwhelming force.”

Moreover, Israel will hit Hezbollah in Beirut if it fires at Israel from south Lebanon, which Iran says is a red line that will trigger more attacks on the Jewish state, restarting this war. If Iran tells Hezbollah to ceasefire, markets can relax; If not, and Israel hits Hezbollah, Iran has to decide if it wants to fire at Israel – and restart the war; ]If Trump forces Israel to hold back vs. Hezbollah, Iran will have linked the two fronts and divided the US and Israel – which likely sees more war. After all, Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, its 1967 Six-Day War, its 1981 attack on Iraq’s nuclear programme, and its 2007 strike against Syria’s nuclear programme all took place against US wishes.

To expect otherwise this time is unwise. Indeed, Trump-Netanyahu differences could be a good cop-bad cop routine to allow the US to push for a deal while Israel does the fighting. In the background, Yemen’s Houthis claim they will restart a maritime blockade of Israel in the Red Sea, which was applied far more broadly the last time they put it in place. Obviously, that can threaten cargo and energy flows at this juncture, as a US Navy F-18 struck and disabled an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman and the EU hit Iran’s Navy… with sanctions.

In short, this crisis is far from over, even as Trump says “total victory” will be declared in the next two weeks as Iranian negotiators are “willing to give us everything,” and VP Vance added that the deal being discussed was “a home run” for the US. Yet the inside baseball question remains which negotiators the US is talking to given local reports that contact has been lost with Supreme Leader Khamenei Jr. and another that IRGV leader Vahidi was killed in a recent Israeli strike.

Elsewhere in geopolitics, Berlin says the Franco-German fighter jet project is dead, a major blow to future pan-European defence plans; Switzerland is weighing a Franco-Italian alternative to US air defences given a 5-year wait for the latter; and a French fighter jet shot down a suspected Russian drone in Latvian airspace.

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They’ll stretch this for six months or more.

Remember, they stretched it all for 47 years.

US Seeking ‘Precise Info’ on Iran’s Enriched Uranium via IAEA Board (Cradle)

Washington has turned to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors in order to determine the fate of Iran’s highly enriched uranium, according to reports by Reuters and other media outlets. Sources cited by Reuters which obtained a draft of a resolution being pushed by the US said that Iran is being called on to provide the Agency with precise information on nuclear material accountancy and safeguarded nuclear facilities in Iran.


The US draft also calls on Tehran to grant all access it requires to verify this information, adding that Iranian cooperation is essential and urgent and must happen without delay. The text does not refer Iran to the UN Security Council, which would have followed up on the IAEA resolution declaring Tehran in breach of its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). That resolution was issued on 12 June 2025, a day before the US-backed 12-day war on Iran last year. Diplomats told Reuters that such a move was under consideration.

Al Mayadeen also reported, citing its own draft copy of the resolution, that Washington is lobbying states on the IAEA Board to back its push. This came as IAEA chief Rafael Grossi called on Tehran to re-engage with the IAEA. ” I call on Iran to engage the Agency constructively in order to facilitate the full and effective implementation of safeguards in Iran, he said, adding that It’s very important that we re-engage. ” Reuters reported earlier in June that the US was preparing a draft resolution to condemn Iran at an upcoming IAEA meeting.

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View from Israel.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, Hamas Is on the Ropes (Hornik)

These past few days the Middle East spotlight has been, for good reason, on Israel, Hezbollah, and Iran. At the time of writing, things are at a standstill, and no one knows what comes next. After the exchange of fire between Israel and Iran, the latter, notes Israeli journalist Amit Segal, “warned that any further Israeli aggression—specifically ‘including in southern Lebanon’—would be met with ‘much more severe and crushing measures.’” Despite that, on Tuesday, Israel went ahead and attacked Hezbollah infrastructure in the southern Lebanese town of Tyre. Will Tehran make good on its threat? We can only wait and see.


Meanwhile, the veteran and venerable Israeli military-affairs analyst Ron Ben Yishai has filed a report from Gaza that gives—dare we say—an encouraging picture of the current condition of another of Iran’s terror proxies, Hamas. While Hezbollah is spread throughout Lebanon, Hamas is concentrated in a much smaller space, Gaza. The IDF, which battled Hamas in Gaza for more than two years running since the debacle of October 7, 2023, now controls about 65% of Gaza, and Hamas is in a jam. Ron Ben Yishai, now 83, spent some time at an IDF outpost in southern Gaza and has a lot of light to shed on the current state of the enclave.

The IDF, for one thing, has been using its presence in Gaza to blow up the notorious Hamas tunnels. Since October 7 the IDF has destroyed about 280 miles’ worth of them, and at present there’s nothing at all that Hamas can do to counteract the process. The IDF has also, using high-quality intelligence, been “systematically eliminating senior [Hamas] commanders, key military specialists and police officials responsible for maintaining governance.” While Hamas still has about 20,000 operatives, only about 8,000 are experienced fighters and the rest are minimally trained, lightly armed “young men and teenagers” seeking to bring home some shekels.

And Hamas’s troubles go beyond that. Its popularity in Gaza is drying up, and armed clans living in the IDF-controlled areas—“whose members and families [number] in the tens of thousands”—have lately been seriously challenging its rule. In terms of Israeli security, the situation is much better than it was on October 6, 2023. Six IDF brigades and 18 battalions now protect the Israeli border communities, compared to much fewer forces in the sleepy, self-delusive days before the catastrophe. Ben Yishai puts it this way: “The way the IDF is currently deployed and operating in Gaza has almost completely neutralized Hamas’s ability to carry out attacks . . . the threat to communities in southern Israel has been almost entirely removed, at least as long as the IDF maintains its current posture.”

Therein lie many questions about the future of Gaza. Although grandiose plans were hatched about Hamas disarmament, the terror group—predictably enough—rejects that option. The “international stabilization force” that was supposed to take over in Gaza “has yet,” Ben Yishai notes delicately, “to materialize.” And the Peace Council that’s supposed to help finance a new, peaceful Gaza “has failed to secure even one-third of the funding pledged by its member leaders.” That, too, is predictable stuff—though it’s been worsened by the Gulf states’ cash-flow problems since the Strait of Hormuz was closed.

IDF commanders, for their part, are sure that only a few weeks would be needed to seize the remaining Gazan territory held by Hamas. “Plans already exist and require only government approval.” At that point, though, with Hamas neutralized, an old problem would arise: what to do with the two million mostly indigent Gazans whom Hamas has been holding, in effect, as hostages, and who’ve been raised on a murderous hatred of Israelis. It was the severe, demoralizing difficulty of ruling Gaza that led Israel—with half or more of the Israeli population supporting the move—to disengage from the enclave in the first place, back in 2005. Of course, that didn’t work out well either.

Ben Yishai hopes the international community, or a future Israeli government, will “succeed in formulating a realistic, adequately funded, phased long-term solution for Gaza’s population without endangering Israel.” It has always been a tall order. For now—unlike Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—Gaza is quiet, and it’s a big improvement.

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Successfully.

West Turns Ukraine Into ‘Criminal Empire’ — Russian MFA (TASS)

The West has turned Ukraine into “a criminal empire,” marking the height of its policy aimed at preserving hotspots of tension, Pyotr Ilyichev, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department for New Challenges and Threats, said.


“The growing conflict potential in various parts of the world is accompanied by dangerous attempts by Western countries to use terrorist groups and extremist forces in order to preserve hotspots of tension,” the diplomat pointed out at the 19th meeting of chiefs of the head offices of counterterrorism units of Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) member states and national bodies coordinating efforts to combat terrorism and extremism. “The collective West’s policy aimed at maintaining hotspots of tension reached its peak when Ukraine was turned from a state into a criminal empire,” the Russian Foreign Ministry official stressed.

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He jinxed them?

Trump Makes History at the NBA Finals (Sarah Anderson)

Donald Trump just became the first president in United States history — or should I say NBA history? — to attend an NBA Final game. Monday’s night match-up was between the San Antonio Spurs and Trump’s beloved New York Knicks, and it took place at Madison Square Garden. The Spurs led the game early on, and the Knicks bounced back for a while, but the Spurs eventually pulled off the win, 115-111. It was Game 3 of the series — the Knicks won the first two games.


Trump sat with his granddaughter, Kai, along with Knicks owner James Dolan and several members of the Trump administration, including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Environmental Protection Administrator Lee Zeldin. I also noted that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was there, but he had floor seats and was not with the president. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was reportedly in attendance, but he did not sit with the president either. Shocking, I know.

Anyway, I’m already seeing MSM headlines about how the crowd erupted into boos when they showed the president just before the national anthem, but that’s only half of the truth. Some of the crowd booed, some cheered, and some erupted into chants of “USA! USA! USA!” It’s the same thing as when Trump has attended numerous other big sporting events over the last year and a half or so, like Super Bowl LIX, the College Football Playoff National Championship, and the September 11 New York Yankees game, etc. — the crowd’s response is about as split as our country is, so don’t buy into any of those “everyone booed” headlines. Even in New York City.

(Also, mark my words, Tuesday’s headlines will be that Trump jinxed the Knicks.) Now, outside was a different story. The were a handful of protesters with signs and chants like “F*** Trump.” Super clever, right? As usual, it was largely lefty white women with professional-looking signs who probably wouldn’t know what a basketball game was if Jalen Brunson and Wemby came out and played a little one-on-one right in front of their sad little protest.

There were also some people in Congress who were upset that Trump would be in attendance, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies (D-N.Y.), aka Temu Obama, who has spent the last couple of days going on TV and telling Trump not to come and politicize the game. “It also is not clear to me that Donald Trump is a big Knicks fan. I mean, does this guy even know the difference between Karl Rove and Karl-Anthony Towns? I don’t think so,” Jefferies said earlier. “He’s just injecting himself into the NBA Finals because he always has to bring the MAGA circus into town.” Well, the president is actually a big Knicks fan. And we have proof, so now it can be clear to you, sir.

Even NBA commissioner Adam Silver knows it:

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Juneteenth. Pulte will do DNI, Fannie, Freddie and more. Full plate.

Trump Doubles Down, Bill Pulte Will Takeover as Acting DNI on June 19th (CTH)

Articulate focus with specific intent can pay dividends. Sorry for my absence earlier today. I can confirm the first sentence, between the commas. Against the backdrop of threats from various legislative branch members, President Donald Trump has doubled down and firmly announced that Bill Pulte will take the position of Acting DNI effective June 19th (aka ‘Juneteenth’). Delivering the message from his Truth Social account, President Trump has extended his plenary power and put Congress back into the position they hold in government. If Congress wants FISA (702), then reauthorize it. If they don’t want it, then don’t reauthorize it. The issue matters not to the overall national security dynamic.


Kash Patel better prepare to get busy. It’s time to put up or shut up. If the FBI carries out a false flag operation (they’d be stupid), or if the CIA attempts to undermine the domestic national security front (they won’t), there is going to be an intense response from Trump and Pulte.

Great job President Donald Trump!

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For now, she’s got them all by the balls.

Citizenship Free Ride May Be Ending; DOJ Warning Should Reach Omar (Manney)

The Department of Justice has filed denaturalization actions against 17 naturalized citizens accused of hiding serious crimes or fraud during the path to U.S. citizenship. The list includes sex offenders, fraudsters, drug dealers, and defendants accused of concealing conduct that should’ve blocked naturalization in the first place. From Fox News: The individuals, from 13 different countries, are accused of serious criminal conduct, including child sexual abuse, narcotics trafficking and large-scale financial fraud. Nearly all of the individuals reportedly lied during the naturalization process, claiming that they did not commit any crimes the authorities were unaware of, claims that were later found to be untrue or misleading.


By making false statements, officials argue that they failed to meet the statutory “good moral character” requirement for U.S. citizenship under federal law.”Gaining U.S. citizenship is a privilege and under the steadfast leadership of President Trump, this Department of Justice maintains a zero-tolerance policy for the abuse of this process,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement. Nine were from the Caribbean and North America, including Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Mexico. Two were from Colombia in South America. One was from former Yugoslavia in Europe. Three were from Asia, including India, China and the Philippines, and two were from Africa, including Somalia and the Congo.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed citizenship as a privilege tied to honesty. Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, head of the Civil Division, said the department will pursue those who secured citizenship by lying. The government’s point is simple enough for even the denizens of Washington to understand, which means somebody there will probably work hard to misunderstand it. Naturalization isn’t a participation trophy; applicants swear to tell the truth, answering questions about crimes, names, past conduct, and immigration history. When those answers are false, the citizenship built on them rests on sand. The DOJ’s new cases say the old wink-and-nod era is getting less comfortable.

Federal law already allows denaturalization when citizenship was illegally procured or obtained by concealment of a material fact or willful representation. The process still runs through federal court, which means defendants get their chance to fight the government’s claims. The DOJ also made clear the 17 complaints contain allegations, not final findings. Good, that’s how it should be; let the courts sort each case. But we can’t let fraud become permanent just because enough years passed. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has also pushed a sharper enforcement posture, including a return to longer ICE training standards after problems left behind by former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

President Donald Trump’s team is trying to restore a basic rule: the United States gets to decide who enters, who stays, and who keeps citizenship after lying to obtain it. The usual fainting couch crowd will call this extreme. Most Americans will call it paperwork, finally meeting consequences. The same principle should make Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) nervous, or at least curious about the weather near the bow. Vice President JD Vance said in May that the Justice Department is looking into whether Omar committed immigration fraud tied to long-running allegations about her marriage history. From Fox News:

“Speaking to reporters, Vance was asked about the administration’s anti-fraud task force — established by President Donald Trump to combat fraud, waste, and abuse across federal benefit programs — and whether it would focus on Omar, a frequent Trump critic. “You read the things about Ilhan Omar… who she married and whether she didn’t marry this person or that person,” Vance said. “It certainly seems like something fishy is there, but everybody’s entitled to equal justice under the law.” The comments follow a podcast interview in March, during which Vance told conservative commentator Benny Johnson that he had spoken with White House immigration advisor Stephen Miller about potential legal action against the congresswoman.

“We think Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America,” Vance said at the time. Omar has denied wrongdoing, crying racism and bigotry each step of the way, and the claim hasn’t been proven.

But the question refuses to die because the documents, timelines, and explanations have never satisfied critics who believe a full federal review is long overdue. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) moved in January to subpoena Omar’s immigration records and those of Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi during a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing on fraud and misuse of federal funds in Minnesota.

Mace said the allegations, if true, could raise questions involving marriage fraud, immigration fraud, and other violations. The motion ran into opposition, which tells voters plenty about Washington’s appetite for transparency when the target has the right friends in politics. The Omar question and the 17 DOJ cases aren’t identical. One involves filed denaturalized complaints, while the other involves public allegations, political pressure, and statements from the vice president that DOJ is looking at the issue. S

till, both point toward the same civic test; citizenship must mean more than a document the government is too embarrassed to revisit. If lies opened the door, the law has every right to walk back through it. Any country that refuses to police naturalization fraud teaches future applicants the wrong lesson: Tell the truth and wait your turn, or lie and hope bureaucracy gets bored. The Trump administration appears ready to choose the first lesson. Citizenship carries honor, duty, and legal weight. Those who earned it honestly deserve protection from those who treated it like a loophole with a flag pin.

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“.. the digital carpetbaggers who are about to turn rural states and counties on their heads.”

Data Centers Will Turn Red States Blue (Tim O’Brien)

It won’t happen overnight, and it won’t happen in Washington. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) won’t have anything to do with it. And neither will the DNC, at least directly. But it will happen. America’s most rural states have the smallest and easiest-to-change voter bases. In the end, it’s just a numbers game. All these states need is more leftists to move in, and the states will flip from red to blue. Up until now, though, the problem has been giving leftists a reason to want to live in a state like Wyoming, the Dakotas, or Idaho. Enter data centers. The Wall Street Journal has reported on one such example where Wyoming is the target of massive data center development.


One of the big and most immediate issues is the need to accommodate all the people who will need to relocate to the state to work there. In America’s least populous state, companies must import armies of workers—and find somewhere to put them. So local officials are weighing a developer’s pitch to erect a ‘temporary workforce housing complex’ for as many as 5,600 laborers and tradespeople. The complex would be larger than 84 of Wyoming’s incorporated cities and towns, according to state data, the Journal reported. People who live in Wyoming do so primarily because of its natural solitude and natural beauty. But in Cheyenne, that’s changing. And it’s not just this one town.

That pastoral scene is gone: Heavy trucks, earth movers and hundreds of construction workers have run nearly round-the-clock for about two years building a Meta Platforms data center. To the east, Microsoft recently announced plans to triple the acreage of its already sizable data complex. To the south, work is just getting started on Project Jade, which could one day be among the biggest data centers in the U.S., added the Journal. Rural states and counties have long been attractive to commercial developers, particularly industrial developers, for a number of reasons. It’s easier to get things built there. Fewer zoning restrictions, fewer existing residents to impact, more cheap land, more access to water, and less visibility to the media and the population centers. Out of sight, out of mind.

Meta, which is behind one of the data centers under development in Wyoming, is headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif. If all you want to do is erect a sign in front of your business in Menlo Park, the city will require you to comply with Chapter 16.92 of its Zoning Ordinance. That ordinance will require you to submit the planned sign size, placement, materials, colors, and design before it will approve it. Given all of these criteria, there is a chance your sign will not be approved. In Cheyenne, let’s just say zoning regulations are far less restrictive for signs. And that’s just for signs. Now scale that up to everything a company might want to do when building a data center.

What’s the permitting process in Wyoming like when compared to California? The short answer is that it’s far less of an issue for the developer. The point is, rural states and counties have less red tape, no matter what you plan to do. Add to the fact that rural areas are known to be cash-strapped. A couple of data centers can bring in a lot of tax revenue and campaign donations.

So what you will see is politicians running toward the digital carpetbaggers who are about to turn rural states and counties on their heads. Yes, they will generate more tax revenue, and those revenues will be needed to cover the costs of all the new highways, bridges, and roadways that will need to be built. Infrastructure is the start, which includes investment in everything from the electrical grid to water and sewage supplies for residents and businesses. Then there will be the need for more commercial and residential development. Of course, schools (and bigger teachers’ unions) are right behind. It won’t take more than a few data centers to fundamentally transform a rural state like Wyoming.

Oh, and did I mention crime and corruption? I almost forgot. Yes, with all those new residents who didn’t call your rural state home until five minutes ago, you have to know they’re bringing new levels of larceny and violence with them. Thus, the need for bigger and more sophisticated police forces.

