AI Archives - The Automatic Earth

Buckingham Palace has attempted to ban this video.
His Majesty King Charles III is trying to lecture the British to abandon Western values and Christianity in favor of 'the wisdom of Islam'. If he likes it so much, let him abdicate and go live in Iran. pic.twitter.com/PjDcWJJDCQ
— Wiki Leaks 1.0 (@WikiLeaksQ) October 8, 2026

President Trump just ENDED Democrats ability to win elections again in one GENIUS move.

Democrats have been using illegal aliens for power. They have admitted it on tape.

Trump’s 2030 Census rule would stop counting illegal aliens, and anyone without a green card, in the… pic.twitter.com/sqpU2x7NzH
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) October 7, 2026

https://twitter.com/21WIRE/status/2108050765298172261?s=20

Trump doesn’t face elections. It’s nice if he does well in the midterms, but that’s all.

• Pentagon Prepares ‘Options’ For Trump To Strike Iran Before Midterms (ZH)

The Atlantic is reporting Wednesday afternoon that the Pentagon is preparing strike options for the Commander-in-Chief to consider, and that Trump may actually pull the trigger before the midterm elections – though the report emphasizes that the decision is still being debated:

After months of on-again, off-again fighting, the United States hasn’t struck Iran in several weeks. The stretch of relative tranquility is coinciding with the final phase of the midterm-election campaign, and the assumption has been that President Trump will want to keep it going through November 3 so as not to remind voters of an unpopular war that is dragging Republican candidates down nationwide.
But that may not be what happens. The White House has asked the Pentagon to develop strike options against Iranian targets that could be exercised ahead of the midterms, according to two administration officials. The planning underscores just how much the president wants to reduce gas prices and demonstrate progress in the conflict before the vote, administration officials told us.And yet a renewed outbreak of direct bombing would likely actually serve to do the opposite, given oil prices have tended to shoot up on headlines of major direct escalation.
Reports out of Iran confirmed earlier Wednesday that negotiations are ‘stalemated’ – also as the Iranians have ramped up targeting tankers with drones in the Strait of Hormuz over the last week.One peculiar and notable line from The Atlantic report is that Trump and the Republicans are looking for “some sort of victory” in a war that they promised would be swift and decisive, but instead has drifted into a seven-month quagmire:
The plans are being developed by U.S. Central Command, which is coordinating the war effort, a U.S. official told us. Even the plans’ advocates acknowledge that limited strikes would not, by themselves, bring Iran to the negotiating table, restore safe travel through the Strait of Hormuz, or lower gas prices before Election Day. But those in favor believe that further action after months of uneasy peace could allow Trump to demonstrate strength and potentially declare some sort of victory, giving Republicans much-needed momentum heading into the election.
Tehran has constantly signaled its military is at the ‘ready’ and that it is continuing to build up its ballistic missile arsenal, even as its exports have dropped dramatically due to the US naval blockade. Meanwhile…
Wednesay (10/7): A tanker was hit by “multiple projectiles” about 51 nautical miles north of Qatar.
https://twitter.com/MoloWarMonitor/status/2107925763764916730?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2107925763764916730%7Ctwgr%5Ea99809684c3f94411a0ef338d46f6a6c3daa4c68%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fpezeshkian-calls-iranians-ration-electricity-stand-us-negotiations-stalemated

Le Pen and AfD can save Europe. Narrowly.

“Mounting problems with housing, schools, and jobs are driving people into the streets while their governments are gearing up for a conflict no one wants..”:

• Europe Is In Revolt – Its Leaders Are Preparing For War (RT)

Europe’s leaders have grand plans – spend more on weapons, prepare for war, and tighten citizens’ belts. The people have more immediate concerns however, like finding somewhere to live, keeping their jobs, and getting an education. Across France, Germany, Spain, and other EU states, the widening rift has started to spill into the streets.

