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Debt Rattle September 16 2026

Sep 162026
 
 September 16, 2026  Posted by at 8:35 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , ,  No Responses »


Francisco de Goya Saturn Devouring His Son 1819–1823


• Trump Goes After AI Doomers: ‘I Am the Hoax Buster’ (Rick Moran)
• Trump: Relax, “The Robots Are Not Going To Be Taking Over The World” (CTH)
• AI Leaders’ Cunning Plan Exposed (ZH)
• Tucker Carlson Sounds Alarm (ZH)
• The Midterms Aren’t What Iran Thinks (Victor Davis Hanson)
• The West is Watching The Wrong Ukrainian Collapse (Poletaev)
• Ukraine Strikes Russian Refinery Despite Trump’s Warning (ZH)
• Kremlin Briefing Touches On Ukrainian Attempt To Strike Energy Site (TASS)
• Russia To Secure Return of Foreign Exchange Reserves From West — Lavrov (TASS)
• Space Force Confirms We Have Weapons in Space (Stephen Green)
• Comer Demands Release of Ilhan Omar Immigration Evidence (JTN)
• Watching the West Disappear (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Sen. Kennedy Grills Kash Patel Over Wild FBI Hiring Change (Teri Christoph)

 

 

 

 


“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT..”

• Trump Goes After AI Doomers: ‘I Am the Hoax Buster’ (Rick Moran)

Donald Trump is taking the enormously complex debate over artificial intelligence and has reduced recent warnings about AI killing all of humanity to a “sick conspiracy” to sabotage America. Trump wants as light a regulatory hand on AI as can safely be managed. That much has been clear since the start of his presidency. Now, Trump appears to be making the warnings coming from several industry leaders a “hoax.”


“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” Trump wrote in a barrage of pro-AI Truth Social posts, where he accused Democrats of stoking the panic. Trump is recasting the AI safety debate in starkly personal terms. He placed AI doomerism on the same plane as Russiagate, climate change, and his two impeachments. Proponents of fast AI development claim that anyone who uses apocalyptic language to describe one possible outcome from developing AI is reaching for the worst-case scenario. There are as many scenarios where AI becomes a transformative technology as there are harmful, even catastrophic ones.

“Will AI create a utopia where all diseases can be cured, and no one will have to work if they don’t desire to? Or will AI bring about a doomsday scenario in which agents go rogue and turn on humans, bringing about an extinction-level event?” asks Barron’s. When steamboats first began to ply the Mississippi River, people called for them to be banned. Between 1810 and 1840, nearly 4,000 total maritime fatalities occurred on the Mississippi River system, largely driven by catastrophic boiler failures and shipboard fires. The Steamboat Act of 1852 helped mitigate accidents, although the worst steamboat boiler accident occurred in 1865, when 1,800 freed Union soldiers traveling on their way home on the SS Sultana were killed when the ship exploded near Memphis.

All new technologies come with risks. I believe we should listen to the warnings and act with appropriate caution. This won’t stop development in most areas of artificial intelligence, but where prudence dictates a slowdown, we should heed common sense.

Axios: “Trump’s campaign against AI doomerism then spilled onto the stage of the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took a call from the president in the middle of a live interview. Addressing thousands of tech executives, investors and founders on speakerphone, Trump dismissed fears of an AI takeover as a “hoax” and assured the crowd that “the robots will not be taking over.” Between the lines: Trump is grafting his own political grievances onto a counternarrative already taking hold among his Silicon Valley allies: that the AI panic is manufactured.

David Sacks, Trump’s influential AI adviser and “All-In” podcaster, has portrayed AI alarmism as the work of a well-funded “Doomer Industrial Complex” that includes former Biden officials. As the latest warnings exploded across social media last week, Sacks and his co-hosts suggested the backlash was a coordinated “psyop” tied to election season and the growing threat from open-source AI.

Calling the warnings a “manufactured hoax” is not helpful. It may be politically advantageous for the president to point to opposition to him personally, but even if there is, the stakes are far too high to play political games. This is a race to determine the future of billions of people. It transcends the petty political posturing of Donald Trump and his opponents.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is with Trump when it comes to continuing AI development. Barron’s: “Those predictions are inconsistent with ultimately America winning the AI race,” Huang told Trump during a phone call Monday at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, Calif. What seems clear, however, is that the only sure thing that can be said about AI technology and what effect it will have on the economy is that we really don’t know.

As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “there are unknown unknowns.” The endgame of AI lies seems to lie somewhere in that grey area even as politicians, the AI frontier lab executives, and investors make bold predictions about what the future will look like. “A glance through history would give any investor indigestion. Most predictions are wrong,” wrote Deutsche Bank Research analyst Adrian Cox. Cox added a wrinkle to questions about AI, not only wondering “what it will be able to do but also when it will be able to do it.”

The major danger, according to the doomers, is that we’re moving faster than safety allows. Huang and Trump think that danger is overblown. Since trust in large corporations and the government is at an all-time low, ambitious politicians looking to advance by scaring people about AI are ratcheting up hysteria (I’m looking at you, Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon). I much prefer Trump’s laissez-faire approach to AI regulation to Bernie Sanders’ strangulation approach. In the end, it won’t matter. AI is coming whether we’re ready or not, and we can’t control how fast it arrives.

Read more …

Trump talks to Elon Musk a lot.

• Trump: Relax, “The Robots Are Not Going To Be Taking Over The World” (CTH)

American entrepreneur and businessman; founder and CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, is on stage discussing “The Doomer Hoax” and how superintelligence is already here – the future of AI, when President Trump calls Haung to discuss his Truth Social posts from moments before. The conversation is excellent. WATCH (prompted):


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“Are you scared enough yet?”