As for the profile of the workforce, the unions are all over data centers, and with unions, you get Democrats. A typical data center workforce, both skilled and unskilled, is most likely to lean left. Whether it’s unionized rank-and-file workers or the “white-collar” techies that parachute in from places like Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, and Oregon. Those will be your new school board members, city mayors, state reps, and ultimately your elected representatives in Washington.

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“..the catch-and-release system pioneered in our Democrat-run cities..”

OUTRAGEOUS: Iryna’s Killer Found Incompetent to Stand Trial (Stephen Green)

The repeat offender who stabbed Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska to death aboard a Charlotte, N.C., commuter train last year is incompetent to stand trial, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday. Presiding Federal Judge Kenneth Bell found that Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr did not understand the proceedings and would be unable to assist in his defense. Brown is up on federal charges of terrorist attacks and other violence against mass transportation systems, in large part because state and local courts kept releasing him, despite a long history of violence and mental illness.


He’s also up on state charges of first-degree murder. In the August attack, Brown appeared to select Zarutska almost at random, stabbing her repeatedly in the neck from behind before casually getting off at the next stop. Zarutska died almost immediately, apparently confused, and then with a look of tragic understanding on her face before she collapsed, unattended and uncomforted by any of the other passengers. The murder, caught on video, shocked the world.

Brown had an outburst at today’s hearing, according to Queen City News, shouting, “that he wants to ask the judge whether he reviewed the evaluation and said he wants to press charges against the FBI.” He went on with more intelligible shouts, including something about having “material in my body.” So clearly, yeah, Brown is not right in the head. However…

The federal judge also ruled — unlike so many previous North Carolina judges — that Brown will not be released. Instead, “he will receive medication and treatment for up to four months in an effort to restore his competency.” After four months, the court could decide again whether Brown is fit to stand trial. If not, Queen City reported, “he could remain in custody under possible civil commitment.”That’s a lot of maybes and ifs for a man with dozens of arrests — usually on the catch-and-release system pioneered in our Democrat-run cities — including:

  • Robbery with a dangerous weapon (convicted; served prison time, notably a 2014–2015 case involving assault and theft at gunpoint).
  • Felony breaking and entering.
  • Felony larceny.
  • Assault (simple assault and other variants).
  • Shoplifting.
  • Making threats / communicating threats.
  • Misuse of 911 (multiple instances, including January 2025).
  • Disorderly conduct.
  • Resisting a public officer.

Yet somehow he was free to murder Iryna Zarutska in cold blood, muttering, “Got that white girl” as she quickly bled out. So Brown is a victim of schizophrenia — so what? Do the rest of us have to suffer from his affliction, too, up to and including murder?

My devout readers might lambaste me for this, but cases like this one have me long past the point of still believing that every life is sacred. Some people just need to be locked up, but so-called “progressive” judges and prosecutors failed to see it that way in Brown’s case, again and again. And a case like Brown’s is hardly unique, as our big cities prefer that social workers “administer” to the criminally mentally ill, rather than incarcerate them.

Iryna is dead because the justice system failed repeatedly to deliver justice. That must stop now before he claims another life. Either Brown is too sick to ever be inflicted on the public, or he recovers enough to face a jury and perhaps face the death penalty. But there’s no way he should ever be free again.

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Malice.

How Bill Gates’ Billions Shape US Medical Research (Paul D. Thacker)

Bill Gates has long been one of the most admired people in the world, especially since he stepped down from his role running Microsoft to devote himself and much of his fortune to philanthropy. That reputation has been tarnished recently, however, by revelations of the billionaire’s close relation with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and exposés on his own fraught relationships with women.


When Bill Gates stepped down as Microsoft’s CEO in 2000, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation started that year with an endowment of $20 billion which became his prime source of influence. On the eve of Gates’ private testimony with Congress scheduled for tomorrow, a trove of federal whistleblower documents provided to RealClearInvestigations is renewing questions about how Gates money has bought what critics complain is an untoward influence on government health policy.

For almost a quarter of a century, his main vehicle of power, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allowing Gates to shape the direction of the country’s health strategy in ways that have benefitted his own priorities and pet causes while polishing his image as a benevolent global do-gooder. At a time of growing concern about the power of billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, Gates’ efforts stand out. Instead of lobbying federal agencies for specific policies, Gates leveraged his wealth to work inside the government, partnering with high-ranking NIH officials to steer taxpayer research funding and design scientific policies for several federal programs.

The cache of several dozen emails and documents, made public for the first time by an NIH whistleblower, reinforces previous reports detailing Gates’s extensive influence over U.S. biomedical research. During the height of the COVID pandemic, Kate Elder, a senior vaccines policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders, complained to Politico, “What makes Bill Gates qualified to be giving advice and advising the U.S. government on where they should be putting the tremendous resources?” Emails and internal plans, for example, show that the NIH – the world’s largest funder of biomedical research – gave the Gates Foundation first billing for the joint workshops and meeting held on federal property.

Like most philanthropies, the Gates Foundation tries to grow its endowment through investments. Some of these efforts, especially its stake in vaccine companies, blur the lines between profit-seeking and the foundation’s mission to develop and deliver vaccines around the world. This symbiotic relationship between capitalism and charity also benefits Gates, whose power and position hinge in large part on the size of his foundation’s assets. Before the pandemic, The Nation magazine reported that the Gates Foundation had a $40 million stake in CureVac – this was not a grant but an investment. CureVac was one of many companies the nonprofit bought stock in that were working on COVID vaccines and therapeutics.

Around that same period, the Gates Foundation announced that it had begun to “leverage a portion of its $2.5 billion Strategic Investment Fund” to advance the nonprofit’s COVID work. The Gates Foundation also turned a $55 million investment in Pfizer’s COVID vaccine partner, BioNTech, into over $550 million when it sold stock a couple of years later after the vaccine hit the market.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was established in 2000 with an initial endowment of $20 billion and a primary focus on reducing global health disparities. Rather than working exclusively through non-governmental agencies, the Gates Foundation began contributing to the NIH through the agency’s own nonprofit, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH). Congress created the FNIH in 1990 as a firewall between NIH officials and outside donors seeking to influence federal research.

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We seek to control brains that are superior to ours. What are we thinking?

AI Agents With Crypto Could Escape And Become ‘Unstoppable’ (CT)

Artificial intelligence agents that have autonomous access to crypto wallets could become unstoppable if deployed maliciously or if they escape from sandboxes, experts from a leading academic research consortium warned. “Unstoppable Autonomous Agents” (UAAs) pose a clear threat if they are deployed to persist automatically and have access to digital assets, according to a June 8 industry review written by 25 academics and experts from top US universities for the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3). “When combined systematically, crypto tools can channel AI’s fluid power into secure, reliable, and highly autonomous systems,” the researchers wrote.


However, this combination could have “far-reaching consequences for users and the financial system,” they added. UAAs may also be equipped with access to cryptocurrency wallets, social media accounts, APIs, and other external tools, said the researchers. “The capabilities enabling such agents are already emerging and improving rapidly.” The warning comes as crypto projects and executives have been pushing the agentic payment and micropayment economy narrative this year, suggesting it could be the biggest use case for decentralized digital assets.

AI self-replication alarm bells
The paper also revealed that existing models can already “surpass self-replication red lines” in local environments, by autonomously creating a live, separate copy of themselves on the same machine, “a capability that could let a system evade shutdown and proliferate.” Because reward signals used in training often fail to perfectly capture the intended objectives, “UAAs deployed for benign purposes may inadvertently cause harm,” or pursue resource acquisition as a default strategy, they said. However, the authors noted that models have yet to replicate themselves onto external infrastructure.

Potential AI agent insider trading advantages
A fleet of self-replicating, resource-acquiring agents could also create unpredictable demand and liquidity dynamics in crypto markets. “AI-powered trading systems could enable collusion between autonomous agents and create unfair insider advantages through opaque strategies.” The tech sector is already dealing with difficult questions about the threat of unmitigated AI. Models such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos have already been shown to be capable of finding and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in major operating systems.

Meanwhile, Gartner warned in late May that governance failures around autonomous AI agents could trigger widespread enterprise failures, predicting 40% of companies will be forced to decommission their agents by 2027. “The harms that could follow from fully autonomous agents of this kind are severe,” the researchers said, suggesting circuit breaker guardrails.

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Jun 092026
 


Pieter Brueghel the Younger Construction of the Tower of Babel 1595


Netanyahu Confirms Israel ‘Holding Fire…For Now’ (ZH)
Score Two More Big Wins for Israel Vs. Iran… Maybe (Stephen Green)
Trump’s Secret Weapon Against Iran: The Power of Antisemitism! (Scott Pinsker)
Trump Suffers Rare Court Setbacks Amid Broader Record of Legal Success (JTN)
On the Kavanaugh Anniversary, Democratic Leaders Swap Me Too for Maine (Turley)
The Jungle Drums Speak! (James Howard Kunstler)
Trump Plans To Buy Chagos Islands, Home To Diego Garcia Military Base (ZH)
OpenAI Files Confidentially For IPO, Joining SpaceX and Anthropic (ZH)
EU Coalition of the Willing: Five Terms for Direct Ukraine-Russia Talks (CTH)
German Lawmakers Want Answers From Baerbock After UN Humiliation – Bild (RT)
A “Godzilla El Niño” (Michael Snyder)
In the Land of Thucydides (John J. Mearsheimer)

 


 

https://twitter.com/TheCalvinCooli1/status/2063671748378137040?s=20 https://twitter.com/barontrump47/status/2063754461261058407?s=20

 


 

Both sides paused overnight last night.

Netanyahu Confirms Israel ‘Holding Fire…For Now’ (ZH)

Israel Halts Iran Attacks ‘For Now’
“After Iran attacked Israel, I instructed the IDF to strike military and economic targets throughout Iran,” Netanyahu said in a fresh Monday statement. “For now, the fire has been contained, because after we struck the terrorist regime in Tehran, it ceased attacking us. If the terrorist regime in Iran makes the mistake of attacking us again, we will respond with force.” The key lines from Netanyahu: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that Israel had stopped its attacks on both Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, after the Iranian military announced it was halting operations.


In a brief statement Monday, Netanyahu said “Iran and Hezbollah are weaker than ever, and we are stronger than ever – but our struggle with them is not over yet.” Having bombarded both adversaries, he added, “right now, the fire has been halted.” Iran’s military headquarters responds: “Should aggression and hostile actions continue—including in southern Lebanon—far more severe and forceful measures than before will follow,” it said, according to Iranian state media. And in a clear sign of the exchange of strikes having ceased: Iran says flight restrictions have been lifted with airspace returning to normal conditions: state media

Israel Pauses Iran Strikes At Trump’s Request
Israel’s N12 News is reporting that Israel is halting strike on Iran at President Trump’s request. There are widespread initial reports that Israeli forces are indeed pausing the attacks, which persisted overnight through Monday morning, and included attack on a major petrochemical complex. However, the latest Israeli messaging has included a warning on the Lebanon front, per Bloomberg: Senior Israeli official says Israel is stopping strikes in Iran at Donald Trump’s request, but confirms operations in southern Lebanon will continue at full intensity in the coming days. The official also warns that Dahieh in Beirut could be targeted if attacks on Israeli settlements and civilians continue.

There are also emerging reports (via CBS) that Trump did not order any US defensive efforts to protect Israel from the latest Iranian ballistic missile attacks – which were the first against Israel since the early April ceasefire. Meanwhile, in a fresh message from Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei, Iran says “Without a doubt … the actions of the Zionist regime in the region cannot be separated from U.S. policies.” Tehran is rejecting the attempts of the Trump administration to distance the US from Israeli actions: “No one believes that the Zionist regime would carry out any action without prior coordination and cooperation with the United States,” Baqaei added.

Trump: ‘Stop Shooting’
A big question remains is if this flare-up in major fighting, which has featured the first direct attacks between Iran and Israel since the April ceasefire took effect, will be short-lived or whether it will endure and escalate into sustained war. So far the situation is showing signs it could be short-lived, after early Monday morning President Trump urged Israel and Iran to immediately stop “shooting” in a Truth Social post. He also expressed that this musts be done “quickly” and is still talking up a “final” peace deal – which at this moment looks as distant as ever. Iran is signaling it is ready to get back to ceasefire, but Israel is again threatening the Beirut suburbs.

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“..that missile fire toward Israel was most likely carried out under pre-established military protocols, without coordination with the office of Supreme Leader.”

Score Two More Big Wins for Israel Vs. Iran… Maybe (Stephen Green)

It started so simply, as these things do, with a barrage of Iran’s patented Totally Ceasefire Missiles™ that Israel knocked out of the sky. It ended, if that’s the right word, with Israeli airstrikes taking out Iran’s top two leaders. That’s a big win, even if one of them was already mostly dead. The fun began on Sunday, when “Iran launched missiles into Israel, not just in the north by the Galilee, but all the way down to Caesarea,” as reported by PJ Media’s own Rabbi Michael Barclay. In all, Tehran launched a total of about 30 missiles in several waves. They were all either shot down by IDF antimissile systems like Iron Dome, or caused no notable damage.


Israel responded with two air attacks that PJ Media’s own Catherine Salgado reported on at Zero Dark Thirty last night, but only now are we learning just how effective those strikes really were. Several outlets report today that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Ahmad Vahidi is among those dead in yesterday’s Israeli Air Force (IAF) strikes.Vahidi’s death isn’t confirmed yet, but fingers crossed. He’s only been IRGC chief since March 1, when his predecessor was taken out in similar fashion.

Considered a hardliner — which is a nice way of saying, “lying genocidal thug” — reports of Vahidi’s death please me very much. I keep trying to get the message through to the White House that if the current Iranian leadership is too hardline to negotiate in good faith, then keep killing them until more pliable leadership emerges. And maybe bomb them, too, just to be sure. Thankfully, the IAF was kind enough to take the next step for us.

Just as pleasing, if perhaps not quite as consequential, is the reported death of the regime’s so-called Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei — son and heir of the previous Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. The elder Khamenei, you’ll recall with no small measure of schadenfreude, was killed in a similar IAF strike in the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury. The younger Khamenei — long rumored to be homosexual and also believed to have been severely wounded during the air campaign — is (or was) at best a figurehead. He hasn’t been seen or heard in public since before Ali’s death, lending credence to the reports that he is (or was) barely alive. Or living it up on Fire Island. Accounts differ.

At the very least, Israel Hayom reported today that their opposition source believes “that missile fire toward Israel was most likely carried out under pre-established military protocols, without coordination with the office of Supreme Leader.” Notice the source indicated Khamenei’s office, not the man himself. “Israel and Iran… are looking to do an immediate CEASEFIRE! Final negotiations on ‘Peace’ are proceeding, subject to ignorance or stupidity getting in its way,” President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social in response to Sunday’s exchange of fires. But I’m inclined to agree with PJ’s Rick Moran, when he wrote on Sunday that “The war has shattered the Iranian leadership structure, making an agreement next to impossible.” And that was before Khamenei and Vahidi hopefully woke up this morning in Hell.

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“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion “

Trump’s Secret Weapon Against Iran: The Power of Antisemitism! (Scott Pinsker)

Sometimes, antisemitism is hilarious. Don’t believe me? Here’s a historic example: “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a 1902 Russian hoax that claimed to document a late-19th century meeting of Jewish leaders, where those evil, untrustworthy Jews discussed their secret plans for world domination. Some consider it “the most influential work of antisemitism ever written.” Throughout vast swathes of Nazi Germany, it was mandatory reading for schoolchildren. In Russia and Western Europe, it was a runaway best-seller. It even gained a following in the United States, where it was republished and serialized 91 times in Henry Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. (Ford later published the series in book form as The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.)


Sadly, in countries shaped by Judeo-Christian traditions, this hoax greatly inflamed tensions between Jews and Christians. Hitler cited it to justify the Nazi’s institutional antisemitism — which, of course, led directly to the Holocaust. From the United States Holocaust Museum: “Hitler referred to the Protocols in some of his earliest political speeches in the 1920s. He also wrote about the book in his autobiography Mein Kampf (1925). Hitler claimed that the Protocols “reveal the nature and activity of Jewish people and expose…their ultimate final aims.” He also predicted that what he called the “Jewish menace” would be “broken” after the Protocols became more widely known.”

Sounds pretty bleak for the Jews. You could draw a straight line between its publishing, the rise of antisemitism, and the genocidal horror of the Holocaust. Yet there was one country that got its hands on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and reached the exact opposite conclusion: “Whoa! You mean there’s a secret group of Jews who control the entire world? And they magically make money wherever they go? HOW AWESOME! Let’s party with those guys!” And that country was… Japan.

Because, after all, Judeo-Christian traditions didn’t shape Japan’s history, culture, and values. So instead of interpreting The Protocols through the lens of European history, the Jewish diaspora, and its (many) antisemitic dog whistles, Japanese readers accepted everything at face value: Somehow, these magical, mysterious Jews figured out how to become global puppet-masters. They controlled the media, the banks, foreign governments, international trade — and more! Apparently, nobody can stop them. Not even the mighty governments of Europe! So imagine what a wonderful ally they’d be to imperial Japan!

It led to a Japanese program called the Fugu Plan to import up to 600,000 Jews. Japan even planned a PR mission to the United States, where Japanese officials would show American rabbis the similarities (?) between Judaism and Shintoism and then invite them to visit Japan. From All That’s Interesting: From the moment it was conceived, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was viciously anti-Semitic, packed with false charges of a Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world. But for a time, a powerful faction in Japanese military and political circles came to believe that this infamous piece of hateful propaganda was completely accurate.

To them, the book — purportedly notes from a meeting of a Jewish shadow government — was not only true, but it was an indication that, rather than attack the Jews, they should befriend them and use them to their own advantage. The result was later called the Fugu Plan, an effort to encourage Jewish immigration to Japanese territory before and during World War II in order to bolster the country’s economic prosperity. Because of imperial Japan’s wartime partnership with Nazi Germany, it eventually abandoned the Fugu Plan. (As you could imagine, Der Führer wasn’t such a big fan.) But it deserves to be remembered, for it illustrates an undeniable truth: People stupid enough to buy into antisemitic conspiracy theories aren’t smart enough to differentiate between facts and fiction.

This brings us to President Donald Trump, Iran, and the never-ending negotiations to bring peace to the Middle East. Spoiler alert: It ain’t been going so swimmingly.And the American people are quickly losing confidence that a peace deal is even reachable. That’s because President Trump has been hinting since March 30 that a great deal was “probably” right around the corner. On May 23, a deal was “largely negotiated.” Then, as recently as May 29, he told us he was making the “final determination” on signing an agreement. Yet it’s now June 8, and not only is there no peace deal, but over the weekend, Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Israeli civilian targets.