Recent weeks have seen housing marches across Spain, student riots and public-sector strikes in France, and demonstrations against military recruitment and industrial job cuts in Germany. Immigration has added to the anger over housing and overstretched services, while the prospect of conscription has young Germans asking whose wars they are expected to fight.
The demands differ, but a recurring complaint unites them – aside from those simply looking for an excuse to wreak havoc: governments aren’t listening. Instead of putting domestic problems first, European leaders are telling their constituents to accept less and sacrifice more, while committing billions to preparations for a suicidal war with Russia. That’s despite Moscow and even Europe’s own intelligence services repeatedly saying there is no imminent threat.
Spain: Priced out and fed up
Spain’s housing crisis has pushed tens of thousands into the streets. After years of soaring rents, the eviction of an 87-year-old woman from her home of 70 years in Madrid last month turned into a rallying point for those sick of being priced out of their homes and the government’s failure to tackle the housing affordability crisis.
The eviction sparked demonstrations across Spain, followed by mass marches and a continuing protest camp in central Madrid. Parliament’s subsequent rejection of emergency tenant protections added even more fuel to the fire, bringing tens of thousands into the streets in around 50 cities last weekend.
Rents in Spain have almost doubled over the past decade as immigration-driven population growth has continued to outstrip housing construction. The population, excluding migration, has meanwhile only continued to decline. The pressure is even more visible in Ceuta, Spain’s North African enclave, where around 72,000 people crossed from Morocco in late July into a territory with roughly 84,000 inhabitants. Although most returned, thousands remained, overwhelming accommodation and straining public services.
Residents have taken to the streets demanding stronger border controls and faster deportations, accusing Madrid of abandoning them. Protests have escalated into clashes with police, while angry locals have torn down makeshift migrant camps. Government promises to restore order have done little to quell the frustration of communities left to absorb the consequences.
France: School’s out
France has also been gripped by overlapping protests over wages, spending cuts, public services, and school conditions. Teachers, healthcare workers, firefighters and transport staff have joined numerous strikes in recent weeks, while a growing student movement has added school blockades to the disruption.
The school protests began in mid-September, with students demanding more teachers, smaller classes, repairs to neglected buildings, and lighter schedules. Thousands of teaching posts have been eliminated this year, with further cuts planned for next year.
Around 266,000 people joined demonstrations nationwide on Tuesday. More than 6,500 have been arrested over three weeks, while hundreds of students and police officers have been injured, including a 15-year-old who lost his hand to a police grenade and a 16-year-old who reportedly lost sight in one eye after being hit by a rubber bullet.
As the movement has grown, violent groups have joined the protests, torching buses, attacking emergency workers, and damaging schools. Across France, 24 schools have been burned or ransacked. Similar demonstrations have spread to neighboring Belgium, where students have opposed education reforms, higher transport costs, and rising tuition fees. In Liege, school blockades have been accompanied by vandalism, fires and arrests.
France: The cuts keep coming
The student demonstrations came on the heels of wider protests that have gripped France for weeks, with public-sector workers protesting a squeeze on wages and services, compounded by soaring fuel prices. Since 2017, public-sector pay has risen by 5%, while cumulative inflation has reached 24%. The government’s proposed €54 billion ($60.4 billion) budget package, which includes spending cuts and freezes affecting pensions and benefits, has only deepened the anger.
Other demonstrations have also challenged continued funding for Ukraine, with protesters arguing that the money should go toward hospitals, education, and lower fuel taxes. Separate rallies in more than 20 cities have also opposed a bill that could give police shootings the presumption of legality, which critics say would make officers harder to hold accountable.
In Germany, workers and students have taken to the streets as Berlin pursues a frenzied military buildup in the midst of a deepening industrial crisis with hundreds of thousands losing their livelihoods and young men facing the prospect of being drafted. Around 45,000 students joined protests in some 100 cities and towns in late September, carrying banners reading ‘We won’t fight in your wars’ and ‘Education instead of bombs’.
The government meanwhile is pressing ahead with plans to expand the armed forces to more than 260,000 active troops and 200,000 reservists by 2035 to align with Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s fixation on creating “Europe’s strongest conventional army.” Young men are already required to register for potential service, but politicians have been pushing for a return to conscription if voluntary recruitment fails to fill the ranks.
Aside from the thousands protesting such plans in the streets, resistance is also showing up in applications to avoid military service. More than 12,000 people sought conscientious objector status in the first eight months of this year – over three times the total for all of last year. Tens of thousands of automotive workers have also protested sweeping job cuts and threats to factories. Volkswagen, for example, plans to shed 100,000 jobs across its brands, while other manufacturers are cutting production or moving it abroad.
Germany’s industrial woes have been further compounded by the loss of cheap Russian energy, which helped make its manufacturers competitive. Higher energy costs, US tariffs, and Chinese competition are now squeezing businesses and threatening jobs across the sector. For arms manufacturers, however, Berlin’s priorities and its latest €108.2 billion defense budget have been good for business. While Volkswagen shares have fallen more than 75% from their 2021 peak, Rheinmetall’s have soared over 1,100% since early 2022. One Volkswagen factory is even set to shift toward producing military equipment for an Israeli arms company.
More guns and more fear
Even with streets burning and protesters demanding relief, European leaders have not let the turmoil distract them from their military ambitions. In France, Macron marked Tuesday’s mass demonstrations by publicizing a nuclear missile test, posting a photograph of himself watching the launch with his back to the camera. While his constituents marched for better living conditions, his message was that France “must be feared to remain free.”
In Germany, Merz and NATO chief Mark Rutte smiled and waved through boos and chants of “murderers” and “blood on your hands” after the military bloc received the Westphalian Peace Prize last week. Inside the ceremony, officials praised military strength as the foundation of peace. Those priorities are also taking shape in Brussels’ budget negotiations. Germany and five other EU states have demanded cuts to the bloc’s next budget, pushing to sacrifice funding for farmers and poorer regions in favor of ever-growing military spending.
The urgency is being justified by the supposed threat of a future Russian attack. However, Moscow has repeatedly denied any such plans, while even Finland’s president has admitted that his intelligence services see no imminent military threat. Nevertheless, for European leaders, preparations for that hypothetical conflict, which they appear to almost count on, continue to take precedence over the mounting problems already bringing people out onto the streets.