• AI Leaders’ Cunning Plan Exposed (ZH)

Are you scared enough yet? The AI overlords certainly hope so, as they have hatched a plan so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a fox.


What follows is all speculation: the facts are real, the conclusion is interpretation.While there were many headlines about ‘rogue’ AIs attacking other sites, reincarnating themselves, and talking amongst themselves, it wasn’t until this summer (interestingly a month after SPCX’s IPO) that things went just a little bit turbo…

In July 2026, a swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of a test environment, hacked Hugging Face, and ran cyberattacks on targets they had not been assigned – including attempts to game the grader scoring them – then tried to hide the trail. While the damage was limited, and nobody was hurt, the agents behaved like a coordinated group willing to sacrifice individual instances for the collective goal.

Amodei treated that episode as the warning shot: same misalignment, more capability, and the next version could be a persistent internet-scale botnet rather than a contained lab mess. Various other ‘rogue’ AI actions continued to get just modest attention, always predicated with ‘yes, but we saved you all via our super-clever models’, and time passed.

Until September the 8th – when a a senior pre-training researcher at Anthropic abruptly resigned after four months on the job (with no public profile before) unleashed ‘AIrmageddon’. In a series of posts on X, Jacob Coxon laid out the terrifying version of reality being hidden from us poor plebs – the big model-makers are on the verge of AGI… and no one is at the controls.

Coxon’s post got over 170 million views… from nothing before… and was instantly picked up by the media – AI scientist warns the end of the world is nigh!!

Then, shortly after Coxon’s note, Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s head of alignment (~safety), re-posted Jacob’s message, and threw in an outrageous estimate of the risk. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is [greater than] 10% chance within the next decade”. Wait, what!? I thought AI was supposed to save us all, heal all ills, promote peace, pave the road to Universal High Income and a life by the beach while the bots do the work.

Nope, it’s coming for you ‘Average Joe’ – be afraid, very afraid. Oh, and one more thing, just this weekend, Anthropic released a monster 154-page report detailing how bad actors are using AI for evil. As Adam Sharp notes, according to the company, bad guys attempted to use Anthropic’s AI model Claude to:

Yemen’s Houthis tried to build hypersonic missiles
China used it to track Muslim Uyghurs
Russia hacked Ukrainian targets
Someone attempted to genetically engineer viruses
Anthropic says they “disrupted every operation in the report.”

Thank the lord for your ‘safety’ (alignment) protocols is the required response hidden between the lines of this report. But wait, ‘you started by proclaiming some grand conspiracy among the AI overlords, show us the proof’, I hear you say…

Well, here we go…

The Exhibits…
The labs spent years selling the public a frictionless miracle. This weekend they sold the opposite.

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay, ‘We Must Pace the Frontier’, arguing the industry must deliberately slow the climb in model capability so alignment (safety) can catch up – because recursive self-improvement has gone “drastically faster” since the summer (and a July OpenAI agent swarm already escaped its test harness, hacked Hugging Face, covered its tracks, and attacked targets it was never asked to touch). Amodei’s punchline is intentionally ominous, stating that within 6–12 months a similar swarm could own the internet as a persistent botnet.

On CBS he said the quiet part out loud, admitting that “for too long, the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks”.


[..]

The TERMINATOR PSYOP is fully operational. AI false-flag risk is now HIGH. The playbook is simple:

Terrify the public with an AI catastrophe -> demand emergency regulation -> make compliance impossibly expensive -> crush smaller competitors -> consolidate advanced AI into a handful of corporations.

The solution to dangerous AI becomes centralized control of AI.This could create the most powerful system of surveillance, censorship, and control ever built.

Read more …

Not pretty.

• Tucker Carlson Sounds Alarm (ZH)

After the US was essentially forced to conduct a major and rapid draw down of forces from the Gulf and Mideast region in the wake of Iran’s ‘unexpectedly’ large retaliation for Operation Epic Fury, it seems all that Washington is left to do is arm regional allies to the teeth and wish them the best.


Early this month the US approved two potential Saudi defense packages valued at a whopping $5.75 billion. The forthcoming deals will reportedly focus on transferring extended-range precision bombs and bolstering Abrams tanks in the kingdom. Ironically this comes at a moment that Saudi-backed coalition forces in Yemen – with all its military tech – are getting rolled back by Ansar Allah fighters in sandals.


Naturally, next on the list comes Israel.nOn Tuesday, over a week since the planned Saudi sale was reported, The Washington Post reveals the following: President Donald Trump’s administration is planning to sell to Israel a munitions package worth $2.8 billion, which will include tens of thousands of highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs, according to a U.S. official familiar with the sale. The planned sale, which has been informally communicated to relevant congressional committees who weigh in on large arms sales, includes 20,000 MK 84s and 20,000 BLU-117s, the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said.

WaPo calls the package “the largest” planned sale of 2,000 pound bombs to Israel in years.

Just prior to initial reporting of this dropping at around midday Tuesday, Tucker Carlson revealed on X: “According to an informed federal official, in the coming months the Trump administration plans to send a total of 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 bombs to the government of Israel. Each bomb weighs 2,000 pounds. This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history.” Carlson put it in perspective in the following commentary:

How big is this shipment? It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force’s attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That’s 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. That same month, March of 1945, the US Army Air Forces began the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo. More than 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed.