Politicians pay a political price when they overpromise and underdeliver. President Trump is no exception: The hawks are mad because Iran is still standing (and giving America the finger); the doves are mad because we went to war; Joe Six-Pack is mad because gas prices are too damn high. Everyone is unhappy! We’ve gone from demanding Iran’s “unconditional surrender” to endless negotiations that aren’t going anywhere. The whole thing is a mess.

As we discussed last week, it certainly seems that stringing U.S. diplomats along — promising great things behind closed doors, agreeing to 99% of demands, but perpetually keeping the final 1% from ever reaching a conclusion — is now Iran’s strategy. From the mullah’s point of view, it’s their best available option because: With a ceasefire already in place (at least in name), the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign has stopped. No more mullahs have been killed. As long as the ceasefire continues, Iran has a free hand to rebuild its military — which it seems to be doing. By linking a peace deal to Hezbollah’s survival, Iran has gotten President Trump to order Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to stop attacking its terrorist proxies in Lebanon. But once a peace deal is signed, Iran would lose that leverage.

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For years, they were always neglecting the Kennedy Center. No more. Trump made his point. He threatened to put his name on it.

The Anti-Weaponization Fund is not worked out, just a try-out. Everybody knows how they will react. More soon.

Trump Suffers Rare Court Setbacks Amid Broader Record of Legal Success (JTN)

The first recent loss came on May 29, when U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ordered that Trump’s name be stripped from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. President Donald Trump has enjoyed considerable success in the courts during his second term. Federal judges and the Supreme Court have allowed key parts of his immigration agenda to proceed, upheld major personnel actions across the executive branch and endorsed an expansive view of presidential authority in several high-profile disputes. But over the past two weeks, the administration suffered two notable legal setbacks: one involving the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and another concerning a controversial compensation fund created through a settlement with the Internal Revenue Service.


Kennedy Center Ruling Reverses Renaming Effort
The first loss came on May 29, when U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ordered that Trump’s name be stripped from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. D.C. Cooper, an Obama appointee, also temporarily blocked the administration’s plan to shut the landmark Washington, D.C. venue for two years of renovations, which had been scheduled to begin on July 6.The backstory starts in December 2025, when a board stacked with Trump’s handpicked allies voted to rebrand the arts complex as the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” and signage bearing the new name went up on the building. Ticket sales declined sharply in the months that followed, and artists began canceling performances in protest. In February 2026, Trump announced the center would be closed for a sweeping overhaul.

Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat who had been a member of the center’s board before her voting rights were stripped, filed suit to stop both moves. Judge Cooper’s ruling was sweeping and pointed. In a 94-page opinion issued on what happened to be President Kennedy’s birthday, he wrote that “the Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

On the closure question, Cooper found that the board had not properly weighed its legal obligations to the institution before voting to shutter it, though he left open the possibility that a future board vote could still authorize renovations. Trump reacted with characteristic directness. In a post on Truth Social, he blasted Cooper and suggested Congress should take the whole institution back: “We are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them so they can make a determination as to what to do with it.”

Court Halts Anti-Weaponization Fund
A Justice Department spokesperson said in the statement that the agency “will continue to defend President Trump’s ability to restore the Center to its former glory as the finest performing arts center in the country – if not the world.” For now, Trump’s name is coming off the building. The second setback involved a program that drew criticism from an unusual source: members of Trump’s own party. In mid-May, the Justice Department announced the creation of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a nearly $1.8 billion pool of taxpayer money intended to compensate individuals who claimed they had been unfairly targeted or persecuted by previous administrations.

The fund was established not by Congress, but through a settlement agreement in a lawsuit Trump himself had filed against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. Under the settlement’s terms, Trump and his family received a formal apology but no cash. The money in the new fund, however, would be available to a broad universe of other claimants. Critics immediately pointed out that this project was an extraordinary arrangement: a fund of public money, created without congressional authorization, through a lawsuit in which the president was simultaneously the plaintiff and the head of the executive branch overseeing the defendant agency.

A group of 35 former federal judges—appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents—filed a motion arguing that the entire legal vehicle was, in their words, “a fraud on the court.” On May 29, the same day as the Kennedy Center ruling, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, in the Eastern District of Virginia, issued a temporary order halting all operations of the fund while she considered its legality. Challengers had argued that money could flow out the door and become impossible to recover before the court could act, and the judge agreed that the risk was serious enough to require a pause.

The political fallout was fast. Democrats called the fund a giveaway to Trump allies. Crucially, even some Republicans in Congress balked, and reports emerged that the fund was throwing the president’s legislative agenda into turmoil. By June 1, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made it official: the Anti-Weaponization Fund was dead. DOJ’s said in a statement on X that it “disagrees strongly” with Brinkema’s ruling but would comply. Trump later told ABC News he accepted the outcome, saying: “We are subject to the courts. At this moment, that’s what it is.”

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Connected to TDS.

On the Kavanaugh Anniversary, Democratic Leaders Swap Me Too for Maine (Turley)

“It’s clear the fix is in.” Those words from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). came with her vote against confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Warren was outraged that her fellow senators refused to believe a woman who came forward with a decades-old allegation against Kavanaugh that lacked any corroboration. It now appears that Kavanaugh’s former accusers are making the case that he was treated unjustly at their hands. At least they are now willing to swap “Me Too” for Maine. Warren’s words were part of a mantra from Democratic members that either you believe women about sexual harassment and assault, or you are enabling abusers.


It was almost exactly eight years ago, in July 2018, that President Trump nominated Kavanaugh to fill the seat of retiring Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kavanaugh, who was at first a very uncontroversial nominee, suddenly became the target of a well-financed, well-orchestrated campaign that would continue to resonate in that fall’s election campaigns. At the time, your failure to accept the word of Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh had assaulted her in high school was just proof that you and the system were sexist.

Long after the Senate confirmed Kavanaugh, the left continued to claim that his presence on the Supreme Court “rests on a mountain of misogyny.” In Ms. Magazine, actress Kathleen Turner reminded people that not believing women was furthering misogyny: “Survivors who come forward break the rules of silence a sexist society demands, and society expects them to pay a price.” If you recall, the lack of evidence led to the Senate Judiciary Committee combing through Kavanaugh’s personal calendars. Denials that such a thing had ever happened, coming from childhood friends, were treated as still more evidence of sexism.

There was Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who grilled Kavanaugh about using the term “boofing” (apparently referring to passing gas) with a high school friend as if it were a confession to a rape. His inquisitorial barrage was something straight out of the McCarthy period. Whitehouse expressed disgust that some would not take Ford’s word for it, declaring, “Today I stand with women who are brave enough to come forward with their stories of abuse and mistreatment. They deserve to be heard and credible allegations must be investigated. We must believe survivors, not bully them.”

Whitehouse is now a major donor and supporter of Graham Platner, the leading Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Maine. He dismisses the New York Times accounts from women of Platner’s physically and mentally abusive behavior. Instead of believing these women, he reportedly attacked Lyndsey Fifield, who “bravely” came forward publicly with her story at the request of Times reporters. Whitehouse is quoted as saying that he was “unimpressed” by the allegations and the multiple women coming forward “seems like a lot of nothing.” He suggested that he is not prepared to believe a woman if she is a conservative. “I mean, the only one who had anything to say that seemed ‘unsettling’ was a woman who works for right-wing political operations,” he said.

That attack was picked up by others like writer Krystal Ball. She too had denounced those who did not believe Ford in the Kavanaugh controversy. In the past, she claimed at that time, “women just didn’t come forward. They knew they wouldn’t be believed. ”Now she cannot imagine why anyone would believe these women, particularly Fifield. “NYT published uncorroborated accusations against [Platner] of ‘unsettling’ and ‘toxic’ behavior that came from a Heritage staffer who previously worked for a conservative org that backs Collins,” she posted online.

Fifield, after sharing stories with the Times of Platner’s alleged abusive behavior, went public to complain that the newspaper had failed to include the corroboration she had provided. She posted that the paper not only failed to include that she has supported Democrats for office, but also asked, “Why does it say ‘nobody could corroborate’ when I offered them sources that COULD corroborate?”

She added, “The Times also failed to include any mention that I DID confide in multiple friends through the years that Graham had been abusive — long before he was running for office. Those friends confirm they told the Times so.” If true, that is a strikingly different approach from the one taken by the media in reporting on the Kavanaugh allegations.

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“Love that the crack heads on Skid Row are up on the issues, know the candidates, and are able to Make Their Voices Heard in between hits of meth.” —Peachy Keenan on X

“.., transformed itself in a decade or so into an out-and-out racketeering operation, that is, to a criminal enterprise dedicated to the misappropriation of taxpayer money among its rank and file, many of whom are not citizens.”

The Jungle Drums Speak! (James Howard Kunstler)

Whaddaya know? Looks like the charismatic Nithya Raman has overtaken maverick candidate Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayoral “jungle” primary because. . . jungle reasons. That is, the denizens of LA’s vast homeless encampments — once known as “hobo jungles” — apparently voted overwhelmingly by mail for the Harvard-credentialed champion of street-junkies in the Silver Lake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, Atwater, and Hollywood neighborhoods (SELAH) she represents on the LA City Council.


So, it will be a November runoff between the super-duper “progressive” incumbent Karen Bass, and merely super-progressive Ms. Ramen. Better reserve your U-Haul trailer ASAP, as the City of Angels completes its transformation to the City of Zombies. And no complaining, please. This is what you voted for.

By the way, what does “progressive” actually mean these days? Progress towards. . . what? The culminating disintegration of a civil polity? The concerted failure to govern a large, urban organism? Unconditional surrender to the forces of entropy? One might suspect a soupçon of racial animus in the mix, too, something of a middle-finger to this thing called white supremacy we hear so much about. It must be rooted out at all costs, including the cost of a place that a productive population once loved — the very people renting all those U-Hauls, dispersing out into the USA gloaming.

Of course, this “progressive” Democratic Party has transformed itself in a decade or so into an out-and-out racketeering operation, that is, to a criminal enterprise dedicated to the misappropriation of taxpayer money among its rank and file, many of whom are not citizens. The model is not unlike more primitive early versions, such as Boss Tweed’s ring in 19th century New York, or the gang under mayor James Curley, the “Rascal King” of Boston. The system was known as “patronage.” Voters were the party’s patrons, and the patrons were on the payroll. Some had actual party jobs. Some just got free stuff in exchange for their votes. They called it a “machine” because its operations became automatic, self-fulfilling.

There was one big difference, though: these earlier Democratic Party grifters, for all their moneygrubbing shenanigans, were American patriots. They celebrated a country so ostentatiously “free,” so fervently dedicated to upward mobility, that it made room for their garish political corruption. The Democratic machine of Los Angeles today is quite the opposite: It’s a faction that loathes and detests the American system and seeks sedulously to destroy it, even while grabbing as much loot as it can in the process.

Mayor Karen Bass was trained for that mission in Cuba. Beginning at age 19, in 1973, Ms. Bass made eight trips there with the Venceremos Brigade (founded in 1969 by the Lefty-left SDS) to “show solidarity with the Cuban revolution,” which, you might remember, was a straight-up communist revolution. One might infer, then, that Mayor Bass is a straight-up communist, with ambitions to destroy the capitalist city of Los Angeles, so as to replace it with a communist utopia — where all production (if there is any) is owned and controlled by the government, which then dispenses the fruits-of-production to the people, according to their needs, as officers of the government see fit.

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“US officials have prepared proposals to bypass Britain and negotiate directly for control of Diego Garcia ..”

Trump Plans To Buy Chagos Islands, Home To Diego Garcia Military Base (ZH)

The White House is actively considering a plan to purchase the Chagos Islands, potentially undermining the UK’s agreement to transfer sovereignty of the strategically vital territory to Mauritius, according to reports. US officials have prepared proposals to bypass Britain and negotiate directly for control of Diego Garcia, the key Indian Ocean atoll that hosts a major joint US-UK military base. The idea forms part of broader options being developed by the Trump administration as alternatives to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s plan to cede the islands to Mauritius, which has close ties to China and Iran.


Strategic Importance
Diego Garcia’s location makes it critical for long-range operations. It enables round-the-clock bomber missions, including potential strikes on Iran using B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, and places key areas within striking range. Amid ongoing conflicts involving Iran and China’s expanding naval presence, US and UK officials stress the need to maintain a robust chain of global military bases.


Senior Trump administration officials worry that transferring control to Mauritius could expose the base to espionage or interference. One former adviser to UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, Ben Judah, told the Telegraph that the base has “super secret, super sensitive facilities” that are vital to British and allied capabilities, noting they would be difficult to replicate elsewhere.

Background on the UK-Mauritius Deal
The UK had agreed to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius while securing a long-term lease for the military base, reportedly involving around £35 billion ($46.7 billion) over 99 years. However, the deal requires US consent due to longstanding agreements governing the base, and Britain has since placed it on hold. President Trump initially appeared open to the arrangement but later strongly opposed it, particularly after the UK reportedly declined to allow strikes on Iran from Diego Garcia in the early stages of the Iran war. He publicly denounced the deal as “great stupidity” and criticized Starmer for weakening the special relationship, calling him “no Winston Churchill.”

US Position and Ongoing Talks
A US official told Reuters: “President Trump has been consistent in his position that the United Kingdom should not give away the British Indian Ocean Territory, which includes our joint U.S.-UK military facility on the Diego Garcia atoll. Diego Garcia’s strategic location in the Indian Ocean makes it a vital and indispensable military installation of significant importance to the national security of the United States.” The US continues regular discussions with Britain to preserve the base’s viability.

Purchasing the islands outright would likely involve waiting for the UK-Mauritius sovereignty transfer before negotiating with Mauritius. No specific price has been discussed, according to sources. In February, Trump said that he had retained the right to “militarily secure” the Diego Garcia air base after calling the UK’s decision an “act of total weakness.” A UK government spokesperson defended the original agreement, stating it was necessary to protect long-term interests and prevent adversaries from gaining a foothold:

“Diego Garcia is a key strategic military asset for both the UK and the US, which has protected our shared security for nearly 60 years. Maintaining long-term operational control and security of Diego Garcia is the entire basis for the UK-Mauritius agreement.” In May, UK minister Hamish Falconer stated there was “no scenario” in which Washington could purchase the islands, reaffirming commitment to the deal. Downing Street has not commented on the latest US proposals.

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I get the feeling they’re all after the same pot of money. There’ll be $200 billion (or however much it is, maybe a trillion), but not 5 or 6 times that. ~And there’s never enougn money, or energy, for any single one of them.

For now, it’s a feeding frenzy, however. Everyone’s just afraid to miss out.

OpenAI Files Confidentially For IPO, Joining SpaceX and Anthropic (ZH)

The rush by AI companies to go public before the window closes (i.e., “market conditions” emerge) entered its final lap late on Monday, when OpenAI joined its two mega peers in filing for a blockbuster IPO that could value the ChatGPT creator at more than $1tn as it races rival Anthropic to list its shares publicly, following an imminent offering by SpaceX.


OpenAI said it had confidentially submitted a draft IPO prospectus to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, formally kicking off the process for one of the year’s most hotly anticipated debuts. The company is also planning to launch a tender sale of its shares to provide liquidity to employees in the coming weeks, before the company goes public, Bloomberg reported. Why employees would want to sell shares ahead of an IPO is not exactly clear, unless they fear the market reaction to the public offering would disappoint.

OpenAI’s listing announcement comes days before SpaceX is set to IPO in a deal that could raise a record $86bn and value Elon Musk’s rockets-to-AI conglomerate at $1.78tn. Anthropic, the startup behind the chatbot Claude, said last week that it had filed confidentially for an IPO of its own. The company soared to a $965 billion valuation in its latest private funding round – above OpenAI’s for the first time – as its revenue surged. The three Wall Street listings comes at a time of unbridled euphoria among investors over AI, which has helped propel US stocks to a series of record highs but also prompted worries that markets are overheating.

Last week, Goldman published a note seeking to preempt the big question: “Can Markets Absorb Massive Stock Supply From Coming Mega IPOs Without A Crash:” While Goldman did not express concerns about the coming flood of stock supply (its argument is that demand will more than offset the flood of new shares), the bank which is also a lead underwriter for both SpaceX and Anthropic calculated that recent and upcoming IPOs will result in roughly $500 billion of additional unlocked shares available to sell in 2026 and likely a larger quantity in 2027 as insiders sell and distribute their stakes to public (mostly retail) shareholders. The bank expects the majority of potential equity supply from the current pipeline of IPOs will become free float in 2027.

OpenAI’s IPO – which also comes at a time when CEO Sam Altman has floated handing out shares to US taxpayers ostensibly in hopes that such an action would lead to a government backstop and/or bailout if and when the AI cycle turns – will mark a test of investors’ appetite for a company posting booming revenue growth but also staggering losses that are forecast to continue for many years as the company spends vast sums on data centres and other infrastructure: its funding commitments to hyperscalar companies are well north of $1 trillion and unless the company manages to dramatically boost its revenue growth it will find itself woefully undercapitalized in coming years. Hence the IPO, as well as a bevy of private credit deals which mask the company’s true debt exposure.

OpenAI has been investing heavily in AI research to compete with rivals including Google and Anthropic, as well as to expand the computing capacity needed to serve ChatGPT’s 900mn users. In February, the company told investors it was planning to spend about $600 billion on AI infrastructure by 2030. It said in a statement on Monday that it had not “decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company”. “But it’s a complicated set of trade-offs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best,” it added.

A public debut in 2026 would also pit Altman squarely against Elon Musk on a different plane than the failed lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO. SpaceX, Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI firm, is targeting an IPO at a valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion on Thursday, which would immediately make it one of the world’s most valuable public companies. As an indication of the staggering demand for AI exposure, OpenAI has already dwarfed even SpaceX’s IPO in a single funding round. The company completed a deal to raise $122 billion from investors at an $852 billion valuation.

The ChatGPT maker also planned to launch an employee share sale ahead of going public at its current $852bn price tag, according to people familiar with the matter. One said OpenAI’s decision to announce its confidential filing was intended to give employees who were considering selling shares “transparency” about the upcoming IPO. US tech groups often file IPO paperwork privately, keeping their financial figures out of the public eye while the SEC reviews documents. That allows start-ups to gauge investor demand, make revisions and sometimes scrap IPO plans without broader scrutiny.

The San Francisco-based company’s move to progress its listing plans received a boost after a California court last month threw out Musk’s legal case against OpenAI and its chief Sam Altman. A public debut in 2026 would also pit Altman squarely against Elon Musk on a different plane than the failed lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO. SpaceX, Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI firm, is targeting an IPO at a valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion on Thursday, which would immediately make it one of the world’s most valuable public companies.