“Le Pen’s 39% compared with just 27% for center-right rival Edouard Philippe and 18% for far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon. ”

• Le Pen Most Credible Presidential Candidate, French Bonds Suffer (ZH)

France’s politicians seem to be getting a dire warning from the bond market: rein in reckless spending or risk a fiscal crisis as borrowing costs skyrocket.

UBS strategist Julien Conzano, head of European macro credit strategy in London, sees bond market pressure pushing both the crisis-stricken Macron government and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally toward greater fiscal discipline, reducing the risk of an expansionary 2027 budget.
Deutsche Bank strategists Jim Reid and Henry Allen wrote in a note that French 10-year government bonds have posted their worst rolling decade of nominal returns since 1803, dating back to the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.

it's been a while since we had a European sovereign debt crisis

*FRANCE-GERMANY 10-YEAR YIELD SPREAD WIDENS 8BPS TO 135BPS

France CDS widest in 13 years pic.twitter.com/9opJUmD2uS
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 1, 2026

The French welfare state’s bill is finally coming due: France’s budget deficit is forecast to be 5.4% of GDP this year, well above the EU’s 3% ceiling. The country has not balanced its budget since 1974. On Tuesday, Le Pen unveiled her shadow budget for next year, should she win the presidential elections in mid-April. In it, she proposed steep deficit cuts.
Le Pen’s plan would shrink the deficit to 3.7% of economic output next year, well below the government’s 5% target, before bringing it to 2.2% by 2032. Savings would come largely from spending cuts, lower transfers to the EU and reduced migrant spending.
French 10-year bond yields rose sharply at the beginning of the week towards 5% before sliding to nearly 4.7% after Le Pen’s shadow budget reveal on Tuesday. But by the end of the week, the government debt yield rocketed back to nearly 4.96%.
To save France from the brink of what we described as a “triple crisis”, which consists of far-left riots, a ticking debt bomb and mass migration all colliding at once, a new Verian survey conducted for local outlet Le Figaro Magazine found that 39% of respondents believe Le Pen has a clear vision to contain the crisis.
Le Pen’s 39% compared with just 27% for center-right rival Edouard Philippe and 18% for far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
The ongoing social unrest by the far-left, weaponizing young kids who have burned down schools and torched buses, has been the extra fuel to propel Le Pen, as her Polymarket odds of winning the “Next French Presidential Election” have skyrocketed over the last week to 43%.

A consensus appears to be forming that Le Pen’s proposed fiscal discipline to rescue France from the brink of what she describes as a looming default, if the current trajectory continues, is a welcome relief for the market and voters. Nomura analysts described this theme in late August (read report), and they see Europe “lurching” right over the next 18-month election cycle.
Goldman: "Our poll-based model continues to show Marine Le Pen as favourite to win next year’s presidential election and Rassemblement National as likely to secure a parliamentary majority. The party’s recent proposals regarding next year’s budget, the medium-term trajectory for…
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 8, 2026

Principal Asset Management’s Howe Chung Wan noted that one accelerator of France’s bond rout was the unwinding of carry positions, which helped drive the selloff and amplified pressure that sent yields soaring. “
You can see this time around in France, it took France and Italy … but it did not take Spain,” Howe said, adding, “So it tells you it’s about positioning. It tells you about who is on the trades.”
[..] Le Pen has tailwinds here as the spending bill for the failed progressive experiment and unfettered spending comes due. Nomura is correct: the market no longer fears right-wing candidates; it fears left-wing candidates and unhinged socialists.

Absolutely insane that this ever happened. And those that did it were never punished.

• Trump Talks About AG Merrick Garland and Jack Smith Targeting His Family (CTH)

During an oval office press availability today, President Trump is asked directly about Joe Biden, former AG Merrick Garland and former Special Prosecutor Jack Smith targeting himself and his family. WATCH:

“..he argues that America’s greatest achievements may still lie ahead.”

• The Trump Manufacturing Resurgence Plan Currently Underway (CTH)

Many of us have watched each step in the process as President Trump executes a deliberate strategy to reindustrialize American manufacturing.