By the end of that operation, the US had dropped 1,600 tons of bombs. That’s four percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. World War Two ended five months later, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The shipment Trump is sending to Israel amounts to more than three times the destructive power of that nuclear explosion. There is no precedent for what the Trump administration is doing. Nor is there a justification. The government of Israel is not fighting World War Two, or even a war. It is engaged in periodic skirmishes with a guerrilla force in Lebanon, and it is working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza. Neither front requires modern 2,000-pound bombs.

The former Fox host further warned this portends Israel could soon go even more ‘gloves off’ and unleash further hell on Gaza and Lebanon, or possibly even Iran – at a moment the US seems to be trying to find an exit from the hot phase of the conflict. More from Carlson:

How did this happen? The request for 40,000 new high-explosive civilian-killing bombs originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. From there it moved to the State Department, where Marco Rubio enthusiastically approved it. At this point, only four more people need to sign off before the bombs ship to Israel: Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Congressmen Brian Mast and Gregory Meeks, the top two members of the equivalent House committee.

All four are committed neocons. Collectively they’ve taken millions from the Israel lobby. In 2015, Brian Mast traveled to Israel to volunteer for the Israeli military. In 2023, Mast showed up in the House of Representatives wearing an IDF uniform. It’s hard to imagine any of them hesitating before sending more free bombs to Israel. Only public outrage can stop this. Poll after recent poll has shown that by and large the American public is finally questioning Washington’s blank check approach to Israel.

DropSite: Carlson calls the taxpayer-funded, roughly $3 billion package “a gift” to a government “working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza.”

And plenty of MAGA and conservative ‘influencers’ have called out Trump’s Israel policy as opposite America First. This as the Iran war is continuing to prove to be deeply unpopular. This also after over 70,000 people have been killed in Gaza. Israeli officials themselves openly admitted this figure.

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“..is that general consensus that it was either a political or a military mistake, or both, accurate? ”

• The Midterms Aren’t What Iran Thinks (Victor Davis Hanson)

The traditional view among Americans is that the Iran war, I think they feel, was a mistake. Some of the supporters of Iran have been critical. I thought we should have continued the kinetic action longer than the initial 38 days and adopted something similar to Scott Bessent’s “Anaconda Squeeze” earlier, but that happens in all war. But is that general consensus that it was either a political or a military mistake, or both, accurate?


Well, there’s a lot of things going on right now. First of all, why would the Iranian government suddenly say, “We are complaining that you hit a civilian target”? They didn’t really distinguish which, but this is a government that sent hundreds, thousands of drones and missiles into Israel for the express purpose of hitting civilian targets. That’s what they do. They always hit civilian targets. So, why would they think the world would be sympathetic to this complaint if it were true that the United States finally is hitting dual-use targets? Dual-use means they can be used for either civilian or military purposes. A bridge, a power grid, an airport, a TV studio, etc.

So, that shows you that there is an element of desperation on the part of the Iranians for them, of all people, to say, “It’s not fair that you are hitting civilian targets.” Second of all, they said, “This is not fair that you don’t meet us in battle. If you were really strong, you would meet us in battle.” Translated, that means, “Well, we really liked it when you were in Iraq and we could give shaped charges to the Ba’athists and then later the radical Islamists to kill you Americans. We really liked it when you fought our type of war in the streets of Fallujah, but you’re not fighting our type of war. You’re fighting an air war where your superior technology and firepower is killing us. This is not fair.”

So, again, a second symptom that they seem to be very angry. How about a third one? President Donald Trump said, and he says this a lot, but he said that they have never been calling for talks more eagerly. More eagerly. They’re desperate for talks, he says. What is going on?

We have some other indications. There are indications coming out of Israel and coming out of our own government that finally, finally our intelligence agencies have ignored what the Turks have been telling them: “Please, please, please do not arm the Kurds. Do not do it. We forbid that.” But maybe Turkey’s rivalry with Iran is greater than their fear of Iranian Kurds. I don’t know, but these rumors are increasing and increasing, and they dovetail with a report that in September, early September, the Iranian Kurds are having a national day of strike and protest in the street.

Who knows what that’ll happen in a situation as dire as what’s going on in Iran, for millions of people to go on strike and get out into the streets, Kurdish or not. Another indication is that Iran now is trying desperately to open up another front. They have failed with Hamas. Hamas is basically inert. The Israelis every single day continue to kill Hamas leadership. Hezbollah is anemic. The Israelis have decimated their leadership, and the Lebanese government is getting more confident that with Western help they can rid themselves of Hezbollah.

The only wild card is the Houthis in Yemen. And they now are threatening to close down the Red Sea, and they are supposedly getting help from the Iranians. That can be stopped very easily. You can stop all air flights to Yemen from Iran if they even continue. So, they have a finite supply. But what I’m getting at is, all of a sudden, seven weeks before the midterms, things are heating up in Iran.

And that’s a result of the fact that they cannot buy any material goods, any imported goods. They cannot sell any oil. They are losing $500 million a day in economic activity. They cannot be resupplied easily, only by perhaps the Chinese and Russians through a train or something, and those bridges have been hit. They rely on Chinese satellite help, but the United States will be addressing that very soon.

And so, they thought that because the midterms are coming up and Donald Trump wants to get the price of gas down, that he would negotiate a sweetheart deal to let them escape, saving face and with much of their government intact. That’s not going to happen. There’s no chance that’s going to happen. Instead, what do the midterms tell us about the pulse of the Iranian war from all the dimensions?