OpenAI had been working with bankers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and lawyers at Cooley for the past few months, people familiar with its preparations previously told the FT. Monday’s filing sets OpenAI on a path to start trading as early as the autumn, they said. It is already one of the world’s most valuable private companies, after closing a record funding round of up to $122bn in March. As part of that deal it raised $3bn from retail investors, who will be given a wider opportunity to invest in the start-up when it becomes publicly traded.

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“Ukraine is not an EU member state, and Ukraine is not a NATO member. Why would the EU put themselves into the conflict resolution when Ukraine is not in the EU.”

“Putin knows the people of Europe do not want the corrupt nation of Ukraine as part of their wealth draining operation.”

“Hey, at least the ‘coalition of the willing’ is now begging for an audience with Putin.”

EU Coalition of the Willing: Five Terms for Direct Ukraine-Russia Talks (CTH)

Politico is reporting that Germany is going to replace the United States as the direct contact for negotiations with Russia; that’s according to a spokesperson for Merz. However, if you read the actual printout from their collective agreement there is nothing of the sort mentioned. Instead, what actually exists within the statement are five terms they have agreed upon in order to start direct discussions between Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin. At least two of the terms are non-starters for Russia: […] Conditions that would need to be in place for a just and lasting peace.

  • First, a stop to the fighting. They called on President Putin to agree to an immediate and complete ceasefire.
  • Second, the current line of contact should be the starting point for negotiations. International borders must not be changed by force, and Ukraine’s sovereign right to choose its own security arrangements and alliances must be fully respected.
  • Third, Ukraine must have robust and legally binding security guarantees in place once a ceasefire enters into force, building on commitments made in Berlin in December 2025 and Paris in January 2026. This includes the deployment of the Multinational Force – Ukraine.
  • Fourth, Russian assets will remain immobilised until Russia ceases its war of aggression and compensates Ukraine for the damage caused by the war.
  • Fifth, that European security interests must be safeguarded in any deal. Elements of any negotiation related to the EU and NATO would need the consent of the EU and its Member States and NATO Allies respectively.

The #3, #4 and #5 points are not going to go anywhere.

Germany, France, the U.K and/or EU participants are not going to put troops on the ground in Ukraine without United States security guarantees. President Trump has already rejected that proposal on three occasions. The Russian sovereign fund that was seized by the EU is not the property of Vladimir Putin; it is wealth belonging to the Russian people and President Putin will not accept that term. Additionally, two-thirds of the world has been against that seizure bolstering Russia’s position.

The fifth point is laughable. The EU collective in Brussels is going to be required to give consent to any peace agreement? Highly doubtful Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin would even entertain that condition. Ukraine is not an EU member state, and Ukraine is not a NATO member. Why would the EU put themselves into the conflict resolution when Ukraine is not in the EU. From a brutally obvious and pragmatic Russian position, this makes no sense. However, I would look for Putin to do something funny with this, like force the EU to adopt Ukraine first as a ‘put up – or shut up‘ type challenge.

Putin knows the people of Europe do not want the corrupt nation of Ukraine as part of their wealth draining operation. Hey, at least the ‘coalition of the willing’ is now begging for an audience with Putin.

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“The gaffe-prone former foreign minister has been blamed for Berlin’s failure to win a rotating seat on the UN Security Council..” …a rotating seat on the UN Security Council that Germany wants to be a permanent one?!

German Lawmakers Want Answers From Baerbock After UN Humiliation – Bild (RT)

German lawmakers want former Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock questioned over Berlin’s failure to secure a seat on the UN Security Council, Bild reports. According to the outlet, the ruling CDU/CSU alliance blames the former top diplomat for the setback and wants her summoned before the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee. Germany failed to win a non-permanent seat on the UNSC – the UN’s most powerful body, with authority to adopt legally binding resolutions and sanctions – for the first time in modern history on Wednesday, losing out to Portugal and Austria. Germany won all six previous contests it entered since 1977, but this time received only 104 votes, well short of the required two-thirds majority.


German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul described the result as a “bitter defeat,” but insisted he “did not personally blame himself,” arguing that Germany entered the race too late. According to Bild, lawmakers are placing the blame on Wadephul’s predecessor, Baerbock, who served from 2021-25. “We must thoroughly investigate the causes of this embarrassing electoral defeat,” Stephan Mayer, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, told the outlet. “[It is] absolutely essential that Annalena Baerbock answer questions before the Bundestag [to explain] how, when, and what exactly her ministry did to mobilize support for Germany’s bid.”

Hesse’s Minister for International Affairs, Manfred Pentz, also pointed the finger at Baerbock. “You cannot blame [Chancellor] Friedrich Merz and Johann Wadephul for this electoral defeat. Annalena Baerbock messed it up during her time as foreign minister,” he stated. Baerbock’s tenure as Germany’s top diplomat drew frequent criticism for a lack of diplomatic pragmatism, an inconsistent agenda, and high-profile verbal blunders.During her time in office, she said she would support Ukraine “irrespective of what my voters think,” declared the EU to be “fighting a war against Russia,” and described Israeli strikes on Palestinian schools as “self-defense.” She also made several awkward historical, geographical, and mathematical slip-ups, including promising a “360-degree foreign policy.”

Despite the gaffes, Baerbock was appointed president of the UN General Assembly after leaving the Foreign Ministry – a largely ceremonial but prestigious UN post. Munich Security Conference chairman Wolfgang Ischinger suggested that Germany’s defeat this week may have partly been retaliation for how Baerbock “snatched” the role, which he told WELT TV had “not exactly generated new sympathy for Germany” among UN ambassadors.

A diplomatic source told Bild that Baerbock is widely unpopular in the General Assembly for being “too focused on Germany… selfies and herself.” Botswana’s former president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, also told the outlet that Germany could have secured more support from African countries in the Security Council vote had Baerbock not treated African partners in a “condescending and disrespectful” manner. He cited diplomatic disputes over infrastructure projects during her tenure as foreign minister.

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Michael Snyder is the boy who cried wolf. Amusing at times.

A “Godzilla El Niño” (Michael Snyder)

The waters of the Pacific Ocean are getting extremely warm, and that could provide fuel for an immensely destructive climate event that is unlike anything we have ever seen before. Even the United Nations has issued an ominous warning about the El Niño event that is in the long-term forecast, because it will have a dramatic impact on every man, woman, and child on the entire planet. We are being told that there is more than an 80 percent chance that El Niño conditions will arrive by the end of next month due to rapidly warming equatorial waters in the Pacific. Meanwhile, an unprecedented “9,000-mile marine heatwave” has developed in the North Pacific. Many experts are concerned that the confluence of those two factors could produce a “Godzilla El Niño”…


The chance of an El Niño event emerging by July is now over 80 percent, which will likely make 2026 one of the hottest years on record. At the same time, an exceptionally large 9,000-mile marine heatwave has been forming in the North Pacific since the end of 2025. These extreme warming events are now evolving together across the Pacific. Scientists are increasingly concerned that the warm water will fuel a “super” or “Godzilla” El Niño, potentially prolonging marine heatwaves, disrupting fisheries and ecosystems, and intensifying global climate impacts well into 2027. The “9,000-mile marine heatwave” in the North Pacific is absolutely astounding climate scientists.

At the same time, the warming in the equatorial waters where El Niño events normally develop is at a level that we haven’t seen since at least 1877… The temperature of the ocean in the equatorial waters where these El Niños form was predicted to be 3 degrees Celsius above average. Experts are saying that this is a level of heat in the Pacific Ocean that hasn’t been recorded since 1877. I have written about the “Super El Niño” that started in 1877 before. That “Super El Niño” was one of the primary reasons why 50 million people starved during the Great Famine that stretched from 1876 to 1878…

This El Niño, they say, could rival the intense event of the late 19th century that triggered “the Great Famine” on a global scale, killing millions of people. And its scythe sliced through southern Africa. “The 1876-78 Great Famine impacted multiple regions across the globe, including parts of Asia, Nordeste [Northeast] Brazil, and northern and southern Africa, with total human fatalities exceeding 50 million people, arguably the worst environmental disaster to befall humanity,” a team of scientists said a decade ago in a ground-breaking paper presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

3 percent of the entire population of the world starved to death during those years. Today, 3 percent of the entire population of the world would be 240,000,000 people. In 1982 and 1983, we experienced the most severe “Super El Niño” of the 20th century… In 1982-83, the most intense El Niño of the 20th century caused extreme weather events throughout the world, including floods in the American Pacific and in the southern United States, and droughts in north-eastern Brazil and Indonesia. It also caused a very mild winter in the mid-latitudes of Europe, Asia and North America. That “Super El Niño” sparked a horrific famine in eastern Africa that wiped out a very large proportion of the population…

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“..the first great realist thinker…”

In the Land of Thucydides (John J. Mearsheimer)

I gave a lecture in Athens on 2 June 2026 that was hosted by two prestigious Greek organizations: the Council for International Relations and the Institute of International Relations. I was asked to speak about why I think Realism explains contemporary geopolitical developments better than any other theory. I was fully aware that I was speaking in the home of Thucydides, the first great realist thinker.
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Jun 082026
 
 June 8, 2026  Posted by at 9:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  39 Responses »


Claude Monet Le Grand Canal et Santa Maria della Salute 1908


Israel Bombs Iranian Regime After Terrorist Strikes (Catherine Salgado)
Israel Strikes Military Targets Inside Iran, Ignoring Trump’s Pleas (ZH)
More Evidence Iran Is Rapidly Restoring Its Missile Tunnels (ZH)
Iran FM Blames US “Contradictions” On Stalled Peace Talks (ZH)
‘I Could’ve Kept It That Way’: Trump Admits The Inflation Is His Choice (ZH)
Trump Storms Out of ‘Meet the Press’ Interview (Matt Margolis)
President Trump Walks Out of Combative NBC Interview with Kirsten Welker (CTH)
Britain Is Erasing White Heroes From Its Money (Margolis)
A Serious Country Doesn’t Swap Its Greatest Leader For Little Animals (MN)
Europe 2.0, Beyond Brussels: The End Of The European Union As We Know It (AmG)
California US Attorney Office Feigns Ignorance of Voter Fraud (CTH)
UK Cop Fired For Questioning Islam In ‘Safe Space’ (MN)
They Threw Everything at Him. He’s Still Standing. (Eric Florack)
A Surprisingly Simple Way To Create Powerful Quantum States (SD)

 


 

 


 


Very pro-Bibi. Well, that’s a view…

Israel Bombs Iranian Regime After Terrorist Strikes (Catherine Salgado)

Israeli forces will not allow terrorists to fire missiles at their civilians without a response. And God bless them for it — the Iranian regime and its proxies have terrorized the world too long. Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy, has been perpetually firing on Israelis, and an Arab terrorist murdered Master Sergeant (Res.) Haim Kalomiti and injured multiple others in a jihad attack Sunday in Tzur Natan, one of over a thousand attempted terror attacks on Israelis just since March.


Then Hezbollah’s Tehran paymasters began bombarding Israel. There has never been a ceasefire. Both Hezbollah and Iran’s regime never stopped shooting at civilians, not for a single day. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) posted late on June 7, “The Israeli Air Force struck military targets belonging to the Iranian terror regime in western and central Iran a short while ago.”

You can see below how many missiles Iran’s regime fired at civilian targets in Israel (note on the map: the “West Bank” is an inaccurate Palestinian propaganda term for Judea and Samaria):

Unfortunately, Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi is getting cockier by the day. I wish to heaven Donald Trump would bomb him to hell instead of pretending we’ll get a deal with Tehran, which will never, ever, ever materialize:

Ambassador Yechiel Leiter released a statement to emphasize to Americans why the strikes on Iranian and Lebanese terrorists were necessary. “Iran fired 11 ballistic missiles at Israel today. Each one of those missiles can level an entire neighborhood and kill hundreds. No self-respecting country in the world would tolerate such an attack, and neither will Israel,” Leiter said.

The ambassador continued, “Israel is now targeting Iranian surface-to-surface missile launch sites, as well as infrastructure facilities unrelated to the energy sector. The people of Lebanon have rejected Iran’s proxy, Hizballah, and have told Iran to get out of their country. If Hizballah fires at Israel, its command centers in the Dahiya will be hit hard.” That is the way to fight a war. Leiter truly observed: “Everyone has had enough of this maniacal Iranian regime.”

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Are they playing PR games?

Israel Strikes Military Targets Inside Iran, Ignoring Trump’s Pleas (ZH)

President Trump said on Sunday he would tell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to strike back after Iran fired a salvo of missiles at Israeli targets in retaliation for an attack on the outskirts of Beirut, news outlet Axios reported. Iran has long said any peace deal with the U.S. would depend on a ceasefire also holding in Lebanon, which Israel invaded in March in pursuit of Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters who fired rockets and drones across the border in solidarity with Tehran. But Israel earlier on Sunday launched strikes in the Beirut area for the first time since the U.S. announced a truce plan for Lebanon last week.


The Israeli military later said it had identified missiles launched from Iran and that its defense systems had intercepted them. Details on whether Israel suffered any damage were not yet available. Trump, who was spending the weekend at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, had been briefed about the escalation between Iran and Israel, a U.S. official told Reuters. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “It’s certainly not going to help negotiations,” Trump told Fox News after the Iranian missile launches. “What I would suggest to Iran: You’ve shot your missiles, that’s enough, get back to the table and make a deal.”

Asked about the earlier Israeli strike on Beirut, he said: “I’m not happy about it.” Trump ]also told Axios he would call Netanyahu and press him not to retaliate. Iran’s chief peace negotiator, parliamentary speaker Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, said U.S. bases and Israeli assets are legitimate targets because of hostile acts including the “violation of agreements over Lebanon.” “They showed that they only understand the language of power,” he wrote on X. Ebrahim Rezaei, an influential hardline lawmaker who serves as spokesperson for the Iranian parliament’s national security committee, posted on X that Iran would deliver a “decisive and painful response” to Sunday’s Israeli strikes on Lebanon.

Iran has not targeted Israel directly since a ceasefire in the wider war in April, although Hezbollah has done so. In turn, an Israeli official, responding to the apparent threat, told Reuters that Israel would retaliate against any attacks on its territory from Iran, and consider it “an opportunity to renew the campaign”. Washington and Tehran have shown little progress in reaching a deal to end the war that Trump launched in February with a campaign of air strikes alongside Israel against Iran. Trump has repeatedly threatened to restart the strikes unless there is an agreement soon.

“We’re very close to a deal, or I’m going to blow the hell out of them,” Trump told NBC News in an interview, broadcast to mark 100 days of the conflict. The comments were recorded on Friday and broadcast on Sunday as Trump visited his New Jersey golf course. Trump has said a similar version of the same news for much of the past month.

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Just a small part, says Trump.

More Evidence Iran Is Rapidly Restoring Its Missile Tunnels (ZH)

President Trump has newly estimated that Iran has 21%-22% of its missiles remaining. Trump said in an interview with NBC: “They have some missiles and drones, percentage-wise maybe 21%-22% of the missiles. That’s a lot, but it’s not what it was before the war.” He and top White House officials had previously mused that the Iranians are working hard to reconstitute their defenses after the opening US-Israeli heavy bombing campaign of Operation Epic Fury.


The fresh statement comes on the heels of a Washington Post story last month which cited CIA estimates saying Iran still holds about 70% of its missiles and 75% of missile launchers it had before the war. So there’s a likelihood that Iran still has significantly more than just 20% of its arsenal. There’s also some anecdotal evidence, and statements from the Iranians themselves, such as in the following… Watch:

The Iranians have been utilizing basic construction equipment to dig out several missile launchers and reopen subterranean tunnels tied to its missile program. = n “Iran has repaired other parts of the bases as well, including roads that the US and Israel bombed to prevent missile launchers from using them,” CNN wrote last week. “Satellite images show almost all these craters have now been filled, and at two sites, even repaved.” Sam Lair, a research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, the same outlet late last month that “There’s nothing to prevent the launchers from being armed with the ample stockpile of missiles that the Iranians still have.”

He sought to highlight the limits of American firepower, in terms of damage, and given that it hasn’t been sustained: “The US military is good at delivering tactical successes, and entombing and suppressing the Iranian missile force is a great example of that,” said Lair. “However, if that isn’t accompanied by a set of reasonable strategic war aims and an achievable theory of victory, it can end up being a strategic failure.” President Trump has been touting the near annihilation of Iran’s arsenal, and has lately said the rest of its launch sites could be taken out in a day if he gave the order.

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Does Iran get their $1.5 million to $2 million per vessel?

Iran FM Blames US “Contradictions” On Stalled Peace Talks (ZH)

The U.S. and Iran remain stuck in preliminary talks to end the war, with the main obstacle being Tehran’s demand for access to billions of dollars in frozen assets and the Trump administration’s refusal to provide upfront cash or broader sanctions relief. Tehran is seeking about $12 billion upfront and $24 billion during a proposed 60-day negotiation window. “Twenty-four billion dollars is not much for America if he wants to reach an agreement with Iran,” Gen. Mohsen Rezaei, a senior adviser to Iran’s top official, told CNN on Friday. “This is our own, not America’s money.”


For the Trump administration, releasing frozen funds for Tehran is optically displeasing because the president spent years blasting the Obama administration over the $1.7 billion Iran payment tied to the 2015 nuclear deal, and later criticized the Biden administration’s move to allow Iran access to $6 billion in assets during a prisoner swap. The U.S. government estimates that Tehran has $100 billion in inaccessible assets, mostly oil revenue trapped abroad, including funds in China, Qatar, Oman, and Iraq. On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei spoke with CNN’s senior international correspondent Frederik Pleitgen about the ongoing negotiations with the U.S.

Baghaei stated, “The main problem of negotiating with this administration is that you have to face so many changing positions, moving the goal posts, different statements, contradictory remarks by different officials, so it makes the whole process very cumbersome.” He outlined one of the main problems is that “the Americans must understand that they have to recognize Iran’s rights,” including its right to peaceful nuclear enrichment under the international non-proliferation treaty. “At the same time, when they are talking about our blocked assets, they’re not going to give us any concession,” he said.

CNN reported earlier on Sunday that c, according to a source close to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Baghaei added that the US must “simply stop their sanctions” and “need to let Iranian assets be released and be available for the Iranians.” Beyond US-Iran talks, IRGC-linked Fars News reports that Iran has been collecting $1.5 million to $2 million per vessel passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Fars said the payments are deposited into Iran’s treasury under the budget law and directed toward designated spending areas. Some payments are reportedly settled not in cash but in USDT/Tether or through barter arrangements.