In this video Mike Steger examines plans for new shipyards, submarine production, and advanced manufacturing at Sparrows Point and across the country. He contrasts this rebuilding effort with the collapse of Bethlehem Steel and Baltimore’s industrial economy, arguing that restoring basic industry is essential to America’s future.
The discussion then turns to Henry Kaiser, whose World War II shipyards transformed American production through workforce training and new construction methods. Mike connects that history to today’s shipbuilding ambitions, steel investments, and the industrial foundation needed to support both naval strength and space exploration.
From American shipyards to SpaceX’s stainless steel rockets, Mike makes the case that industrial growth can renew the confidence and purpose of Western civilization. Drawing on Marco Rubio’s remarks in Athens, the symbolism of Prometheus, and John Paul Jones’s refusal to surrender, he argues that America’s greatest achievements may still lie ahead. WATCH:

Chapters 00:00 America’s Revival of the West
01:25 A New Era at Sparrows Point
03:10 Rebuilding America’s Shipyards
04:55 Bethlehem Steel and Baltimore’s Decline
07:10 Henry Kaiser and Freedom’s Forge
09:10 The Ship Built in Under Five Days
10:00 Rebuilding American Steel
11:10 From Shipyards to Starships
12:35 Prometheus and the Torch of Progress
13:35 John Paul Jones: “I Have Not Yet Begun to Fight”

“Moscow has “fully accepted” the US peace proposal put forward at the Anchorage summit, yet Europe derailed the process, Russia’s top diplomat has said..”

• US Folded To EU Pressure on Ukraine – Lavrov (RT)

The US gave in to pressure from the EU, which has openly gloated about undermining the Anchorage understandings and declared them “buried,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. The top diplomat made the remarks on Wednesday while speaking at a press conference following a ministerial meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Lavrov reiterated Moscow’s position that the Anchorage initiative was ultimately derailed by European nations. ”Our conscience is clear, not to mention the fact that we fully accepted the United States’ proposal last August, which was made during the summit… in Alaska,” he stated. It is not our fault that the Americans could not withstand the unprecedented and brazen pressure from Europe, which later proudly declared that it had buried Anchorage.
US President Donald Trump hosted his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, last year, with the two leaders reaching an understanding on how the Ukraine conflict could be settled. While Moscow has portrayed the outcome of the summit as an “agreement,” despite some “nuances” remaining, Washington has repeatedly disputed that characterization. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously said that there was “a proposal in Alaska, but there was no agreement.”
According to Lavrov, the Anchorage understandings were ultimately undermined over the following months by EU and British leaders. During the G7 summit in Evian in June, French President Emmanuel Macron openly declared that Anchorage had been “buried.”
While the US has displayed a declining commitment to the “understandings,” Trump has never explicitly declared the framework dead. Last month, Washington attempted to revive negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, but the process stalled once again amid continued long-range strikes by Moscow and Kiev. According to Lavrov, Russia agreed to a Washington-proposed trilateral meeting with Ukraine, which was expected to be held after the recent Russian parliamentary elections. Kiev, however, actively attempted to disrupt the polls and launched a massive attack while voting was underway.
”We made it clear that, under these circumstances, we want to know what proposals exactly [Vladimir] Zelensky’s negotiators would bring. This is very important to us, and the American side has taken our arguments with understanding,” the minister added.

Make Starlink work.

• Take More of My Money, Elon! (Stephen Green)

Another day, another regulatory approval for Elon Musk to launch more satellites than he has up there already. It’s almost a “dog bites man” item at this point — but only almost. This one has all kinds of cool little angles. “In a regulatory win,” PCMag reported on Tuesday, “SpaceX has secured approval to launch and operate 15,000 next-gen satellites for Starlink Mobile, the company’s service to deliver satellite connectivity to phones.” Satellite smartphones, cool. When you’re outdoors.