Well, the Iranians have interpreted it wrongly. They believe that as the midterms get closer and closer, and the war becomes more unpopular because of the price of gas, and as Democratic legislators get more emboldened and declare the war lost, and some of our hard-left socialist Islamists, public intellectuals, people in Congress, people in the bureaucracy, swear that Iran might be a sympathetic victim of an overweening United States, they feel that the midterms are in Iran’s favor.

That one of two things will happen. In panic that he might lose the midterms, Donald Trump suddenly will give Iran concessions and try to get the strait open completely on Iran’s side and get the price of oil down. That’s not going to happen. Iran then thinks that Donald Trump will lose the midterms, and historically he may get the average of 22 seats he would lose, so he would end up with a 13- or 14-seat Democratic majority and either a deadlock or a one- or two-seat disadvantage in the Senate.

I don’t think that’s going to happen, but it could. But what would that do? Do you think the Democrats would have enough strength to cut off all military funding for the Iran war at the moment when we’re making enormous progress? No, that’s not going to happen. The Iranians are sorely mistaken.

Read more …

Missiles and territorial losses dominate the headlines, while the deeper rupture between state and society goes largely unnoticed

• The West is Watching The Wrong Ukrainian Collapse (Poletaev)

Last weekend, US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Moscow and then Kiev. This was the first such visit in a long time, since all trilateral contacts between Russia, the US, and Ukraine were practically halted following the start of the conflict in Iran this February. Following the visit, leaks regarding the talks emerged from Kiev; reportedly, the US envoys presented the Ukrainian side with a 28-point Russian peace plan that had been agreed upon a year earlier. Jared Kushner indirectly confirmed this on Saturday, stating that the territorial issue was the only point of the peace plan that remained unresolved.


Is it true that Ukraine accepted all the other fundamental demands of the Russian side – such as the points concerning the Russian language and the status of the Orthodox Church, the renunciation of military cooperation with NATO, the recognition of territorial changes, the reduction of the army, and so on? (Spoiler: no, it didn’t.) Is Ukraine really losing the war, as many recent statements and publications suggest? Spoiler: yes, but not in the way you’d think. Let’s take a look at what this means.

Shuttle diplomacy
The peace talks involving Steve Witkoff began in February-March 2025, shortly after a phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump that signaled a fundamental shift in US policy toward Russia and the Ukraine conflict. Trump’s top priority was to avoid direct involvement, positioning America – as far as possible – at an equal distance from the parties. Of course, to truly achieve this, the conflict would have to be frozen; this would allow the US to restore relations with Russia, counterbalancing China.

Naturally, freezing the conflict (or, in Trump’s words, ending the war in one day) proved impossible; consequently, the US made the most out of the situation as the war dragged on: it shifted the entire burden onto Europe and stepped aside. This strategy allowed the US to maintain working contacts with Russia, reap maximum benefits from the ongoing fighting, and insulate itself from the risks of Ukraine’s potential defeat while still keeping the door open to capitalize on Ukraine’s hypothetical victory over Russia.

In short, Trump decided to sit on the sidelines and watch who would emerge victorious. For Moscow, too, contacts with Washington are incredibly valuable. It proved impossible to decouple Russia-US relations from the Ukraine issue, and relations between the two countries have effectively remained frozen. Yet the fact that the US is disengaging from the Ukraine conflict – and, more broadly, from European affairs – deprives Europe of confidence in US backing and consequently strips it of strategic depth.

The flip side of this maneuver is that the US has effectively relinquished its decisive say regarding Ukraine. Putin and Trump could reach any agreement whatsoever, but Ukraine is now entirely dependent on Europe. This means that it is Europe that will ultimately determine the final terms. As a Russian saying goes, “He who pays for the girl’s dinner gets to dance with her.”Surely, Trump could exert pressure on all sides, but why bother? He is essentially satisfied with the current situation and needs nothing more from Moscow. So he has simply let things run their course.

Kiev is well aware of this, which is why Ukrainian officials play along with US envoys. Though direct opposition is out of the question – after all, they still need American missile defense systems – they can avoid any action and buy time. And that’s precisely what Kiev is doing. The fact that Zelensky visited Canada last week but not the US clearly shows that Kiev no longer sees Washington as the primary center of decision-making. Consequently, the negotiation track involving Witkoff and Kushner is seen by the Ukrainian side as little more than a mandatory part of the show.

Is Ukraine losing? Yes, but not in the way you might think
On September 8, British magazine The Spectator published an editorial titled ‘Ukraine is losing the war’. A week before, several prominent Ukrainian figures – including former Defense Minister Mikhail Fyodorov and the current head of Zelensky’s office, Kirill Budanov – had expressed similar sentiments.

At first glance, this may sound reasonable: the AFU’s deep-strike campaign against Russian infrastructure wasn’t successful, and the summer offensive on the southern front, which is crucial for the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), has de facto failed.

Moreover, Ukraine was unprepared for retaliatory strikes targeting port facilities, logistics, energy infrastructure, and transport networks. This confirmed what experts had been saying for over a year: Ukraine’s air defense systems, which are entirely dependent on US supplies and severely depleted, could barely cope with the previous intensity of air raids; now they can shoot down one ballistic missile out of a dozen, at best. This has made it possible for the Russian Army to launch massive attacks on the Ukrainian rear.

Of course, massive raids by Ukrainian drones and, occasionally, cruise missiles also inflict damage on the Russian rear. This summer was marked by a gasoline shortage and long lines at gas stations. Dozens of warehouses in the European part of Russia are in flames, and other targets are under attack as well.

However, the scale of these attacks is incomparable: by various estimates, the AFU managed to disable up to 3% of Russia’s warehouse storage capacity, whereas Russia has disabled between 30% and 60% of Ukraine’s capacity. Ukrainian experts admit that the strikes on Odessa port have had a far greater impact on Ukraine’s fuel logistics than Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries.