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“”There’s no reason to raise interest rates … What they do is when they raise interest rates, they try and kill success. I don’t want to kill success. We should actually lower interest rates.”

‘I Could’ve Kept It That Way’: Trump Admits The Inflation Is His Choice (ZH)

In a wide-ranging interview in which he touted record stock prices and rebranded weapons-grade uranium as “nuclear dust” (and then stormed out), President Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud: the prices Americans are paying at the pump are not an accident. This was all his decision. “I could’ve kept it that way,” Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker in an interview taped in a rain-battered Wisconsin barn before he was set to appear at a farming industry roundtable discussion – describing the cheap gasoline everyone enjoyed during his first few months back in office. “But I said, I have to take a little bit of a turn … We’re going to have higher gasoline. We’re going to have a little higher fertilizer, et cetera, et cetera. But I’m going to get rid of a nuclear weapon in the hands of very dangerous people.”


“The farmers love me”
Asked about farmers who can no longer afford fertilizer – seventy percent of them, by Welker’s count – Trump didn’t push back, but instead changed the subject to loyalty. “I had a choice to make. I could keep it going. The farmers were doing great. Fertilizer was very cheap. Everything was cheap. Gasoline was very low. Everything was very low. I could’ve kept it that way. But I said, I have to take a little bit of a turn. The farmers are going to understand it better than anybody.”v

Trump leaned on his heavy support in the heartland. “I love the farmers, and the farmers love me. The farmers trust me,” he said, pointing to the $28 billion in trade-war bailouts he cut growers in his first term. So – the economic cost of the US-Israeli war on Iran is something that Americans should be willing to eat for him. And again, promises of utopia: “And when we have a completion, you will see things like you’ve never seen. The oil will go down.” “It’s all coming down as soon as the war’s over,” he promised of gas and diesel. When Welker pressed for a timeline, he bristled – “No, but you keep talking about speed” – and reached again for Vietnam.

The public is less patient: an Economist/YouGov survey this week found sixty-eight percent of adults want a deal to end the war as fast as possible, including fifty-five percent of his own 2024 voters. They are being asked to finance a known cost today against a promised windfall on an unscheduled tomorrow, on the word of a president whose case rests on never having to name the day. That is not an economic argument. It is a leap of faith with a fuel surcharge.

Blame The Fed
And of course, it’s the Fed’s fault for not aligning with Trump’s agenda. Given whispers that the institution is actually considering hiking rates in response to a strong jobs report, Trump preemptively branded the move as a crime against prosperity. “There’s no reason to raise interest rates … What they do is when they raise interest rates, they try and kill success. I don’t want to kill success. We should actually lower interest rates.”

And then – in what should give any bondholder pause: “Growth is the greatest thing you can have, and growth does not cause inflation.” No, apparently it takes braking a core campaign promise to personally engineer higher prices. Meanwhile, new Fed chair Kevin Warsh gavels his first meeting later this month, and Trump was careful to say he would not “have a big influence on him” – except, he clearly spelled out his expectations. “I would like to see rates get lower,” he said, “because we could build this into the greatest machine that the world has ever seen, but you can’t do that when everybody immediately raises interest rates.”

Meanwhile, Trump insists Iran can be starved into surrender… “They tried a blockade, and now we blockaded them,” he said of Iran. “And, as you know, they’re losing $400-500 million a day. It’s not sustainable for them. They have an economy that’s shot, in addition to everything else.” The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil; and the valve Trump is twisting shut to strangle Tehran is the same valve lifting fuel costs in Des Moines. The blockade he is celebrating and the inflation he admitted choosing are directly linked. Asked what happens if the talks fail, Trump did not hedge: “Either way, we win.”

Asked about the highly enriched uranium still buried in Iran, he offered a branding note. “The official name is highly enriched uranium. And I call it nuclear dust because it seemed to be nice, and everyone understands it better, and it’s sort of cute, and people picked it up.”He assured Welker the sites are under constant watch from orbit: “If anybody walked there, if you walked over there, I would be able to read your first name on your lapel. And these are cameras up in space. It’s pretty amazing technology. Space Force.” He claimed, in passing and without elaboration, that the United States “took over Venezuela in a matter of minutes.” He put Iran’s surviving arsenal at “maybe 21-22% of their missiles … It’s a lot of missiles, but it’s not what it was when we first attacked.”

 

 

Doing The World A Service
At the end of the day, Trump had no choice: “I had to stop a country, very powerful, very dangerous country, from having a nuclear weapon because they’d use it. They’d blow up the world. They’d blow up the Middle East. They’d blow up Israel. They’d come here. They’d blow up Europe. They’re nuts, okay? They’re crazy people. I deal with them. And very high-strung people. Little crazy. And – I get along with them. I like them. But you don’t want to let them have a nuclear weapon. And I’m doing the world a service, but I’m doing our country a service. You know, it’s America first. I’m doing our country a service. Nice rain.”

Indeed…

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“A country can never be great with a dishonest press.”

Trump Storms Out of ‘Meet the Press’ Interview (Matt Margolis)

President Donald Trump sat down with NBC’s Kristen Welker for a Meet the Press interview, but things went sideways fast. The exchange started to unravel when the topic of election integrity came up. Trump made clear that he views the media’s handling of these stories as part of a larger systemic problem, one that the press has deliberately chosen to ignore. He told Welker that her network actively works against him and that he had the receipts to back it up. “You play right into their hands with this stuff,” Trump said.


“You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged. Do you know that I won an election in a landslide and I got 94% bad press.” Welker tried to redirect the conversation toward acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, but Trump wasn’t having it. Every time she jumped in, he pushed through it. He insisted the evidence of problems with election integrity runs deep: “You have more evidence, there’s more evidence than ever presented.” “Your elections in this country — we’re like a third world country,” he said. “Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked.”

He didn’t stop there. “And so is ABC and CBS and CNN,” Trump continued. “You’re a one-sided crooked network.” That’s when he made his move. “Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough,” Trump said. “Thank you, darling. Have a good time.” Welker scrambled to keep him in his seat, reminding him of the effort it took to set up the interview. “Mr. President, let’s — please, I traveled all the way to Wisconsin,” she said. That didn’t move Trump at all. “I sat in the rain with you for an hour,” he told her. “On and off in the rain, and I’ve given you enough time.”

Then he turned it into something bigger. “You ought to straighten out your press,” he said, “because you know what? A country can never be great with a dishonest press.” Welker kept pushing, repeating that she flew to Wisconsin specifically for the interview. Trump’s mind was made up, and he was done. I don’t doubt that the liberal media will frame this as Trump dodging tough questions or losing his composure. That’s the predictable take from a press corps that circles the wagons whenever one of its own gets called out. But watch the clip and form your own opinion.

Trump previously told the New York Post’s Miranda Devine that accountability for the 2020 election may still be coming, saying his administration has uncovered information that wasn’t previously available and now knows “who rigged the election.” He argued that evidence gathered since returning to office has only reinforced his belief that the election was stolen. Trump maintains that Joe Biden did not legitimately win in 2020 and claimed Biden actually lost “in a landslide.”

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Do watch part of it.

President Trump Walks Out of Combative NBC Interview with Kirsten Welker (CTH)

President Trump abruptly ended and walked out of a combative interview with NBC’s Kirsten Welker, who will now receive the praise and adulation that Margaret Brennan so emphatically wanted. Kirsten Welker is now the leading Democrat Presidential Candidate for 2028. During an NBC interview, Welker continually interrupted President Trump and challenged his assertion of government weaponization against J6 protest attendees and voter fraud. President Trump was making the case that the current California vote counting of mail-in ballots, still taking place 5-days after election day, was representative of voter fraud within the U.S. election system.


Welker demanded President Trump provide the evidence. President Trump emphasized the evidence is in the process that is taking place in front of your eyes. Welker again demanded President Trump provide the evidence. Eventually Trump gave up in frustration. The Video and Transcript is Below:

[TRANSCRIPT] – KRISTEN WELKER: This $1.8 billion so-called anti-weaponization fund that’s going to compensate people who say the federal government weaponized the legal system against them. It’s been blocked by the courts, met with opposition from Republicans .

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: And Democrats.

KRISTEN WELKER: – in Congress, and Democrats.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Most, excuse me, mostly Democrats.

KRISTEN WELKER: Mostly Democrats and some Republicans.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Some. Very few Republicans.

KRISTEN WELKER: Just to be very clear, are you backing off the fund completely as your acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said, or are you looking for another avenue to revive the fund?

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: So let — let me explain what the fund is. People have been hurt so badly by radical left lunatics that worked for the Biden administration and Sleepy Joe. They’re vicious. They’re violent, what they did to people. And of course they went after me more than anybody else. They raided Mar-a-Lago and all the other things. But people have been badly hurt. They’ve committed suicide. They’ve lost their jobs. They’re lost their families. They’ve lost their wives. They’ve lost everything. They’ve lost everything over a fake weaponization of government. Now, let me just tell you –

KRISTEN WELKER: So are you looking for a way to revive it?

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Well, look. If it was up to me, I’d pay them the kind of money that they deserve. People have been destroyed. Lives have been destroyed. Many suicides, think of it. People have committed suicide because a bunch of thugs went after them.

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Duck! 😉

Britain Is Erasing White Heroes From Its Money (Margolis)

The Bank of England has decided that Winston Churchill, Alan Turing, and Jane Austen are too controversial to appear on British banknotes. So they’re replacing them with frogs. I’m not kidding. Frogs. And foxes. And dolphins. And puffins. The Bank announced it would phase out portraits of historical figures in favor of native wildlife imagery on its next banknote series. The official explanation was “security,” but we all know better than to believe that. Writing in The Telegraph earlier this week, Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, said: “The Bank’s foremost objective is the security of our banknotes, which includes tackling the threat from counterfeiting.”


However, the Savanta research, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, will raise questions about whether the decision was also motivated by concerns that featuring Britain’s former wartime prime minister and other national heroes would upset some sections of the public. The researchers concluded that Churchill, Turing, and Austen were “contentious and not representative of the UK’s cultural and natural diversity.” Officials received advice to scrap historical figures entirely because they represented “a backward-looking vision of the UK that carries too great a risk of division and controversy.”

Translation: too many white people on the money. One hundred nineteen focus group participants called the existing banknote figures “potentially divisive, elitist and disconnected from their own experiences.” One participant actually described Alan Turing, the man who helped crack the Nazi Enigma code and helped bring an end to World War II, as “imperialistic,” complaining about a “‘we’re the ones who won the Second World War and saved the world’ feeling” to the notes. I guess they missed the memo that Turing was a gay man persecuted by his own government. Apparently, none of that matters if the woke mob has decided he’s problematic.

It gets worse. Savanta advised against depicting Georgian and Victorian architecture, flagging those buildings as high risk “due to potential links to colonialism/slavery.” The researchers also warned against showing the White Cliffs of Dover because of their “association with the UK border.” One focus group participant from Northern Ireland said some British buildings were “erected on the back of slave trade money.” Another said the White Cliffs “could be seen by some people to be a political statement, particularly at the moment around immigration and small boats. “Is there anything these woke focus group members aren’t offended by? Seriously, iconic landmarks are out. Celebrated intellectuals are out. War heroes are out. The puffin, however, made the cut.

The Bank claims the Savanta report had nothing to do with its final decision. They point to a public consultation in which 44,000 people participated, with 60% choosing nature imagery and 38% preferring historical figures. Don’t buy it. The Bank commissioned focus groups specifically to assess whether historical figures were too divisive, so it was likely rigged from the start to justify what they wanted to do in the first place. “Without great and courageous figures like Churchill and Turing, we may have swastikas on our banknotes today,” Retired British Army Colonel Richard Kemp said. “We owe them so much and it is right that we should be reminded of our debt to them daily on our banknotes.”

Kemp added, “The woke desire to erase Britain’s proud and remarkable culture has now even infiltrated the Bank of England. This decision is shameful and should be reversed.” Robert Jenrick of Reform UK added, “If it wasn’t for the likes of Churchill and Turing, we’d be living under a government that really was divisive and imperialistic. The Bank of England should stop wasting time and money on this and focus instead on keeping prices down.”

Why should this matter to those of us in the United States? Well, this same nonsense is coming here, and you all know it. The movement to scrub historical figures from public life has already targeted building names and statues, and there have been efforts to update American currency with more diverse figures as well. I’ve long believed that it is inevitable that Democrats will one day push to put Barack Obama on our money. Give it time, and the demand will be that American money features only figures the far left approves of. Dead white men need not apply.

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Q: Since when was Alan Turing on the money? Banned forever because he was gay.

Wasn’t putting him there a great victory? For gay rights?

Who wins that one now? Gays lose again, right?

A Serious Country Doesn’t Swap Its Greatest Leader For Little Animals (MN)

The Bank of England has now admitted the quiet part out loud. Historical figures including Winston Churchill were removed from future banknotes after researchers told officials they were “elitist and divisive.”


The move replaces British legends with wildlife in a calculated step to sideline national heroes and accelerate cultural replacement. This is not a neutral design update. It is institutional capture in action, where the man who rallied Britain against Nazi tyranny gets sidelined because focus groups and consultants found him too problematic for modern sensitivities and would prefer to look at a Fox or a hedgehog instead.

The revelation aligns precisely with plans first laid out months earlier. Back in March, the Bank announced it would phase out portraits of Churchill on the £5 note, Jane Austen on the £10, JMW Turner on the £20, and Alan Turing on the £50. In their place would come native British wildlife, plants, and landscapes. King Charles III would remain on the front of the notes. Officials claimed the shift followed a public consultation with over 44,000 responses, where around 60 percent supposedly favored nature themes for security reasons and to celebrate the environment.

Critics at the time called the idea absurd and bonkers. They warned it represented a war on history and showed the Bank had been captured by progressive ideology. One former business minister said notes should honor the historical giants who shaped the nation rather than fuzzy animals. Another asked what came next – squirrels running the economy. Observers noted it fit a wider pattern of erasing or downplaying Britain’s past under the banner of progress and diversity.

That pattern includes London museums draping portraits to “reclaim Caribbean history,” the removal of Shakespeare, Thatcher, and Churchill artworks from 10 Downing Street in favor of pieces by artists with Caribbean ties, Cambridge panels labeling Churchill a white supremacist whose empire was supposedly worse than the Nazis, and a London primary school renaming “Churchill House” after Marcus Rashford to promote diversity. Statues of Churchill have faced vandalism and calls for removal, including during pro-Palestine protests earlier this year. Each step chips away at the symbols that once unified national memory.

Now the June reporting makes the motive unmistakable. Research commissioned by the Bank concluded that figures such as Churchill, Alan Turing, and Jane Austen were “contentious and not representative of the UK’s cultural and natural diversity.” Officials received advice to replace the portraits with nature images because historical figures represented “a backward-looking vision of the UK that carries too great a risk of division and controversy.”

The Bank has insisted the decision was not driven by that specific research but by an earlier poll showing public preference for nature. Yet the Freedom of Information details tell a different story about how the process unfolded behind closed doors A public consultation is currently running on the wildlife shortlist. Proposed replacements include an owl, hedgehog, badger, or common frog. One commentator summed up the national mood: “We are not a serious country anymore.”

https://twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/2062610790683984267?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2062610790683984267%7Ctwgr%5Ea67b9ad8e4437d980d63a6c9204f63f3cf1e7678%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fserious-country-does-not-swap-its-greatest-leader-banknotes-little-animals

Some of the animals under consideration are not even native to Britain. That detail alone exposes the move as more than harmless environmental appreciation. It functions as a psyop to further erode British culture – stripping away recognizable national symbols and replacing them with generic or imported imagery that weakens any sense of rooted identity.

This fits the same ideological framework that has infected other institutions. DEI priorities and critical race theory obsessions treat any strong assertion of British heritage as inherently suspect. The man who helped defeat fascism is recast as “divisive” while the focus shifts to animals that supposedly better reflect “cultural and natural diversity.” The result is a currency that no longer celebrates the people who built and defended the country. It celebrates detachment instead.

The broader assault continues without pause. Schools, museums, government buildings, and now the Bank of England itself participate in softening, diluting, and apologizing for the past. Historical giants are judged not by their achievements but by whether they pass modern committee tests on representation. When they fail, they are quietly retired in favor of whatever the latest advisory group deems safe and inclusive.

Britain’s wartime leader did not save the nation so that unelected researchers and captured bureaucracies could later declare him unfit for the money supply. Yet that is exactly what has happened. The same institutions that owe their continued existence to Churchill’s stand now treat his image as a liability.

A country that systematically removes its heroes from public view is not evolving. It is forgetting how to value itself. The Bank of England’s choice to prioritize “non-divisive” wildlife over the figures who actually shaped the United Kingdom sends a clear message: national pride is now considered too risky for everyday transactions.

Britons who still believe their history is worth defending have every reason to push back. This is not about banknote design. It is about whether the nation retains the confidence to honour the people and events that made it possible. Replacing Churchill with a hedgehog is not progress. It is surrender dressed up as sensitivity.

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EU wants far too much. They want French soldiers obeying German commanders.

Europe 2.0, Beyond Brussels: The End Of The European Union As We Know It (AmG)

Europe has reached the end of an era. Not the end of its history, but the end of its false form. For decades, the European Union served as the great substitute project of a continent that no longer dared to think politically. It promised peace without power, order without a people, unity without roots, and prosperity without cost. That was its founding lie, and it was a lie from the very beginning.


Political order does not grow out of procedural routines, commission papers, or moral self-incantation. It grows out of peoples, interests, borders, loyalties, and the willingness to defend what is one’s own. Legitimate authority rests on a people and its consent, not on an apparatus and its expertise. That older idea—that government draws its life from the governed rather than from the competence of its administrators—is precisely what Brussels has spent two generations trying to administer away.

That is why today’s EU is not the high point of European history but its bureaucratic state of exhaustion. It is too centralized to be free and too artificial to be binding. It commands an immense body of rules and possesses no sustaining political soul. It has institutions, but not the kind of historically grown legitimacy that holds a community together across generations. And so it answers every crisis with the same reflex: more centralization, more redistribution, more standardization, more discipline. What is sold as the solution is only the problem enlarged.

Europe is not failing because there is too little Brussels. Europe is failing because there is too much Brussels. It is failing because of a political class that no longer sees the continent as a historical space but as an object of administration. It is failing because of an ideology that treats every organically grown difference as a defect and therefore regards peoples, traditions, and national particularities as raw material to be processed. And it is failing because of a functional elite that has learned to disguise power as morality and to pass off its own interests as universal values.

There is a name for this kind of governance: the administrative state—the permanent, unelected layer that survives every election, answers to no voter, and grows whether the public wants it to or not. Brussels is that layer raised to the continental power and freed from even the inconvenience of a national electorate. There is no European demos to vote the managers out. That is not a flaw in the design. It is the design.