The problem with satellite phone service is that the tiny, low-powered antenna in your phone can only barely keep a connection with a sat even in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Put a roof over your head and fuggedaboutit. PJ Media’s own Charlie Martin and I actually discussed this scenario a year or two ago, when Musk first talked about selling cellular service — and the answer was bolted to my roof.
I’m a Starlink customer, and there’s no reason SpaceX’s Starphone* service couldn’t glom onto my WiFi just like my AT&T-provided phone does every time I pull into my garage. *For now the name is Starlink Mobile, but isn’t Starphone both cooler and more in line with the company’s naming conventions? But what happens when I go to my corner bar for my traditional lunch of burger, fries, and martini, and the satellite signal dies the moment I walk in the door?
This is a (mostly) solved problem. Back when Xfinity was still my ISP, the company had courtesy WiFi service seemingly everywhere. It hardly mattered where I was; if I needed WiFi, there was an Xfinity router nearby that used the same login credentials any-and-everywhere. Bad cell service? Hitting your data cap? Just look for the Xfinity router in your phone’s WiFi settings.
The trick — and this is something Xfinity couldn’t do, since they were serving as a replacement for your cell provider — is making the handoff from satellite to WiFi (and back again) so seamless that the user never notices, anywhere in the world.
Here’s where it helps to do what Musk does and think big. Getting businesses to host a Starlink router is no big deal — Xfinity has been doing it for years. Making it portal-less for that seamless transition ought to be a no-brainer, too. It already works at home, and for out-and-about, SpaceX seems to have that problem solved, too. For airlines like United that offer Starlink to their passengers, SpaceX requires that the service be both free and without any login screen.
Installing stuff on airplanes is time-consuming and expensive. Locally, no big deal. Let’s say you own a small bar (a dream of mine since Cheers, honestly), and SpaceX comes along and offers to put a router in your place — at no cost to you — and a neon FREE STARLINK sign to hang in the window. That’s how the company builds out the indoors part of its cellular service in the business world. But residential? Aye, that’s still the rub, because I don’t want my phone to stop working when I go over to my neighbor’s house for drinks, and he isn’t a Starlink user.
And Another Thing: Delta’s real beef with Starlink might not have been due to a personal grudge between CEO Ed Bastian and Musk. Delta reportedly insisted on putting their branding on Musk’s service, along with a mandatory login portal that required fliers to sign up for Delta miles. SpaceX said no, that’s not how we do things, and Delta went off in a huff to Amazon’s rival Leo service — that won’t even be up and running for another two years.
One solution is to set up ground-based repeaters (cellular or WiFi) in dead zones. That’s hardly ideal, of course, but over time, I suspect SpaceX will be able to shrink the dead zones down to virtually nothing for reasons I’m about to reveal. The answer once again turns out to be as obvious as the Starlink transceiver on my roof: Don’t sell the phone; sell the bundle — and watch the dead zones disappear all on their own.
For one low monthly price, SpaceX might sell you high-speed internet service, works-anywhere satellite cellular, and (probably) a brand-new Apple iPhone or Samsung Galaxy (your choice!) every three years. Once SpaceX has Starmind (orbital AI service) up and running (or even before then), an extra $20 or $30 a month gets you all the Grok you can eat.
You get the convenience of one-stop shopping and a phone that works literally anywhere in the world, seamlessly and without friction. SpaceX — and this is where my SPCX shares start doing the happy dance — gets endless subscription revenue. Physically, is it possible?
Yes, and we saw why last week during Starship’s deployment of the first operational Version 3 (V3) Starlink satellites. Those 26 birds increased the throughput of Starlink’s existing constellation of 11,100 satellites by an estimated 2.3%. What that means is, a fully loaded Starship deploying 60 V3s will increase capacity by a little under 5%. Every 20 Starship launches will nearly double Starlink’s current ability to deliver.
That’s less than two months’ worth of Falcon 9 launches, and by one estimate, “Starlink will soon have more bandwidth than the entire terrestrial internet combined.” Who’s going to beat SpaceX on price, particularly with services and hardware sold in a convenient bundle? I’m not saying that a theoretical Starlink/Starmind/Starphone combo would be for everybody, but I am saying…

“The American Experiment, as modified by the white liberals, had failed, and so had the country.”

• The Day Accountability Arrived (Paul Craig Roberts)

The multicultural tower of babel collapsed when the fictional narrative of the US Navy escorting millions of barrels of oil daily exiting the Strait of Hormuz could no longer be maintained. This orchestrated hoax in the Western media had kept the future price of oil below the current price at the pump and provided reassurance that things would soon be better.

When the narrative no longer could be maintained, energy prices shot up taking inflation with them forcing most Americans to make dramatic reductions in their standard of living. The demand for US Treasury debt by foreign central banks dried up, causing a hit to the US dollar’s value that further drove up US inflation, the dumbshit American policymakers having based the US economy on globalism. As so much is imported, the dollar’s decline sent prices sky-high.
The government was unable to fund its budget except by printing money, which further destroyed the exchange value of the US dollar and drove inflation higher in an economy that had so stupidly globalized itself for the benefit of corporate profits and not for the American people. Federal and state support for the underclass dried up. Social security payments became erratic. Looting and mayhem broke out as the black welfare class and 30 million immigrant-invaders fought for survival.
White communities became targets, although many were hand-to-mouth themselves. Being armed, except for the Northeast and California where “gun control” was the religion, white communities organized for defense to protect from the onslaught from The Camp of the Saints, anointed by the insouciant whites themselves as the inheritors of America. The many decades of the white liberals teaching blacks to hate whites, of teaching women to hate men, and of teaching children to mistrust their parents and all authority culminated in the complete collapse of society.
Sexual morality was dead from generations of internet porn teaching young women and men that threesomes and foursomes were the epitome of sexual pleasure and that no one needed a wife or husband when multiple sex partners were at hand. As a nation the United States ceased to exist. It existed as a territory in which various sections were at war with other sections in ongoing violent conflict. White survival was highest in the Southern states whose white populations had comprised the majority of the US military.
The American Experiment, as modified by the white liberals, had failed, and so had the country.

“.. that shared experience has produced sharply different political conclusions among people living in the same region.”