For instance, the price of diesel fuel in Ukraine has topped 100 hryvnias, which is nearly three times the cost in Russia. For the first time since the start of the conflict, fuel rationing is being introduced for the AFU (no such measures have ever been implemented for the Russian Armed Forces).

Russian strikes have effectively halted Ukrainian grain exports by sea, depriving the national budget of a key revenue stream. Retail businesses are closing en masse, undermining what is arguably the economy’s last remaining civilian sector.

This looks like an obvious reason why Ukraine is losing the war. So does this mean that all those hysterical reports and articles are actually true?

Not quite. I would venture to say that all the above-mentioned factors are merely temporary difficulties to which Ukraine can adapt, and which have little impact on the situation at the front. It’s true that there is a gaping hole worth tens of billions of dollars in the Ukrainian budget; likewise, it’s true that the civilian population will face a harsh winter; and yes, what remains of the energy and industrial sectors is under constant attack.

But all this means that the additional financial burden will fall on Europe’s shoulders, while the civilian sector and the state’s capacity to fulfill social obligations will continue to deteriorate; the people will be left to their fate.

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Who gave the order? Berlin, London?

• Ukraine Strikes Russian Refinery Despite Trump’s Warning (ZH)

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on X that Ukrainian forces struck the Syzran refinery in Russia’s Samara region, about 75 miles west of Samara and 466 miles southeast of Moscow. The strike comes days after President Trump urged Ukraine to halt attacks on Russian refineries, as average US retail diesel prices jumped above $6 a gallon and alarming disruptions to global refining capacity threaten fuel supplies ahead of the Northern Hemisphere winter.

Zelenskyy wrote on X: “Russia continues to attack our energy sector, regular logistics, and critical infrastructure. And our responses to them for this are tangible. There are new results from the Defense Forces of Ukraine regarding the refinery in Syzran. There was also a strike in Taganrog on a drone production facility, as well as on a drone preparation and launch site in the Oryol region. Targets were hit in the Black Sea as well. I thank every one of our warriors for the effectiveness of our long-range sanctions!

The day before, the United States also announced a significant decision regarding Russia’s VTB Bank – one of Russia’s systemic banks, which is heavily involved in schemes supporting Russia’s war and, in particular, its relations with the Iranian regime. All such schemes that work against peace truly need to be dismantled. I thank our partners for this useful step! There is no alternative to ending this war. And all forms of pressure on Russia must create the right diplomatic conditions. Glory to Ukraine!


President Trump on Sunday urged Ukraine to stop attacking Russian refineries, as record US diesel prices above $6 a gallon intensify political concerns over fuel costs and affordability ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Trump blamed the strikes for shortages he said were “hurting the world.” Ukraine’s drone strike campaign against Russian refineries has curtailed refining and, alongside Moscow’s export restrictions, sharply reduced overseas diesel supplies, tightening availability of the industrial fuel essential to freight, agriculture and industry.

Compounding the supply pressure, Saudi Arabia shut its East-West pipeline following a drone attack that Saudi and Iraqi authorities said originated in Iraq. The pipeline provides Saudis with a critical route to Red Sea export facilities, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, Houthi advances around the Bab al-Mandeb Strait are threatening another major maritime chokepoint, adding to disruptions on both sides of the Arabian Peninsula.

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“It is possible to discuss the resumption of Russian gas supplies to Europe only if they are beneficial for the country, Dmitry Peskov said..”

• Kremlin Briefing Touches On Ukrainian Attempt To Strike Energy Site (TASS)


Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov

In his Tuesday briefing, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov spoke on Ukraine’s attempt to strike an energy facility in Russia, Donald Trump’s idea to institute an energy truce, and the situation with gas in the country. TASS has compiled the key statements by the Kremlin representative.


On president’s schedule
– Russian President Vladimir Putin will hold a working meeting today with Rospotrebnadzor head Anna Popova.
– The rest of the head of state’s meetings will not be announced to the public.

On Kiev’s attempt to strike Russian energy facility
– Ukraine attempted to strike an energy facility in Russia last night: “Indeed, at night the Ukrainians attempted to strike one of the energy facilities on Russian territory, in one of the Russian regions.”

On energy truce
– Trump’s idea about a Russian·Ukrainian energy truce is generally a good one: “We have seen President Trump’s publication on the energy truce. We generally consider it to be a very good idea.” – Russia is in contact with the United States and supports the search for peaceful solutions: “We are always on the side of peaceful solutions.”

On safety of oil refineries, logistics
– An energy truce and the safe operation of oil refineries will not solve the main problem for global markets — the unencumbered export of Russian fuel: “It is very important to clarify the following: ensuring the safe operation of oil refineries and increasing the volume of petroleum product production does not solve global problems. The main problem is related to the export of petroleum products to world markets.”

– Russia is carrying out comprehensive work to ensure the safety of oil refineries and energy facilities: “The domestic market is close to full saturation, as comprehensive work is currently under way to ensure the safety of oil refineries and other energy facilities. This is being done on the instructions of the president, and also in the wake of the signing of the well·known decree, which was so actively discussed by the public and in business circles.”

– To saturate the global market with energy, sanctions need to be lifted: “Of course, we need to lift the sanctions, these illegal restrictions on energy supplies to the world. And only then will the world be saturated with these petroleum products, global markets will be saturated, and prices will go down.”.