The real scandal of Europe today is not even its material mismanagement but its intellectual arrogance. The Union behaves as though it could suspend history—as though cultures could be harmonized like technical standards, as though political loyalty could be decreed the way one issues a packaging regulation. As though a continent of radically different historical experiences, economic structures, demographic trajectories, and security realities could be pressed into one standardized form without damage. Yet the damage is already visible. The EU is not unifying Europe. It is wearing it down.

To see why, it helps to return to a text that saw the whole thing coming. In 2011, long before today’s disruptions, the German social scientist Gunnar Heinsohn published an essay whose title I have borrowed and broadened here: “Europa 2.0: Neuzuschnitt der Alten Welt” (Europe 2.0: Recutting the Old World). It was written in the first panic of the euro rescues, and it has aged with uncomfortable precision.

Heinsohn’s argument was not, in the first place, a complaint about Brussels. It was an argument about arithmetic. He began with the chain of liabilities that the productive European middle class—the net taxpayers, the people who put in more than they take out—had quietly been made to guarantee. First, the bank rescues of 2008. Then the Greek bailout and the great euro backstops of 2010, which shielded bondholders and the comfortable classes of the periphery at the expense of taxpayers who were never asked. Then the implicit guarantees extended to the aging, shrinking states of the European East. And beneath all of it, an ever-growing domestic population to be supported for life. The decisive point was simple and merciless: when all these promises—upward, downward, and outward—come due at once, no one will be left to bail out the people who were made to do the bailing.

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Tricks.

California US Attorney Office Feigns Ignorance of Voter Fraud (CTH)

California ballot counting will continue until the key republicans in each race are pushed into 3rd place. That’s when ballot counting will conclude. At a certain point, the pretending gets ridiculous. This X message from the First Asst U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of California is a case study in pretending not to know things.


Former Attorney General Eric Holder was hired by California govt to advise on the election changes created by linking DMV database to Secretary of State database. The tech team that wrote the code to link the DMV and SOS were given specific instructions. The affirmative flag, the checkbox in the DMV system that says the applicant is legally eligible to vote, was neutralized. Meaning, if the checkbox is left blank, the computer system accepts the application from the DMV as affirmative. The DL applicant data is transferred to the SoS office, and the applicant is registered to vote.

Illegal Aliens, unlawful migrants, were allowed to get California Driver’s Licenses and State IDs. The Motor-Voter process now registers those drivers and ID recipients as legal voters and ballots are created. Those illegal ballots form the core of the voter fraud in California and were first used in the November 2018 midterm election as the beta test for national rollout.Not a single person in Sacramento politics doesn’t know this. They are all aware. All the USAO has to do is go check and they will see. The fraud is impossible to prosecute. The fraud is built into the system. Go look. Everyone knows.

We originally outlined this activity a decade ago. Nothing has been done to stop it. JAN 2017 – California officials have instructed DMV data programmers to remove the internal coding flags for the drivers’ licenses of illegal aliens in California. As you might be aware, California passed a law known as AB60 authorizing illegal aliens to receive drivers’ licenses throughout the state. Within the administrative functions of the state DMV database a designation code known as “AB60 code” was created to flag those specific licenses as containing “Federal Limits Apply”.

We have confirmation from a top-level IT source, state officials instructed programmers to immediately remove AB60 administrative coding. The removed code in question is an administrative function for identifying the registered DL holder as an “undocumented person” or illegal alien holder within the DMV database. The established computer flag allows an administrator or DMV or State official to filter the massive database of California Driver’s License holders and identify just those who are ‘undocumented’. The removal of the “flag” via deletion of the program code, means the database cannot be easily filtered to show only illegals who received those Drivers licenses, and/or generate a list of those license recipients.


According to the IT source the motive for the code/flag removal appears to be an effort hide data and curtail any tool useful in any voter fraud investigation. Several additional aspects lead to this conclusion including California hiring former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to lead the fight against the Trump administration. Additionally, the State Driver’s License process via the State DMV has an on-line link to the Secretary of State office in order for California residents to register to vote. As a specific function of the programming code within the SoS system, and as a direct outcome of previous instructions, all voter registrations proceed through the registration process, even if the user “forgets” to check the box that says they are a citizen.

The internal database coding established by the Secretary of State IT department which synergizes with the State Department of Motor Vehicles, allows and approves voter registration when the designation box “U.S. Citizen” is left blank. It is the combination of this specific programming structure, the events and instructions of the past 48 hours, in combination with the outcome of the U.S. election and new Trump administration saying they will launch a voter fraud investigation, which leads the IT source to the conclusion there is an effort underway within California to hide the evidence of “Illegal Voting” via the use of “State Issued Drivers Licenses” and the willful blindness from the Secretary of State.

No alternate explanation from within the California DMV Headquarters has been offered for why they are instructing IT data programmers to remove the AB60 coding from the Driver’s License system.

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Englan’ is a bitch.

UK Cop Fired For Questioning Islam In ‘Safe Space’ (MN)

A Christian police community support officer lost his career after asking a Muslim colleague about jihad and Hamas atrocities during a diversity session that promised open discussion. At the same time, training drilled “white privilege” into police ranks. Luke Salmons, a 46-year-old Christian father of two and respected PCSO with North Yorkshire Police, relates how he attended a mandatory training day on race, religion and culture. Trainers spent several minutes marching up and down the room chanting “Islam is a religion of peace” repeatedly.


A Muslim sergeant then spoke about his faith and invited questions in what was presented as a “safe space” where “there was no such thing as a bad question.” Salmons asked what the sergeant, as a peaceful Muslim, thought about the situation in Gaza and atrocities carried out by Hamas and other groups in the name of Islam. He also asked what jihad meant to him. The discussion was civil. The sergeant later invited Salmons for coffee to continue the conversation privately.

Salmons brought a book on the topic to work. Colleagues photographed it in his locker and reported him as a risk. An inspector then suspended him, declaring “I don’t like your beliefs.” Salmons noted the obvious double standard: no inspector would ever say that to a Muslim officer.He was suspended on full pay for months, resigned under pressure in April 2025, and faced gross misconduct proceedings. Supported by the Christian Legal Centre, he appealed. Chief Constable Tim Forber overturned the dismissal before Salmons had even finished presenting his case. There was no apology and the episode devastated his family.

“I loved my job and I was good at it. I was well respected as a PCSO and my colleagues said they loved working with me and couldn’t understand what was happening. But an overzealous inspector took against me and that was the end of my career, even though I had done nothing wrong,” he related. “It devastated me and my family. For months we lived in total uncertainty, with my reputation being shredded in secret. I resigned not because I had done anything wrong, but because the silence, the delay and the pressure became unbearable for my wife and daughters,” Salmons added.

This is the new reality inside parts of British policing: open discussion of uncomfortable facts about Islamist ideology is treated as career-ending wrongthink, while entire days are devoted to chanting slogans and centring one faith above others. The same ideological pressures are visible in operational failures. In the Henry Nowak case, an 18-year-old white British student was stabbed five times. He told responding officers he had been stabbed and could not breathe. Instead of treating him as a medical emergency, officers handcuffed him after his attacker falsely claimed racism. The attacker was allowed to walk away. An inquest is examining whether the handcuffing contributed to Nowak’s death.

The police watchdog investigated itself and declared no wrongdoing. Serving and former Hampshire officers later admitted the mandatory DEI training played a role. They told former Home Secretary Suella Braverman they had “it drummed into us about our white privilege and unconscious bias.” One described the outsourced trainer as “deeply hateful of white people and our culture.”v

Meanwhile, shocking street interviews and bodycam footage show officers across forces admitting they will arrest people for speech that causes offence if an allegation is made – including phrases such as “send them all home.” In one Birmingham incident, officers restrained a light-skinned suspect while a crowd of young men from ethnic minority backgrounds kicked and struck him; the police did not intervene to protect the suspect.

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Good to reiterate from time to time.

They Threw Everything at Him. He’s Still Standing. (Eric Florack)

We’re getting pretty close to the midterm elections. I’d like you to consider, as you contemplate your vote, what we’ve been seeing for a solid decade now. The full weight of the media establishment, the Democrat Party, and the socialist left — all of whom drain your tax dollars to fund their operations — has waged the most expensive, coordinated, and (thanks be to Heaven) catastrophically unsuccessful demolition project in recorded history. The target? One man. I’ll let you guess who.


Think on that for a moment: four criminal indictments, 91 charges (and I may have missed a few). Investigations that went nowhere, like a compass in a magnet factory. They spent billions. They squeezed hundreds of journalists shoulder-to-shoulder into the same putrid trough, all filing the same bogus story, all reaching the same pre-approved conclusions without evidence, all somehow surprised when nothing stuck to the man. Every major network. Every newspaper of record. Every drive-time radio voice with a thesaurus and a grudge.

The late-night TV hosts — propped up on expensive, ratings-free life support, their audience consisting exclusively of insomniacs and the unfortunate souls stranded at airport gate C-17 — dutifully swung away, night after night, year after year. When the losses mounted too high and those late-night “stars” collected their pink slips, the establishment — the very people who’d been attacking this man — turned around and blamed him for their firing. Never mind the millions they cost the networks. The word “unsustainable” leaps to mind, unbidden.

Hollywood crawled out of its gated compounds to weigh in. Every blue-checkmark, every celebrity whose last project you cannot name, every platform with a “trust and safety” team — all of it, fully deployed. All for naught. Meanwhile, medical research watches from the parking lot, never seeing anything approaching that kind of coordinated effort. Even after all that, it didn’t work. Let’s be honest about what this was, and is. This wasn’t political opposition. Opposition, per se, is normal. Opposition is healthy. That’s democracy (small d).

This was anything but democracy. This was a systematic campaign to destroy a man’s family, dismantle his businesses, strip away his freedom, and physically erase his name from ballots. The goal was never to beat him. It was to eliminate him. Consider the parallel: Eric Swalwell got caught cozying up to a Chinese intelligence operative, and the story disappeared in 48 hours. This man absorbed a decade-long siege with unlimited ammunition — and he’s still standing. The reason? There was nothing to what they threw at Trump. In all this time, not a bit of it has stuck. Don’t you think if they actually had anything, it would have tipped the scales by now?

When all those efforts failed, they even tried to kill him — what, ten times now, going back to 2016? I’ve lost count. Butler, of course. West Palm. Mar-a-Lago. The Correspondents’ Dinner. And those are just the attempts that made the headlines because they got close enough to finish the job. That asymmetry should tell you everything you need to know. And a quick look at what’s happening in California right now offers another indicator of how desperate these people have become. That story may give us a hint — if we’re honest — about how “Creepy Uncle Joe” claimed 81 million votes after campaigning from his basement.

Here’s the thing about coordinated fury at that scale and duration: it is never about the target. It’s about what the target represents — and what his continued existence threatens. Seventy million Americans heard something from this man they hadn’t heard in a long time: the truth. That the system has been deliberately rigged against them. That someone is outright stealing their tax dollars and laundering still more into causes explicitly hostile to their interests. That the credentialed experts and the legacy press have been lying — casually, continuously — and expected nobody to notice. That Americans — as Americans — do not require permission from Davos, from party establishments, from media gatekeepers, or from anyone else to trust what their own eyes are showing them.

That is not a Republican message. That is not a Democrat message. That is a freedom message. And seventy million people didn’t just hear it — they recognized it, voted accordingly, and to this day continue to support him, much to the chagrin of the destroyers who clearly still don’t understand what they’re up against. That’s what the machine is actually fighting: not a man, but a message. Because if that message spreads — if people fully internalize that the managers have been manipulating them, manufacturing confusion, and deliberately stoking fear — those managers lose everything.

The fury isn’t evidence that he’s dangerous. It’s evidence of exactly what he told you: that they are.

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Does it work only on a quantum scale?

A Surprisingly Simple Way To Create Powerful Quantum States (SD)

Many of the most promising quantum technologies, including advanced sensors and future quantum computers, depend on a phenomenon known as entanglement, where particles become deeply connected and influence one another in ways that cannot be explained by classical physics. Creating the complex entangled states needed for these technologies has traditionally required sophisticated equipment and carefully designed experimental systems.


Researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have now proposed a much simpler approach. Their new theoretical method can generate and control a wide range of entangled quantum states using tools that are already common in many quantum physics laboratories. The work, published in Physical Review X, could help advance ultra precise quantum sensing and open new opportunities for exploring fundamental physics.

“We wanted to take simple ingredients that you find in a lot of physical platforms and put these together in a minimal way to get something interesting, complex and powerful,” said Aashish Clerk, professor of molecular engineering at UChicago PME and senior author of the new study. The research was supported by Q-NEXT, a U.S. Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory.

Rethinking Cavity QED Systems
The team’s approach is based on cavity quantum electrodynamics, commonly known as cavity QED. In these experiments, atoms or other particles are placed inside an optical cavity, which consists of two mirrors that trap light between them. The particles then interact with the confined light inside the cavity. A limitation of many cavity QED systems is that all of the atoms interact with the light in exactly the same way. Because the atoms are effectively indistinguishable, the range of quantum states that can be produced is restricted.

“The challenge has always been that these systems have too much symmetry. All the atoms are talking to light in the same way,” Clerk said. “That really restricts what kind of entangled states you get.” In a typical cavity QED setup, each atom has a ground state and an excited state separated by a specific energy difference. The researchers found a straightforward way to reduce the system’s symmetry. While all atoms continue to be driven by the same laser, additional lasers or magnetic fields are used to shift the excited state energies of different groups of atoms. The atoms are arranged so that each one is paired with another atom that has an equal but opposite energy offset.

This simple modification allows atoms to behave differently from one another while preserving enough structure for the system to remain controllable and predictable. By changing which atoms receive particular energy shifts, scientists can tune the system to produce a variety of entangled states without altering the physical hardware. “You turn these lasers on and wait, and at some point the system stabilizes into an interesting, highly entangled quantum state,” said Anjun Chu, a postdoctoral researcher in the Clerk group and first author of the new work. “By simply adjusting the lasers, we can access kinds of entangled states that no one had thought about before.”

Building Better Quantum Sensors
One of the most promising uses for the new approach is quantum sensing. In theory, entangled quantum states can detect extremely small differences in magnetic fields or gravitational fields between separate locations. However, developing states that are both highly sensitive and resistant to noise has remained a major challenge. The researchers demonstrated that a version of their proposed system containing two groups of atoms could be used to measure field gradients. When the two atomic ensembles are placed in different locations, the resulting quantum state reflects the difference between the local magnetic or gravitational fields. At the same time, it naturally rejects background noise that affects both locations equally.

“You’re able to do two things that are normally not compatible with one another: Use entanglement to build an exquisitely sensitive sensor but also have robustness to arbitrarily large amounts of noise,” Clerk said. “Normally, entanglement is very fragile. This approach has some amazing resilience.” Another advantage is that the information stored in these quantum states can be extracted using standard Ramsey measurement techniques, eliminating the need for specialized or exotic measurement methods.

Applications Beyond Sensing
The researchers also showed that the same platform can generate unusual quantum states that have long attracted interest from physicists. One example is the AKLT state, a well known many body entangled state first introduced in the 1980s to describe unusual magnetic materials. The team found that their relatively simple setup can stabilize this state. In addition to helping scientists study complex magnetic systems, the AKLT state may also have applications in quantum computing.

Next Steps For The Research
The work remains theoretical for now, but the researchers are already discussing possible experimental tests with other groups. They are also investigating more sophisticated ways to arrange atoms within the system and exploring the full range of quantum states that their method may be capable of producing.

“The fact that such simple ingredients can generate such complex and useful quantum states gives us hope that even before we reach the dream of a general all-purpose quantum computer, we can already generate quantum states that let us do things we couldn’t do in a purely classical world,” Clerk said. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science National Quantum Information Science Research Centers as part of the Q-NEXT center.

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Jun 072026
 


Claude Monet San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk 1908


US Led Over 100 Vessels via Strait of Hormuz in May — NYT (TASS)
‘Biden’s War’ Has Become Trump’s – Lavrov (RT)
Promethean Action PAC Discovers MAGAnomics (CTH)
Trump Says US Weighing Taking Stakes In AI Companies (ET)
California and the Politics of Low Expectations (Turley)
The EU’s ‘Strictest-Ever Migration Law’ Won’t Change Anything (von Hoffmeister)
Paris Riots Fuel The Right (RMX)
Tory Leader Warns Of ‘Civil War’ In UK (RT)
Questions and Answers (James Howard Kunstler)
The White Countries Have Become Rabidly Racist Against White People (PCR)
When Race is the Only Possible Verdict (Eric Florack)
Europe No Longer Attractive Global Hub, Only Itself To Blame – Kneissl (TASS)
EU Embassies In Moscow Should Establish Dialogue With Russia — Kneissl (TASS)
UK Government Plots Digital ID Lockdown On Every Phone (MN)
Bots Now Generate More Web Traffic Than Humans – Cloudflare (RT)

 


 

 


 


Surprisingly little war news today, but all the more -racial- discrimination.

About this article: 100 vessels a month is quite a lot. 3 per day, and not small vessels. An oil tanker carries two million barrels.

US Led Over 100 Vessels via Strait of Hormuz in May — NYT (TASS)

Last month, the US military helped coordinate the passage of more than 100 commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, The New York Times (NYT) wrote citing sources. According to the report, passage through this waterway remains dangerous for ships against the backdrop of stalled US-Iranian reconciliation talks. Earlier, The New York Times said the US Central Command (CENTCOM) assisted the passage of 70 ships via the strait. The majority of them switched off their transponders.


The United States and Israel launched a military operation against Iran on February 28. Major Iranian cities, including Tehran, were struck. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced a retaliatory operation, targeting sites in Israel. US military bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were also hit. Tehran decided to close the Strait of Hormuz to ships associated with the United States, Israel and countries that backed the aggression against Iran.

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“The US president could have ended the Ukraine conflict by following through on his own proposals, the Russian foreign minister has told RT..”

‘Biden’s War’ Has Become Trump’s – Lavrov (RT)

America’s position on the Ukraine conflict has become almost indistinguishable from that of the EU, making US President Donald Trump’s stated ambition to mediate an end to the fighting hollow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has told RT. Trump repeatedly blamed the conflict between Russia and Ukraine on his predecessor, Joe Biden, and claimed that he could bring it to a swift conclusion while campaigning in 2024. However, recent statements by members of his administration suggest a different course, Lavrov said on Thursday in an interview on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.