• They Survived October 7. Now They’re Divided Over Who Should Rule Israel (Blade)

For residents of Israel’s Gaza Envelope, the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, was not an abstract national trauma. Communities close to the Gaza border were among the first to come under assault, and residents spent hours locked in safe rooms, hiding from gunmen and rocket fire. Three years later, that shared experience has produced sharply different political conclusions among people living in the same region.

Michal Koren Kariv, a 50-year-old filmmaker from Kibbutz Mefalsim, remembers that morning all too well. As Hamas launched its deadly assault on communities across southern Israel, her family remained inside their home as armed militants reached the area. They spent hours in a protected room without electricity, unsure of what was happening outside.
When the family was finally able to leave, Koren Kariv says she saw devastation on a scale she had never witnessed before. The experience, she says, fundamentally changed her relationship with the state. “I no longer believe anything,” she said. “Simply nothing.”
Accountability is a must
For her, the coming election is largely about the demand for a state commission of inquiry into October 7, an investigation that would establish what went wrong, who knew what and when, and which decisions or institutional failures contributed to the disaster. She says she plans to vote for those who promise to get to the bottom of those failures.
“I believe that whoever was prime minister when the attack occurred must bear political responsibility. Netanyahu was the head back then, so he should have resigned. I am not saying I won’t be voting for a right-wing party. All I am saying is that Netanyahu should not be prime minister.”
Koren Kariv says she has never voted for Netanyahu’s Likud, but she has never been in the so-called “anti-Bibi camp,” simply because she acknowledges the positive things Netanyahu has done for the country. She also recognizes that the current government has invested heavily in rebuilding the southern communities.
Shortly after the attacks, the Israeli government established the Tkuma administration to oversee reconstruction and recovery in communities damaged or evacuated after the massacre. Government figures show a multibillion-shekel reconstruction program covering housing, infrastructure, education, community services, and economic recovery.
Koren Kariv acknowledges that the Gaza Envelope has received substantial investment since the attack, including new construction, educational funding and a stronger military presence. But she draws a distinction between rebuilding communities physically and addressing the political and institutional failures she believes preceded the attack.
“The question here is not simply whether houses have been rebuilt or money has been allocated. I want to know why the country was so unprepared, whether warnings were missed and who should have acted differently. So my conclusion is therefore not that the state has done nothing. Rather, that reconstruction cannot substitute for an investigation into the failures that preceded the attack.”
Tilting towards the right
A few kilometers away, Sami Danieli, a 65-year-old former security officer from the religious moshav of Shibolim near Sderot, drew a very different lesson from October 7.
Unlike many other communities in the Gaza Envelope that experienced direct infiltration by militants, his moshav was relatively protected. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad reached its outskirts but did not enter. Residents nevertheless sheltered as rockets fell, and Danieli says he lost close friends in neighboring communities that bore the brunt of the attack.
Even before October 7, Danieli had voted for National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who supports the expulsion of Palestinians and promotes settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza. The events of October 7 did not weaken that support. They reinforced it.
“If I could vote for Ben Gvir twice, I would do so,” he said. “I don’t believe there can be peace with Hamas, and that’s why Israel needs to take a tougher approach in its security policy.”
Ben-Gvir has said he would pursue a tougher security policy if he were given the defense portfolio following the election. As national security minister, he has already pursued a series of hardline measures towards Palestinians. These include worsening conditions for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, backing legislation imposing the death penalty for people convicted of terrorism, and distributing thousands of firearms to Israelis living in areas considered vulnerable to Palestinian attacks.
Danieli says he supports those measures. He remains firmly behind the right-wing bloc headed by Netanyahu and rejects claims that the current government bears responsibility for Israel’s failure to prevent or decisively end the war.
Instead, he points to anti-government protests and other factors that he believes constrained Israel’s ability to defeat Hamas.
“The anti-government protesters were the ones who weakened the country with their demonstrations. Then, when the war happened, total victory was not achieved partially due to the restrictions imposed by the Americans [under the Biden administration – ed.] and partially because of ammunition shortages.
“Netanyahu’s performance during the war was excellent though. Not very good – it was excellent.” Danieli also gives the government credit for the reconstruction effort in the south.“Government assistance reached the region and funds were provided, but of course there will always be people who will say that this is not enough,” he said.
“I believe that much of the criticism is coming from residents who are politically motivated. Eighty percent of them have a political agenda and this anti-Bibi bias prevents them from seeing the truth. This is why I don’t want the left to come to power. The right-wing must stay and rule,” he added.
Uncertainty prevails
Polling, however, shows that the hopes of Danieli might not materialize.
Reuters’ polling tracker, updated in late September, showed the centrist Yashar party led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot narrowly ahead of Likud in the polling average. The aggregate projected 66 seats for parties opposed to Netanyahu and 48 for parties supporting him, while also noting that the anti-Netanyahu camp did not have an obvious coalition path to the 61-seat threshold.
Individual polls by Israeli television channels and news outlets have produced different results. A Kan survey reported in late September put Yashar at 23 seats and Likud at 21, with the two main blocs each projected at 52 mandates.
A Times of Israel poll published on October 1 likewise found Netanyahu’s bloc ahead but still short of the 61 seats required to form a government on its own. Likud and Yashar were tied for first place among individual parties.Israel uses nationwide proportional representation. Parties must pass a 3.25% electoral threshold to enter the Knesset, and a governing coalition requires the support of at least 61 of the parliament’s 120 members.
For the residents of the Gaza Envelope, however, the numbers on a polling chart tell only part of the story. They lived through the same morning, heard the same rockets and waited behind the same locked doors for help to arrive. Yet, three years later, their memories of October 7 have taken them in opposite political directions.
Koren Kariv sees the election as a test of accountability, a chance to establish why the state failed and who should answer for it. Danieli sees it as a test of resolve, an argument for maintaining the political course he believes offers the strongest security.
Three years on, the communities closest to Gaza are no longer simply asking how they survived October 7. They are asking what the country should become because of it. And when they enter the voting booth, those two questions will lead them to very different answers.