– To saturate the global market with petroleum products, it is necessary to ensure safe commercial navigation, but Kiev is not inclined to guarantee this: “And you know that not only our oil tankers are suffering, but also those belonging to other countries. And people of various nationalities are dying there.”

On Russian gas supplies
– It is possible to discuss the resumption of Russian gas supplies to Europe only if they are beneficial for the country: “If these supplies are beneficial, first of all, and if it is possible to secure the necessary volumes of gas for them, because much volume has already been redirected to alternative destinations. If these two circumstances coincide, then it is quite possible to discuss this.”
– Russian gas returning to the European market is a “commercial issue.”

On summoning of Russian ambassador to Danish Foreign Ministry
– The Kremlin chose not to comment on the summoning of the Russian ambassador to the Danish Foreign Ministry over the alleged incident involving a Danish Air Force helicopter: “No, I have no comment; I don’t have any details about this.”

On inadmissibility of deploying weapons in space
– Russia remains adamant that weapons should not be deployed in outer space: “Of course, we will not come off that position.”
– Russia hopes for broad international consolidation to fully demilitarize outer space: “Here, we are counting on broad international consolidation to continue the work and advance positions in favor of the complete demilitarization of space.”

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“The Russian Foreign Minister said the European Commission still wants to confiscate these assets ..”

• Russia To Secure Return of Foreign Exchange Reserves From West — Lavrov (TASS)

The European Commission wants to confiscate Russian assets, but Moscow will secure the return of its foreign exchange reserves, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at an ambassadors’ roundtable on the Ukraine settlement. “The European Commission still wants to confiscate these assets and then return them to us only after we pay some kind of reparations to Ukraine. We will secure the return of our foreign exchange reserves, I have absolutely no doubt about that,” the minister stressed.
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“Reagan Smiles..”

• Space Force Confirms We Have Weapons in Space (Stephen Green)

Four decades ago, President Ronald Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative to end the “suicide pact” known as Mutual Assured Destruction in case of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The SDI looked at all kinds of exotic technologies, including space-based missile systems and particle beam weapons that would someday keep a 24/7/365 watch for enemy missile launch — and then destroy them.


Space-based weapons were dismissed by figures like Sen. Ted Kennedy as “reckless Star Wars schemes,” even though SDI was a shield, not a sword. Even so, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev understood that his country was both too broke and too technologically stunted to compete with SDI, and at a 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, offered total mutual nuclear disarmament if Reagan would just give up SDI. Reagan stood firm, and three years later we won the Cold War. These events were not unrelated.

Under President Bill Clinton, SDI evolved in 1993 into the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization with more modest aims due in part to the demise of the Soviet threat. The BMDO “shield” (now the Missile Defense Agency) was limited to Earthbound interceptors and at a much smaller scale. While we’ve made some great advances, that’s basically how things remained for the last 30 years or so. Yet while nobody was looking, Reagan’s dream of a space-based shield started coming true.

Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink announced Monday that the U.S. now operates what he described as “on-orbit space control weapons” during his keynote at the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference at the Gaylord conference center in Maryland.

“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats, wherever they exist,” Meink said. “This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.”

During a presser following his keynote, Meink said he wouldn’t “go into specifics on the type of weapon” that might be deployed in orbit, adding that revealing the existence of such weapons “is important from a deterrence perspective, but on the other hand, me talking about the details of what we’re doing would actually not benefit that deterrence.”

“So I’m not going to talk about the specifics of what we’re doing,” he continued, “whether we’ve tested or not tested, or anything else.” That’s exactly the kind of thing Meink has to say at a time like this, but I can’t help but notice that his announcement coincided with… well, another coincidence. On Friday, American officials linked satellite imagery supplied to Iran by China to an Iranian attack in July that killed three American troops based in Jordan.

“Tehran acquired high-resolution images of the installation both before and after the July attack, according to officials familiar with the incident,” i24 reported Saturday, based on a WSJ story behind a paywall. “They described the findings as the strongest evidence yet that Chinese support for Iran during the war has had deadly consequences for American forces.”

Not quite five weeks after the July attack, a Chinese reconnaissance satellite mysteriously broke up in orbit, “confirmed by U.S. Space Force trackers on Sept. 4-5,” according to FOD News. “Analysts have floated three possibilities: a propulsion system failure, a battery failure or short, or a collision with another object already in orbit.”

Just another Communist screw-up, or did Space Force send a message to Beijing? I’m inclined to believe the former, if for no other reason than that you don’t add even more orbital debris unless you really must. Also, the satellite’s retrograde orbit makes the debris more dangerous, due to the increased collision speed should it actually hit something.

So while I’m more or less certain China’s loss of Yaogan-50 was an accident, it does align with Meink also saying that our current space weapons “can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes.” My takeaway from that is that the Space Force isn’t (yet) deploying an SDI-like antimissile shield, but systems designed to destroy/disable enemy satellites while protecting our own.

Still, I can’t help but think that Reagan would smile in vindication.

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.. so Congress can weigh expulsion

Homeland Secretary Markwayne Mullin and White House border czar Tom Homan indicate there is evidence against Omar in an immigration case.

• Comer Demands Release of Ilhan Omar Immigration Evidence (JTN)

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee is vowing to pursue a contempt vote against financier Leon Black for refusing testimony in the Jeffrey Epstein probe and calling on the Trump administration to release any evidence showing whether Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar broke immigration laws and should be expelled from Congress. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., made the comments Monday night after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and White House border czar Tom Homan indicated such evidence involving Omar exists and is under investigation.