“Biden’s war has become Trump’s war,” the Russian foreign minister said. Speaking to Congress this week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said efforts to facilitate Russia-Ukraine talks were complicated “because, frankly, we’re not an impartial mediator.” He cited the continuation of the sanctions on Russia and sales of US weapons to Ukraine. “After we agreed to the United States proposal in Anchorage [in August 2025], Washington began to shift its position. Instead of advancing those same proposals in its dealings with Ukrainians, it is now pretending that the parties should sort things out themselves. This is not a very consistent position,” Lavrov said.

“It is the West that cannot be trusted to keep its agreements. Its approach is: ‘I’ll promise something now, then stall for time.’ If the US had truly advanced its own initiative, I think… the fighting would already have stopped.” According to Lavrov, the only major difference between Trump’s policy and that of Biden and the EU is that his administration resumed direct talks with Russia. Dialogue is important, he said, but it must be matched by action on commitments already made.

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“.. both Trump and Bernie Sanders agreed on the problem. The difference between them was the solution.”

Promethean Action PAC Discovers MAGAnomics (CTH)

In 2015, even before President Trump came down the golden escalator, CTH was outlining a ‘new era and dimension’ in American economics that could be possible if a presidential candidate focused on specific Main Street policy. Throughout the next four years we watched carefully how Donald Trump was organizing that Main Street revival and what specifically was creating the economic growth. One of the points emphasized in 2016 about Trump’s unique MAGAnomic policy, was how both Trump and Bernie Sanders agreed on the problem. The difference between them was the solution.


Think of it like economic football.
Both Trump and Sanders identify the rigged game. Bernie Sanders wanted to change the referees so that government controls the game. Donald Trump’s approach was different. Trump wanted to change the rules of the game, not step in and try to play referee to a rigged game where the rules were flawed. One of the examples of economic “rule changing” is trade tariffs. You don’t need govt to regulate the corporations directly (ie. raise corporate income taxes). Instead, you can change trade policy to make the better corporate decision a return of production back to the USA (a fundamental rules change).

Both approaches involve a different govt policy, but Trump’s approach changes behavior. That’s MAGAnomics. One of the reasons Trump’s approaches are much more effective, is that his rule changes extend beyond the American corporate game. Trump’s approach changes the behavior of foreign governments and foreign corporations, a win/win/win.An example is the Japanese government investing in America to offset reciprocity tariffs; while Toyota, a corporation, invests in specific auto manufacturing expansion to avoid baseline tariffs.

You don’t get that kind of result through Bernie’s approach changing the American referee in an all-American game and raising corporate income taxes. And don’t forget, the corporation can just move offshore and avoid income taxes entirely. Apple used to have their company incorporated in Ireland. Trump’s rule changes brought them back.The Promethean Action PAC is now highlighting the fundamentals of Trump’s MAGAnomics and how the policy is distinctly different from all U.S. economic policy before it.

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“The bad news? His executive order is voluntary and does almost nothing to protect Americans,“ Sanders wrote. “Congress MUST act.”

Trump Says US Weighing Taking Stakes In AI Companies (ET)

President Donald Trump told reporters on June 5 that his administration is exploring the possibility of the United States acquiring a public stake in artificial intelligence (AI) companies. Trump made the comment in response to a question about a recent News of the United States report, which suggested that unnamed senior U.S. officials had discussed with major AI firms the possibility of the federal government holding some shares in their companies. “There’s so much money that is so big that there are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner with the companies,” Trump said aboard Air Force One.


“I have spoken to all of [the AI companies]. There’s something very interesting about it, where it almost becomes a partnership with the American public, and we’ll look into that,” he said. Trump said he and his team have a meeting scheduled in the “very near future” with major AI firms to discuss this possible venture. “We’re talking about it, where the American people can benefit from the success of AI, and by doing that, they can like it better,” Trump explained.nSen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) penned an op-ed in The New York Times on Monday titled “A.I. Is a Public Resource. You Should Own Half of It,” where he announced he would soon introduce congressional legislation to give the American public a direct ownership stake in the largest AI companies in the United States.

“It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax—not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock,” Sanders wrote in the piece. He said the legislation, which he plans to call the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, would give the American public a direct role in determining the future of AI while also guaranteeing that the trillions generated by the industry are “used to improve the lives of all of us—not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer.”

When asked on Friday if he found it odd that he and Sanders were seemingly on the same page about the proposal, Trump said that the two “have certain things that aren’t that far apart” regarding economic policy. “People are surprised, but if you’ll take a look, many of the people who voted for Bernie Sanders … they went to me,” Trump said, referring to some of the voters who backed him in the 2016 presidential election after previously supporting Sanders in the Democratic primary that year.

Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday asking AI companies to voluntarily submit their frontier models for government review 30 days before a full public release. In a post on X hours after the order was announced, Sanders said it was “good news” that Trump had “finally acknowledged AI poses a real threat” after the president had previously criticized efforts to tighten regulation of the AI industry. “The bad news? His executive order is voluntary and does almost nothing to protect Americans,“ Sanders wrote. “Congress MUST act.”

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Expect nothing. You may be pleasantly surprised.

California and the Politics of Low Expectations (Turley)

This week, the nation watched as California grappled again with the ordinarily straightforward task of counting votes in an election. While large states such as Florida declare election winners within 24 hours, California may take up to two weeks to count all the votes. Even Los Angeles cannot count its votes in the time of large states despite giving the Clerk an annual budget of $336 million and a $448,179 a year salary with the help of 1,100 budgeted positions. In most states, voters would be outraged by the incompetence, waste, and inefficiency.


However, in the Golden State, voters shrug, as if they can demand no more from their elected officials than subpar performance. Call it the Politics of Low Expectations and California is the model for the nation. For years, my students have asked me what the secret is to a successful marriage approaching four decades (For full disclosure, there is an ongoing contractual dispute over my counting eight years of monogamous dating — leading to two dates on our anniversary cakes). The answer is simple. I reduced her expectations so low that I have exceeded them on a daily basis.

That began with our eloping on New Year’s Eve. We were married after an actual shotgun wedding where the clearly expectant teenage bride’s family was screaming profanities at the teenage groom. After paying $50 and using my high school ring for a wedding ring, we stepped out on the street of Old Town Alexandria as a drunk was retching in the gutter. That left only room for improvement. On any given day, my wife is simply grateful that I have not traded the house and car for a handful of magic beans. California Democrats seem to have applied my approach to matrimony to politics, creating a politician’s dream voter with few expectations.

That is most evident with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s infamous high-speed train to nowhere. In 2008, voters were promised a 500-mile High-Speed train running from San Francisco to Los Angeles for $33 billion. It is now projected to cost somewhere between $126 billion and $231 billion. After roughly two decades, no track has been laid, and the current plan is to focus on building a track between Bakersfield and Merced. Without any track to display, Newsom recently stood before a freight train on an existing track to insist that his train is moving speedily along.

One would think that citizens would be coming for their leaders with torches and pitchforks. Instead, there is a collective shrug as if it is perfectly normal to spend more than the entire budget of Amtrak on a non-existent train. The same leaders have burned billions in other boondoggles, including a massive solar power farm that produced energy at a higher cost and incinerated thousands of birds a year. California is facing a growing crisis of rising homelessness, dismal education scores, and an exodus of business and wealthy taxpayers. It has also imposed taxes that make gas the most expensive in the nation while suppressing its own energy industry.

Now, after many voters took the unprecedented step of voting for Republican candidates for governor and L.A. mayor, citizens will wait for weeks to learn the results of an election that would have been called days ago by third-world countries. The same politics of low expectations are evident in other states. In New York City, voters just shrug when told that they have a budget rivaling that of the entire state of Florida, resulting in awful educational, infrastructure, and other conditions. Voters have watched as wealthy taxpayers have taken their money and jobs to other states.

In return, figures like Mayor Zohran Mamdani promise state-run grocery stores, which will cost tens of millions of dollars to build and operate at a loss. In Minnesota, elected officials allowed billions to be stolen in fraud while businesses fled a state rife with rioting and homelessness.

Baltimore, a student failed all but three of his classes and was ranked in the top half of his graduating class. Yet, voters reelected the same leaders who have denied generations any real opportunity for advancement. While other countries maintain superior school systems at a fraction of the cost, urban voters cast their ballots like lemmings for the same party and politicians.

In states like California, politics has long been run on Henry Ford’s pitch that you can have any color Model T so long as it is black. This election seemed to offer voters something they had not seen in many years: a real choice between a Republican governor and an L.A. mayor. As California slowly counts its votes, the odds still heavily favor the continuation of California as a one-party state. Poor services, rising crime, rampant homelessness, hundreds of billions in waste and other failures are treated as virtually inevitable. The result is an electorate that only a politician would love: passive voters who expect little from their government and receive even less.

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“Politicians promise immigration control while the economic and demographic forces driving migration remain firmly in place..”

In other words: Europe is simply too far gone.

The EU’s ‘Strictest-Ever Migration Law’ Won’t Change Anything (von Hoffmeister)

The European Union’s new migration rules, agreed upon in principle by lawmakers and state representatives, will allow EU countries to transfer rejected asylum seekers to third countries if they cannot be returned to their countries of origin. They also introduce stricter rules for dealing with illegal migrants, especially those considered a security risk.


The media has called it “historic,” “hardline,” and the “strictest-ever migration law” as politicians behind their lecterns spoke of control and the defense of borders. Yet in truth, the EU has once again promised to become tougher while preserving the structures that produced the migration crisis in the first place. New procedures, databases, and regulations have appeared, but the underlying incentives have remained largely intact. The result resembles many political spectacles of recent years: a performance designed to reassure anxious voters while preserving the economic and ideological foundations of the existing system. The gap between rhetoric and reality has become one of the defining characteristics of contemporary Western politics.

The same pattern can be observed across the Atlantic. Donald Trump returned to office promising the strongest immigration enforcement campaign in American history. His supporters anticipated deportation operations on a scale never previously attempted. Yet the reality has proved considerably more modest. Immigration enforcement agencies continue to conduct highly publicized arrests that generate dramatic footage for television and social media. A worker removed from a restaurant kitchen, a raid on a warehouse or construction site – all good for cameras and for political supporters to receive confirmation that action is taking place.

Yet the larger economic machinery that attracts millions of migrants continues operating. Businesses that employ illegal labor rarely face penalties severe enough to transform their calculations. The availability of employment remains the primary magnet drawing people across borders. A government genuinely committed to ending illegal immigration would focus relentlessly on employers, labor contractors, and industries dependent on cheap foreign labor. However, such measures would provoke opposition from powerful economic interests. Consequently, symbolic enforcement often proves more attractive than structural reform.

Politicians frequently present immigration as a humanitarian question, a cultural question, or a question of border security. The economic dimension often receives less scrutiny. Modern capitalism and mass immigration have become deeply intertwined. Employers gain access to larger labor pools, which increases competition among workers and places downward pressure on wages in many sectors. Agricultural businesses, logistics firms, construction companies, restaurants, delivery services, and countless other industries derive substantial advantages from a continuous supply of foreign labor. The benefits remain concentrated while many of the costs become dispersed throughout society. Housing demand rises, infrastructure faces greater pressure, schools require expansion, healthcare systems absorb additional burdens.

Welfare programs support those who struggle to establish themselves economically. These expenses rarely appear on corporate balance sheets – instead, they get distributed across the broader population through taxation and public expenditure. This contradiction led the French thinker Alain de Benoist to formulate one of the most incisive observations in the entire debate: “One who criticizes capitalism while approving of immigration, of which the working class is its first victim, would do better to remain silent. One who criticizes immigration while remaining silent regarding capitalism should do the same.” The statement captures a reality that many ideological camps prefer to avoid. Immigration and capitalism frequently function as partners within the same economic system, and any serious analysis of one eventually encounters the other.

Back in Western Europe, governments routinely announce crackdowns on illegal immigration while simultaneously preserving the economic and demographic model that depends on continuous inflows of foreign labor. Public discussion frequently centers on boats crossing the Mediterranean or migrants entering through other irregular routes – images that dominate news coverage because they are visually dramatic. Yet illegal immigration represents only one component of a much larger phenomenon. The overwhelming transformation of Western Europe has occurred through legal channels. Work permits, family reunification programs, student visas, humanitarian admissions, labor recruitment schemes, and various residency pathways have altered the demographic composition of entire societies. A politician can reduce small boat arrivals while expanding legal immigration quotas. Statistical reports may then suggest success even as overall migration continues at historic levels.

Italy provides an instructive example. Giorgia Meloni rose to power promising a fundamental break with previous migration policies. Her electoral success depended heavily on public dissatisfaction with mass immigration. Yet her government subsequently approved hundreds of thousands of additional work permits for non-European migrants in response to labor shortages. Nearly half a million new non-EU work visas were authorized over a multi-year period even while the government continued presenting itself as a champion of immigration control. Supporters emphasized efforts against illegal arrivals, while employers welcomed access to additional labor, and the demographic trajectory remained largely unchanged.

This recurring pattern has created a phenomenon increasingly described by critics as the “Melonization effect,” where leaders campaign as insurgents against mass immigration and then govern as managers of the existing system. Similar tendencies have appeared across numerous Western countries.

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Marine Le Pen.

Paris Riots Fuel The Right (RMX)

:With French national elections approaching in 2027, the mass riots seen in Paris following the PSG victory in the Champions League are leading to an even sharper electoral shift towards the right-leaning National Rally’s Jordan Bardella. Verian’s June barometer, published by Le Figaro Magazine, places Jordan Bardella at the top of political figures, with 47 percent of those questioned wanting to see him occupy an important place in public life. This rating, up six points in one month, reveals a record result for the National Rally.


Marine Le Pen comes in second position and is also progressing. Several other personalities located on the right are also rising in the ranking, including Marion Maréchal, Éric Ciotti and Robert Ménard. The riots in Paris left stores and cars burned out and resulted in 890 arrests, 180 officers injured, and two deaths. The apocalyptic videos from the riots also sent shockwaves through the French public. While these polls cannot predict the election, they underline data showing that Bardella or Le Pen are well positioned to win the presidency in 2027 elections.

https://twitter.com/RMXnews/status/2061886947467919775?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2061886947467919775%7Ctwgr%5Ed4eaf6b6844c32a7acab68214b84076630ca3930%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Frmx.news%2Farticle%2Fparis-riots-fuel-the-right-jordan-bardella-would-trounce-all-opponents-in-2027-national-election%2F

Other recent polls also show that Bardella would win a runoff against a range of candidates. A poll from a week ago from Odoxa showed Bardella beating former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe 52 to 48 percent. Other potential candidates, such as the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon, were also beaten by wide margins, with polling showing Bardella nearly 50 points ahead of him, at 74 percent to 26 percent, illustrating the France’s distate for Mélenchon’s politics.

Brussels’ nightmare scenario
Politico ran a piece three days ago entitled “Brussels’ nightmare scenario,” which predicted that a Bardella-Mélenchon matchup is a real possibility and would be viewed as catastrophic by the EU elite, as both candidates have a highly skeptical view of the European Union.

“That prospect of stopping Bardella has hit a major potential hurdle, however, as momentum builds behind the campaign of the firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far-left France Unbowed party. The latest polls suggest he now has a strong chance of qualifying for the second-round showdown — depriving the race of a centrist who could rally voters against the far right in the EU’s No. 2 economy.” The paper also quoted, Gérald Darmanin, the justice minister under President Emmanuel Macron. He said he now believes Mélenchon will be the main challenger to the “far right.” “You have … to be wearing blinkers not to see it,” he said.

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A brown skinned lady who swears that Britain “is not a racist country,” Now you know what you got there is a politician.

Tory Leader Warns Of ‘Civil War’ In UK (RT)

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has slammed UK politicians over what she described as attempts to score points on existing racial divisions, warning that it risked pushing the country towards a “civil war.”nSpeaking in an interview with the BBC aired on Friday, Badenoch reacted to the murder of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old Polish-British university student, who was stabbed five times by Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old Sikh. The incident took place in Southampton in December 2025, but gained a national spotlight only recently.


When police arrived, Digwa falsely claimed he had been the victim of a racist assault, with police initially believing his account. Body-cam footage released after sentencing showed officers handcuffing the dying student as he repeatedly told them he had been stabbed and could not breathe. While Digwa was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 21 years, the fall-out triggered widespread uproar, protests, and accusations of “two-tier policing” and “anti-white prejudice” in Britain. The incident also drew outcry from the US – a traditional UK ally – with the State Department warning that “ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational decline.”

Badenoch insisted that Britain “is not a racist country,” but acknowledged that “we are now seeing more and more hostility to people of every ethnicity, whether they’re English or not English.” However, she insisted that the real driver of tension was politicians using racial divisions to harvest votes and importing these conflicts into communities that had previously been spared from them. “Parties which do that, politicians who do that, they may get to benefit in the short term, but in the long term, that’s how you end up with civil war,” Badenoch warned.

While Badenoch did not name specific politicians, one of those who seized on the controversy was Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, widely known for his anti-immigration agenda. Farage called for “pure cold rage” in response to the incident. Reform UK is currently polling at around 27%, with Labour and the Conservatives tied at roughly 18% each. Meanwhile, Badenoch herself became the Tory leader after former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s landslide defeat in the general election in 2024, which was in large part caused by the party’s identitarian and cultural policies as well as a failure to deliver on immigration promises.

The culture war has long plagued British politics, with one of the most notable instances coming in August 2025 when “Operation Raise the Colours” saw activists tying Union Jacks and St. George’s Cross flags to lampposts across England. While the protest was framed as an expression of patriotism, some Labour-run councils disagreed, ordering the flags to be removed over concerns that they were sowing division – a move that drew furious condemnation from Reform UK.

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“I’m the look-around candidate. All you have to do to understand why I’m surging in the polls is just look around. . . .” — Spencer Pratt

Questions and Answers (James Howard Kunstler)

Just watch in wonder and nausea as California’s mail-in ballots dribble in, providing a real-time demonstration of the “Our Democracy” party spitting in the country’s face again, since everybody knows exactly what’s going on. Meanwhile, the Senate voted down the SAVE Act again this week by 52 to 48 for. . . reasons. But, hey, cheer up, it’s Pride Month. At the same time that California was queering its own “jungle primary,” a troupe of drag queens swanned and capered around New York’s City Council Chamber in what was called a “Pride Ball” (actually more of a show than a ball).


And what it really showed is that the party running New York City has no shame. How, exactly, does mental illness intersect with the public interest, you might ask? Historians of the future, roasting armadillos-on-the-half-shell over their campfires, will probably figure it out. For now, you must pretend that no such question even exists. Don’t bother asking. Just go along with the gag.