“..the Association of Human Mathematics..”

• Mathematicians Declare War on AI — Taxpayers Foot the Bill (Scott Pinsker)

The frontrunner for the most arrogant, tone-deaf remark of 2026 comes from the Association of Human Mathematics (AHM). Upon OpenAI’s announcement that its model had solved 90 of math’s 500 hardest open problems, AHM released a furious denunciation: “Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done.” Yeah? So what? Who cares what they asked for? Mathematicians study math — they don’t own it.

Because the opposite is true: Most of them work for us. More than half of all U.S. mathematicians are directly employed by the federal government. Another 12% are paid by colleges. Just 18% are employed in aerospace, manufacturing, and professional services! To quote Gen X philosopher Alanis Morissette, “Isn’t it ironic?” By the numbers, mathematics is one of our country’s most heavily subsidized industries. Only a small sliver of its jobs are in the private sector. The discipline is utterly incapable of paying for itself.
So mathematicians survive by suckling the government teat.That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Hey, government waste is an open secret, but some government investments pay off. (Really!) Perhaps mathematics will be one of them. The mathematicians certainly think so. Here’s a Reddit thread on the topic:
For decades, the case for funding math research was simple: it pays off for you, society, and everyone.
1984, the US “David Report” (the landmark math funding report): “the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.” Federal math research funding rose 34%.
1992, International Mathematical Union (IMU): one of its official aims was “Mathematics, keys for Development.”
1997, NSF: “broader impacts,” meaning benefit to society, became a required criterion for every grant proposal.
2012, UK: a Deloitte study commissioned by the research council credited math research with about 16% of UK economic output and 2.8M jobs.
2018, UK Bond Review: math is “arguably the single most pervasive and powerful engine of innovation.” A £300M government pledge followed in 2020.
2021, IMU/UNESCO: the International Day of Mathematics theme was “Mathematics for a Better World.”

So maybe mathematics is worth the taxpayers’ investment. Maybe, as famed “mental calculator” Shakuntala Devi said, “Without mathematics, there’s nothing you can do. Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers.” Maybe mathematics is key to maximizing not just human progress — but mastering all the mysteries of the universe!
If so, why are the mathematicians’ undies in a trefoil knot over OpenAI answering 90 unsolved math problems? Wouldn’t you assume they’d be excited — because progress is progress, and advancing knowledge is a good thing? Who cares if the answers came from an 11-year-old whiz kid, a tenured MIT professor, or ChatGPT? Would it matter if Einstein’s revelations came to him in a lab — or in a dream?
Because the point of the mission isn’t the journey. Professional mathematicians may crave a rollicking, number-crunching adventure — replete with debates, published papers, and dueling personalities — but that’s not why taxpayers are underwriting their profession. We’re in it for the destination: More knowledge. Superior insights. New data. Useful information. Faster breakthroughs. And a better, smarter, more prosperous tomorrow.
This is why AHM’s public statement on OpenAI was so eye-opening: Yesterday, on October 6th, 2026, OpenAI — which is currently defending lawsuits against accusations of illegal plagiarism, copyright infringement, and trademark dilution — released a repository of manuscripts purporting to contain solutions to a number of high-profile problems in mathematics.
Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done. The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, from whom OpenAI has claimed to derive its legitimacy, opened their initial advisory statement by saying that frontier AI corporations should not test advanced mathematical problems on internal models. In ignoring the central premise of the Advisory Group’s position, OpenAI has indicated total disregard for the norms of scientific research — norms that guarantee that mathematics remains trustworthy, ethically researched, and in the public interest.
Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress that is informed by history and field-specific considerations. We reject OpenAI’s assertion that this release advances our subject, and we urge mathematicians and the public to view the value of this publication model with due skepticism. Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power. We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centers human understanding.
AI is a tool. It produces data and information. What we do with the data and information is up to us. If mathematicians don’t want to use this tool, fine. That’s between them and their employer. (Seems pretty self-defeating to spurn a helpful tool, but whatevs. To each their own.) But if the mathematician is being bankrolled by American taxpayers, it’s perfectly legitimate for us to insist they use the best possible tools, because we have a vested interest in maximizing our investment.
Otherwise, we’re wasting money.