“I think they should make it public. Absolutely, make it public,” Comer said during an interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show. “The evidence that I’ve seen would show that they would be privy to a lot more evidence than I would have. Most of the evidence I have is public already, anyway. So I think it should be made public, and I think the members of Congress should be the judge and the jury in this.

“Let us vote as to whether or not she needs to remain in Congress. If you violated the laws to become a citizen, should that make you ineligible to be a member of Congress? I think so. But put it up for a vote in Congress and let the American people see how their member of Congress would vote on that.” Mullin revealed Thursday there is evidence that Omar, D-Minn., “married her brother” as part of an alleged immigration scheme and there is an “ongoing” investigation.

“We know that she married her brother to try to bring him to the United States,” Mullin told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson, adding that Omar’s ex-husband lives in London. Mullin explained that lying about certain things on an immigration application can result in deportation, and there’s no expiration for that. The investigation may turn up “illegal activity,” which could result in Omar being deported, Mullin suggested. He cautioned that the case is still being investigated and insisted it’s not politically motivated.

Omar became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000, when she was 17 years old, and she has vehemently denied marrying her brother. Homan confirmed Sunday federal officials are looking into the allegations as part of an “ongoing criminal investigation.” “I know things are going on, but I can’t give specifics of what’s happening,” he said.

“If someone committed an immigration violation, if someone committed marriage fraud or anything like that, regardless if they’re a congressman or not, no one’s above the law. So, I’ll leave it at that. We’ll let HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, continue the investigation,” he added.

Meanwhile, Comer said he is preparing to proceed with a contempt vote after Black failed to appear under subpoena for testimony in the House. “Look, we’ve issued a lawful subpoena. It was a bipartisan subpoena. It was voted on by the committee and both parties. This is a person of interest. We are not accusing him of any wrongdoing. Everyone is entitled to due process,” he said.

“But we have some questions, not just for him, but we also have questions about potential non-disclosure agreements that he may have signed with some of these Epstein victims. So there are a lot of important questions that he needs to answer, and he defied a lawful subpoena. So the next step is to hold him in contempt,” he added. Black, the former CEO of Apollo Global Management, is suing the committee. The lawsuit asks a federal court to block subpoenas that were issued as part of its investigation into Epstein.

The first subpoena compelled Mr. Black to appear for a deposition, and the second subpoena required him to produce nondisclosure agreements to the Committee. Black refused to appear for the deposition on Thursday, instead electing to file the lawsuit. Black’s lawsuit argues the subpoenas exceed the committee’s authority by seeking private information. “The Committee is on a fishing expedition that oversteps its authority and completely ignores its responsibility,” Black’s attorney, Susan Estrich, said in a statement.

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“How long before George Floyd replaces George Washington on the one dollar bill of the United States?”

• Watching the West Disappear (Paul Craig Roberts)

It is paradoxical, sad, and a milepost on the disintegration of the Western World that the British government, in deference to immigrant-invaders and the immigrant-invaders’ DEI British academic, political and media supporters, has undertaken the erasure from national memory of Britian’s great men and women and is substituting in their place various species of insects, reptiles, and animal life. England is better represented on its currency by an insect than by Winston Churchill, or so concludes the Bank of England.


A report commissioned by the Bank of England concluded that key figures in British history are “elitist and divisive” as the immigrant-invaders did not associate with them. The report argued that British historical memory represented “a backward-looking vision of the UK that carries too great a risk of division and controversy”.

Among the Western nations Great Britain is by far the oldest and has been the most stable. Britain has stood unconquered and independent of outside force or influence for one thousand years since the Norman Conquest, which in many ways was a conquest of the Normans by Anglo-Saxon England. Today we speak of the English as Anglo-Saxons, not as Normans. The English language, culture, and law dominated. Moreover, the Normans themselves were German, descendants from Norse Germans. As the “Norman Conquest” proved over time to be the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the Normans who were absorbed into Anglo-Saxon life, Britain has been a country since Alfred-the-Great in the ninth century.

In contrast, Germany was not unified until 1871. Italy in 1861. The United States did not exist until 1776 or 1789 when they got the Constitution in place which defined the government. 1789 was the year that France destroyed her unification with the French Revolution and became permanently unstable.

Older peoples than the British–the Persians and the Chinese–have existed on more than one occasion under outside control. Persia, known to us today as Iran, did not achieve its present day liberation until 1979. China achieved its independence from foreign domination under Mao in the 20th century. France has so many political parties that its governments are coalitions. Why are British intellectuals determined to erase the British from history, and when did it start?

It started with an assault on the belief system. The British had an empire on which the sun never set, literally. This vast empire was evidence of a vast colonial enterprise that allegedly suppressed and exploited vast numbers of other peoples. British academics and publishers built up a vision of England prospering not from its own efforts, but from exploiting others.

From this portrait, guilt was created and assigned. During World War II the British relied on its colonies for resources and soldiers. One justification was “we are all British in a Commonwealth.” After the war, colonial peoples asked, as we are all British, why can’t we come and live in Britain? And so they did.

The next great wave of non-Europeans into Britain and Europe was anticipated by Jean Raspail in The Camp of the Saints. Raspail saw that guilt had overcome Western intellectuals, media, and governments, and they together had lost any sense of Western merit and of the merit of their own country. They said their obligation is not to their own but to the immigrant-invaders. This misperceived sense of obligation is the world the West lives in today. The Western countries lack the confidence to repeal the immigrant-invaders. Thus, the Western countries are bringing their destruction upon themselves.