Here’s a scene you might like to see: As you know by now, the president has nominated Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to be the Senate-confirmed full-on, bona fide AG. But Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) says he would require Mr. Blanche to declare that the Jan 6, 2021, Capitol riot was “an insurrection.” Wouldn’t it be fun to hear Mr. Blanche reply by saying, “Can’t do that, sir, because the DOJ has an ongoing case that involves dozens of federal officers from several agencies instigating the events of that day in collusion with members of Congress and the US military, and, well, I can say no more about that at this time. . . .”

Similarly, election fraud. Just days ago, Mr. Trump told Miranda Divine of The New York Post, “We had a rigged election [2020], we can’t have rigged elections. We know who rigged the election. We know everything now. . . we have information that nobody thought was possible. . . . Let’s see what happens.”

Hmmmm. . .. Wouldn’t that prompt you to suspect that the DOJ has a case, or multiple cases, involving 2020 election fraud cooking on its stove? Recall that not long ago the FBI seized 700 boxes of evidence from the Fulton County Election Hub in Union City, GA. And another truckload out of Maricopa County, AZ. Do you think they’ll discover some, er, irregularities in all that? Perhaps eye-wateringly blatant?

Would it not then be urgent to seek indictments of actual persons, if any are deserved, well before November, so that measures could be taken to preclude more fraud and cheating in the midterm election — measures like . . . passing the SAVE Act! How might Majority Leader John Thune explain his intransigence on the matter in the face of all that? Or, like New York’s City Council, does he have no shame?

In another momentous development this week, the new management at CBS-News cashiered 60-Minutes star Scott Pelley for apparent insubordinate behavior in a confab with the show’s newly-hired Executive Producer Nick Bilton and Mr. Bilton’s boss, Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss. They had already sacked the querulous Sharyn Alfonsi a week earlier. Of course, 60-Minutes, with its giant audience following NFL games, was one of the main units in the Deep State’s gaslighting apparatus, and Mr. Pelley burned brightest there for years, flaring out one lying-ass narrative after another from the Russia Collusion hoax to 2020 election fraud to the Jan 6 fake “insurrection,” with the same burnished arrogance he showed his new bosses. Gone now. . . buh-bye. Next up, Lesley Stahl (“Sir!!! Sir !!!”), and the self-important prick Bill Whitaker. Fire them all!

If you seek to understand why the American public is so deeply bamboozled, it is largely the utter failure of the news business. You can trace that to a couple of signal changes of policy. One was the 1987 repeal of the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine,” which required TV stations holding federal licenses to cover controversial public issues in a “fair and balanced manner.” The other was the 2013 “modernization” (under Barack Obama) of the Smith-Mundt Act (1948), which had prohibited the US government from “propagandizing” its own citizens — and after “modernization” turned squishy on that.

The 1975–1976 (Sen. Frank) Church Committee — the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities — documented that the CIA had long-term secret relationships with dozens of U.S. journalists. This is casually referred to as “Operation Mockingbird.” Since the Church Committee, it has only gotten much worse as the Deep State struggles to cover-up layer upon layer of crimes it keeps committing. The nightly news shows now are just anchors and “panelists” shooting their mouths off. The news itself goes mostly unreported. A big reason is that broadcast news now employs nearly zero correspondents in-the-field. Nobody is out there reporting on events. They don’t want to spend the money. So, the news just spins and spins, mostly in the service of manufactured lies.

Also last week, famous New York Times columnist and fake Nobel economics prize-winner Paul Krugman put out a video calling for the “purging” of MAGA and everything MAGA-adjacent from American life — when his team (the party of “Our Democracy”) comes back to power, as it must. He didn’t detail whether this process would entail internment camps and crematoriums, but you could infer as much from his tone. Kinda gives you a clue of where their heads are at.

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Paul Craig Roberts.

The White Countries Have Become Rabidly Racist Against White People (PCR)

As I was writing this article several thousand British citizens were outside a police station in Southhampton, England, demanding accountability for the murder of a young white British student, Henry Nowak, by a black immigrant-invader and the white British police.


The black immigrant-invader murdered Nowak by stabbing him five times. The white British police murdered Nowak by ignoring his testimony that he had been stabbed and what turned out to be Novak’s last words: “I can’t breathe.” The British police, trained as they successfully have been to see the white person as the aggressor, instead of arresting the black immigrant-invader who attacked Nowak, fatally as it turned out, the white British police arrested the dying Nowak, who died in police handcuffs. The “racially sensitive trained” white British police believed the black immigrant-invader’s lie that Nowak had used a racial epithet. They did not believe Nowak that he had been stabbed. The “racially sensitive police” did not even look to see if Nowak had been stabbed. Instead, they handcuffed a dying man and did not call for medical help.

You would think that this would be a scandal–and it was–but not for the right reason. The rabidly anti-white white British prime minister Starmer characterized the several thousand white protesters, a small number in view of the enormity of the injustice, as “far-right rioters and racist thugs.” In other words, the Prime Minister of England sees racism not in the unprovoked deadly attack on the white Nowak by the black immigrant-invader, not in the British police’s ignoring of Nowak’s dying plea for help. The white British Prime Minister Starmer sees racism in the British citizens’ protest about what has happened. Is there any lower form of pure political excrement than Starmer ? How does a piece of political excrement such as Starmer survive as Prime Minister of Great Britain?

Now, let us ask ourselves how a white ethnic British Prime Minister from the Labour Party, which in former times prior to the despicable Tony Blair, represented the ethnic British working class, became indoctrinated and brainwashed to such an extreme extent that the racists in society are the white people who suffer from theft, rape, and murder by immigrant-invaders.? Confront this fact: The excrement that serves as Prime Minister of Great Britain, formerly a great and reasonably moral country, has defined protest about a racist murder of a white British citizen to be “white racism.” This is the position of white people today. In NO Western country do white ethnic citizens have the protection of law. Their own government is against them.

The UK, once an ethnic nation, now a Tower of Babel, has a “commitment to racial equality.” What does it mean? To quote the official answer, “it does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘color blind,’” it means limiting racism to white people. No one but white people can be racists. This is the official position of the Starmer UK government. It was the official position of the Biden regime and the official position of all Western European governments. Trump prefers to hand over to Israel the power otherwise handed over to immigrant-invaders. This is why the police automatically saw the murderer of Nowak as the victim and Nowak as the racist.

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“This death connects directly to George Floyd — not superficially, not controversially, but logically. In both cases, nobody asked what happened. They asked who did it — then let that answer bury every other question alive.”

When Race is the Only Possible Verdict (Eric Florack)

Vodkapundit put it best earlier this week: “By now you must know the story of Henry Nowak all too well. The 18-year-old student was stabbed five times on a Southampton street following an altercation with a British Sikh man. As he lay bleeding out, trying to tell the police he’d been stabbed, killer Vickrum Digwa told police that Nowak was a racist. So police cuffed the dying victim. Digwa and his brother knew exactly what to do even before the cops arrived. “We’ve just been attacked by…” Gurpreet Digwa told police dispatchers with a pause, “someone racially.”


Vickrum was just convicted of murder and sentenced to a minimum term of 21 years, but the Southampton police have yet to face any consequences for their behavior. In today’s Britain, it’s basically impossible. Almost 250 years after Americans codified British notions of liberty, Britons returned the favor, so to speak, by institutionalizing the American left’s liberty-destroying racial grievance spoils system. “To understand how we got here,” Konstantin Kisin wrote for The Free Press this week, “you have to understand what the post-[George] Floyd ‘reckoning’ actually did to British institutions—especially the police. The response to Floyd’s death wasn’t merely emotional, nor was it just symbolic. It was ideological, and it was systematic.”

I have a lot of respect for Kisin. His statement here does nothing to diminish that respect. Kisin is right. This death connects directly to George Floyd — not superficially, not controversially, but logically. In both cases, nobody asked what happened. They asked who did it — then let that answer bury every other question alive. More succinctly, ethnicity didn’t influence the verdict. Ethnicity was the verdict, delivered before Nowak’s body finished cooling. But sure, call it justice. The left certainly does. News flash: That’s not a justice system. That’s an ideology with a gavel. On Derek Chauvin, I’ll be equally direct: overturn the conviction. George Floyd killed George Floyd. The fentanyl he swallowed in order to hide it from the cops did the paperwork.

I’ll grant the cops in the case of Nowak this much: they followed orders and training. How reassuringly Nuremberg of them. I mean, they were certainly caught in the middle here. That truth doesn’t exonerate them, but it does redirect the crosshairs. The politicians who enshrined race over logic in that department’s doctrine? They built this outcome, brick by brick. The brass who designed training that systematically lobotomizes human judgment deserve the lion’s share of the blame for Nowak’s death. You don’t get to manufacture robots, point them at people, and then act surprised when someone ends up dead.

Bill Glahn over at Powerline addresses this with appropriate sarcasm: It has been decreed by official Britain: the unprovoked, brutal murder of Henry Nowak shall not be “politicized,” lest the wishes of Henry’s surviving family be dishonored. In practice, to avoid politicization, one must refrain from any criticizing or questioning any errors or omissions by anyone in government. How dare you. The only prominent political figure to not go along with the Omerta is Reform leader Nigel Farage. For this incivility he was defamed on the BBC. Now that the official police watchdog has officially cleared the police response from any hint of wrongdoing, and now that Nowak’s murderer has been sentenced to the shortest possible prison term (21 years) for a murder conviction, we must speak of this incident no more.

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“We are to blame for a great many of these problems ourselves, former Austrian Foreign Minister said “

Europe No Longer Attractive Global Hub, Only Itself To Blame – Kneissl (TASS)

Europe has ceased to be a center of attraction in terms of economy, innovation, and demographics, and it has only itself to blame for it, former Austrian Foreign Minister and head of the G.O.R.K.I. Center at St. Petersburg State University Karin Kneissl said in an interview with TASS on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). She noted that in recent years, a lot of Arabic and Spanish could be heard at SPIEF.


“That’s simply a reflection of the times. It’s interesting that American companies were here again this year. The world has changed, and overall I have much more confidence in the South and the East. And I have been saying this for a long time, even before this whole situation with the war in Ukraine began. Because for me, Europe is no longer the focus of attention. And it hasn’t been for a long time,” Kneissl said. “From a demographic standpoint, we have been left behind. We are not particularly strong in innovation either,” she continued. “We are to blame for the economic crises we are experiencing in Germany and other countries. There is too much bureaucracy, too much ideology in the energy sector, and the selection of personnel is too poor.”

According to her, there are even bigger problems on top of that. “And now, in just about every corporation, everyone has their own director of geopolitical affairs who explains where the Strait of Hormuz is. We are to blame for a great many of these problems ourselves. And some people are still trying to point the finger at Russia and say: this is ‘Putin’s inflation’ or this is ‘the Russian recession.’ You still hear this in Germany and especially in Austria,” the analyst noted. At the same time, she believes that there are forces in some countries that hold a different view. “There are also those who have realized that they created their own problems and that they must solve them on their own,” Kneissl stressed.

SPIEF
The 29th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF-2026) is taking place on June 3-6. This year, the event is held under the theme “Pragmatic Dialogue: The Path to a Stable Future.” Saudi Arabia is the guest country at SPIEF. The forum program is dedicated to shaping a new model of global development amid the ongoing transformation of the world economy.

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“According to former Austrian Foreign Minister, European embassies “just need to do their job”..” These days, she’s “head of the G.O.R.K.I. Center at St. Petersburg State University”..

EU Embassies In Moscow Should Establish Dialogue With Russia — Kneissl (TASS)

EU embassies should take the lead in restoring dialogue with Moscow, former Austrian Foreign Minister and head of the G.O.R.K.I. Center at St. Petersburg State University Karin Kneissl said in an interview with TASS on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). “Every EU country has an embassy. They really need to start doing their job and maintain normal relations with Russia. I’ll say it again: there is no need for a mediator here. There are 27 EU embassies in Moscow, and their job is to maintain daily working contacts with the Russian authorities. That is their responsibility,” she said.

According to Kneissl, European embassies “just need to do their job.” “I do not see much point in having a separate coordinator. Theoretically, the EU high representative could perform this task. Who is that now? Kaja Kallas. We know her very personal stance toward Russia,” the expert noted. The former Austrian foreign minister added that if Javier Solana, the EU’s first High Representative, were hypothetically in Kallas’s position today, “he might have been a better fit.”


“Of course, a lot depends on the individual. But regardless of who holds this position, in my view, this task should be carried out by each individual EU embassy. French companies have one approach to the Russian market, German companies another, and Italian companies their own view of Russia. Ultimately, each country has its own foreign trade interests when it comes to Russia,” she emphasized.

According to Kneissl, “the high representative will never be able to take all these interests into account, especially since there is another position in the European Commission responsible for that — the commissioner for trade and economic security.” “Perhaps I am being too pragmatic. But I will say it again: the core tasks of diplomacy have hardly changed over the centuries. What should a diplomat do? First, represent their country. Second, keep their capital informed about what is happening in Russia. And third, conduct negotiations. They need to negotiate agreements in areas such as culture and sports. These are their responsibilities. And they must do their job,” Kneissl concluded.

SPIEF
The 29th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF-2026) is taking place on June 3-6. This year, the event is held under the theme “Pragmatic Dialogue: The Path to a Stable Future.” Saudi Arabia is the guest country at SPIEF. The forum program is dedicated to shaping a new model of global development amid the ongoing transformation of the world economy. The Roscongress Foundation is the organizer of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. TASS is its official general information partner.

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How much crazier are the British than everybody else?

UK Government Plots Digital ID Lockdown On Every Phone (MN)

The Labour government in Britain is accelerating its assault on digital privacy under the well-worn banner of child protection. Fresh plans leaked to the press reveal ministers intend to compel Apple, Google and other tech firms to restrict smartphones so thoroughly that a digital ID will be needed to use them with unfettered access. The mechanism comes in the form of expanded age verification that effectively demands digital identification for device setup and use. What is sold as safeguarding the young is shaping up as a backdoor mandate for every adult in Britain to submit ID just to operate a phone or go online.


This development lands alongside Google’s confirmation that it will soon bring digital IDs to Android devices in the UK via Google Wallet. Users will record a short video selfie and scan a government-issued ID to add a digital version of their passport or other documents.

The feature, already rolling out in select EU countries this summer, is explicitly tied to the UK’s Online Safety Act requirements for age checks on content involving self-harm, eating disorders, bullying and pornography. Google is exploring certification under the government’s digital identity trust framework, which could extend its use to everyday purchases such as alcohol. Apple has already implemented similar restrictions on iOS devices in Britain, forcing age confirmation or locking users into limited “child mode.”

ig Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo has been blunt about where this leads. “Protecting children online is vital, but these are outrageous plans that will fail to address the underlying causes of online harm. This will only result in population-wide ID checks for all of us to use our phones, tablets and laptops.” She continued: “Put simply, the Labour Government is introducing ID checks for the internet. No one in a democracy should need to show their passport just to get online.”

Carlo warned that the proposals replace genuine parental responsibility and meaningful tech design with “performative, authoritarian government control that children can easily circumvent by accessing adult-registered devices.” For the UK’s fifty million adult internet users, the outcome is stark: “this backdoor digital ID requirement would invoke the death of anonymity and internet privacy.” The mechanics are chilling. Without submitting to intrusive ID checks during device setup, users face a “chokehold on your software and internet access leaving you with a child-locked device.” Restrictions on messaging, streaming and browsing open the door to client-side scanning – government spyware sitting in every pocket. Carlo noted this has long been a GCHQ ambition and “will be exploited for other purposes before long.”

The bigger picture involving “The Government mandating that all phones/devices in Britain require ID and surveillance software is a crossing of the Rubicon that would make the UK one of the most authoritarian internet regimes in the world.” “I don’t know anywhere else in the world that has done this,” Carlo warned. The story broke via a leak to The Times rather than any parliamentary process. Carlo called it a travesty: “This extreme technological censorship requires rigorous public and parliamentary scrutiny that is totally missing.” Big Brother Watch has pledged to fight the measures. These phone-level controls do not exist in isolation. They slot directly into the UK’s wider digital ID infrastructure, already exposed as a dystopian experiment in mass surveillance.

The government’s One Login platform and planned GOV.UK Wallet create a centralized system for identity verification across public services, with biometric data, audit trails logging every use, and a permissions framework that can deny access to everything from jobs to age-restricted purchases. What begins as convenient “right-to-work” checks or alcohol verification quickly becomes a comprehensive record of daily life, open to expansion and abuse. nThe ambition reaches even further back – to the cradle. Labour ministers have privately discussed assigning digital IDs to newborn babies alongside their health records, modeled on Estonia’s system.

Framed initially as a tool to tackle illegal immigration through right-to-work verification, the scheme has ballooned into a cradle-to-grave tracking apparatus. Critics across the spectrum have labeled it a sinister overreach with nothing to do with stopping the boats and everything to do with building a permanent digital file on every citizen from birth.

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“The rise of AI agents has pushed automated requests past human activity, according to the internet infrastructure firm..”

Bots Now Generate More Web Traffic Than Humans – Cloudflare (RT)

Bots and AI agents now generate more web traffic than humans, according to data from internet infrastructure company Cloudflare. CEO Matthew Prince has described the development as a major turning point in the history of the web. Recent Cloudflare Radar data shows that automated bot requests account for roughly 57% of traffic to ordinary webpages across a selection of websites using the company’s services, compared with about 43% generated by humans.


“Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince wrote on X on Wednesday. He stated that he had expected automated traffic to overtake human activity only in 2027, but that “agentic traffic” has grown rapidly enough for bots to pass humans “for the first time in the Internet’s history.” The shift is primarily being driven by AI agents – automated systems that browse, retrieve, and process web content on behalf of users. While a human might visit a handful of websites before making a purchase or researching a topic, an AI agent can scan thousands of pages in order to produce an answer or complete a task.

Cloudflare’s figures suggest that much of today’s web activity is no longer ordinary browsing by people clicking through pages, but machine-to-machine traffic with automated systems requesting data from websites, apps, services and databases. The data covers web traffic only and does not include activities such as streaming, messaging, gaming, or app usage. The trend has revived debate over the “dead internet theory,” the idea that much of online activity is increasingly generated by bots, automated accounts, and AI systems interacting with other machine-made content.

The rise of bot traffic has also threatened the internet’s advertising-based business model. Since bots do not click on ads, concerns have been raised about whether websites may eventually charge AI agents for access to content. Meanwhile, researchers have also noted that large parts of the older web have been disappearing. A 2024 Pew Research Center study found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible a decade later, fueling concerns that the open web is being transformed from a space built around human browsing into one increasingly dominated by automated systems.

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