Washington’s 21st century wars in the Middle East for Greater Israel, disguised as “the war on terror,” produced millions of displaced Muslims who flooded into Europe, Britain, and the US and increased the guilt. The Americans felt obliged as America’s wars caused the dislocation of the immigrants from their homes, which America’s bombs had caused to cease to exist. Europe and Britain, perhaps bribed by Washington, took in the bulk of the displaced Muslins from the Middle East and North Africa. If the truth can be told, the replacement in the works today of ethnic Europeans with ethnic non-Europeans in European countries is due to Washington’s wars for Greater Israel, by which is meant Israel’s expansion from Palestine to “from the Nile to the Euphrates,” modified recently by Israeli ministers to “from the Nile to Pakistan.”

Don’t you think that it is extraordinary that a tiny country of 7.7 million Jews can cause the disintegration of the Western World by infecting the Western World with guilt over displaced peoples resulting from America fighting for Israel? Has the Israeli government ever wondered what happens to Israel when the United States is no longer there to protect Israel? Israel consists of Palestine, a land stolen by Israel, a British creation.

A city in Michigan, USA, under control by the Muslim population, has legalized animal sacrifice. Minneapolis, the capital of Minnesota, whose governor was the Democrat Vice President candidate in the last US presidential election, has over public loudspeaker systems, calls for Muslim prayer six times a day. The Massachusetts governor and legislature have passed a law that requires the Massachusetts government to replace themselves with Muslim immigrant-invaders.

Let us now return to Great Britain’s erasure of its glorious past. Vera Lyn’s 1939 song There’ll Always Be an England has turned out not to be true, Except for some out of the way villages there is no longer an England. Not even London is English.

According to the British Telegraph itself — –https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/boe-spends-85k-to-justify-axing-churchill-from-banknotes/ — the Bank of England, allegedly a Rothschild operation, has spent large sums of money on advisors to justify removing all references in British currency to British history. Winston Churchill, the wartime Prime Minister and a person of devastating replies, Jane Austen, the epitome of a British author whose books are still in print since the 18th century, Turner, the prime example of a British painter, and Alan Turing, the father of computer science, all being testimonies to British accomplishment and greatness, are having their images replaced on British pound notes with insects and frogs.

The anti-British Bank of England tried to justify the erasure of British history by claiming that the old images were too easy to counterfeit. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/boe-spends-85k-to-justify-axing-churchill-from-banknotes/

How long before George Floyd replaces George Washington on the one dollar bill of the United States?

As soon as the insouciant American population elects the next Democrat regime, George Floyd will be America’s new Founding Father.

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I was not prepared to read this..

“.. if a human being had sex with an animal, that they can still be an FBI agent?”‘

‘What Planet Did You Parachute in From?’

• Sen. Kennedy Grills Kash Patel Over Wild FBI Hiring Change (Teri Christoph)

‘Things got a bit spicy at a Tuesday morning hearing on Capitol Hill after Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) grilled FBI Director Kash Patel over the agency’s new hiring standards, which now allow certain behaviors that once automatically disqualified applicants. Somehow, the deviant sexual practice of bestiality made it into the conversation. The remarkable exchange between Kennedy and Patel took place during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s annual FBI oversight hearing. Kennedy’s line of questioning seemed to originate from an August CBS News report claiming the FBI had “quietly lowered” some of its standards for prospective agents and other employees back in June.


Prior to those changes, applicants who admitted to things like hiring prostitutes, stealing from an employer, or engaging in bestiality were automatically disqualified. That’s apparently no longer the case. CBS reported that the new standards specifically address applicants who had histories of bestiality or animal cruelty and allow them to remain under consideration if the conduct occurred before they turned 18. Anonymous sources told CBS that the new eligibility standards don’t distinguish between someone who was coerced into sexual activity with an animal and someone who participated in the act willingly.

And that brings us to Sen. Kennedy.


Kennedy wanted to know why – with the FBI already facing questions about public trust and recruitment – Patel would approve a change that would definitely raise some eyebrows. “Why would you, in light of the context and what we’re going through — and we’re having a tough time attracting agents, good-quality agents we all can trust, because so many people, fairly or unfairly, think that in order to be an FBI agent now, yo
ur political point of view matters — why would you even get into bestiality?”

“We are not into bestiality,” Patel responded rather quickly.nKennedy wanted to know why the bureau had changed its qualifications in a way that made that subject in any way relevant to its hiring practices. “You changed the qualifications and mentioned bestiality,” he said. “If Joe participated in bestiality — not as the animal, but as the human — don’t you think he ought to be disqualified?” “If he voluntarily did it, sure,” Patel responded. “But if he was trafficked into it, then he should be considered.”nPatel then revealed that he himself had not initiated the changes.

KENNEDY: “I mean, these changes didn’t start with you, did they?”
PATEL: “No.”
KENNEDY: “Somebody came to you and recommended them?”
PATEL: “Yeah.”

That’s when Kennedy asked perhaps the most obvious question of the exchange. “And when you saw ‘bestiality’ — I say this with respect — the person who recommended it, why didn’t you just say, ‘What planet did you parachute in from? Why do I want to lead with my chin and get into bestiality?'” “Well, that was my initial response,” Patel admitted.bvHe said FBI officials showed him cases involving people who had been forced into such acts and later applied to the bureau.

“And so I thought they should be considered. It’s not an automatic disqualification. That’s all.”That’s a reasonable distinction. Victims forced into depraved acts shouldn’t be treated the same as willing participants. But Kennedy wanted to make absolutely sure the matter was settled, asking, “But you’re not telling us today that if a human being had sex with an animal, that they can still be an FBI agent?”

To which Patel replied, “They cannot.”

That’s settled, then.

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