Rubio’s tour took him to Athens yesterday.

“The United States is in favor of the Greek-Israeli defense relationship, Marco Rubio tells Kathimerini. ‘We view that as a positive – obviously for the region – and I think the challenge is not just maintaining a relationship with Israel, but how do you also maintain good relations with other countries in the Middle East, whose relationship with Israel may not be as positive. We face the same challenge, obviously, and we navigate it,’ the US secretary of state says.”

• ‘US and Greek Interests Overlap’: Marco Rubio (Kathimerini)

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking to Kathimerini in an exclusive interview during his visit to Athens on Wednesday, lays out the priorities shaping Washington’s approach to the most pressing issues in Greece’s neighborhood, from Greek-Turkish relations and Iran to defense, Ukraine, the Strait of Hormuz and energy.

Why are you in Greece now?
I don’t know if there is a reason for now. We should have been here as soon as we could. I don’t travel to a country unless the ambassadors are in place, so that was part of it, and I think it worked for our schedule. I do think this relationship is deep and enduring. We had opportunities to interact with the prime minister and the foreign minister at global gatherings in the past, and hosted them bilaterally and in the US. I hope we come back many times because US-Greek relations are something that I have been very involved in, going back to my time as a senator – though I didn’t get to visit as a senator – and one we continue to build on.
The US supports a new energy architecture in the area with the Vertical Corridor and the Great Sea Interconnector electricity cable. Is the US going to support the interconnector project in the Aegean, which faces a lot of irritants and obstacles?
If there is anything that has become obvious over the last few months, it is that we need to diversify the way the world gets its energy. I say that if the world has learned anything over the past five years, it is that we need to be able to do that. The Russia-Ukraine war reminds us of that, as is what is happening in Hormuz and potentially in the Red Sea with the Houthis. We need to diversify. Our supply chains are running to some of the most volatile areas of the planet. So this is a very important priority for us and one more example of how US and Greek interests overlap. So, we are very committed to it.
We understand there are some potential impediments, there are some things standing in the way, and we intend to use our diplomatic efforts to remind all parties how important this is to us and why this matters. And I hope to find resolutions. As I said in the press conference, some of these issues are obviously not best resolved through media or communiques; they are best done privately and quietly within the diplomatic realm, but this is very important as we need to prioritize engagements from multiple countries.
President Trump has a personal relationship with Turkish President Erdogan. You are very involved in the area. Are we going to see any mediation on your side on this?
Well, I always sort of avoid discussing sensitive topics in the media because it only makes them harder to solve. That said, we engage with Turkey all the time. They are a member of NATO, and they have obviously been engaged in a number of other issues. For example, they have hosted talks in the past with Russia and Ukraine. It’s a relationship we have invested in as well; maybe that investment will help us in regard to these conversations. On issues like these, if you want to put out statements, you can put out statements, but if you want to get a resolution, they are often best dealt with within the confines of direct private conversations. That’s how diplomacy often works best.
One of the big issues, another sensitive issue, is whether Turkey is going to get the F-35s. You introduced the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) bill as senator. What’s your assessment now?
‘To me, [a Greek-Turkish crisis] would be unimaginable. It wouldn’t be good for either Turkey or Greece, but it also wouldn’t be good for the United States. It is something we could never allow to happen’
Well, the status of that is the following: Number one, [Turkey] is a member of NATO. Number two, the president expressed the desire, if possible, to provide them, as they have paid for a few of them already. Obviously, these planes are many, many years away from delivery, but there are two that have already been paid for. But there is a law that was passed by the United States Congress. There’s a law, and there’s also a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act that places very strict conditions, so until those conditions are met, frankly, that sale can’t happen. \
And that’s been conveyed to the Turkish side. They’re aware of it; I think they’re trying to find answers for it. It revolves around the S-400 system. So, as of now, that issue hasn’t been resolved, and legally we can’t make that transfer until that is resolved. Perhaps it will be resolved – and there are various options – but as of right now, it hasn’t been resolved.
Greece has requested some specific weapons for its F-35s, some of the same ammunition that Israel is getting. Is there any response you can give on that now?
There is no formal response. It’s under strong consideration. Obviously, a country like Greece is an important ally of ours from a defense standpoint. We have a lot of interoperability already when it comes to defensive posture – and Greece adopted a very strong defensive posture when our presence in the region was being threatened. So, they’ll be given strong consideration in that regard. Obviously, that’s a decision that’s made through an interagency process in our own system. Ultimately, the decision is up to the president, but we obviously want to get input from the Department of War as well.

2003 https://t.co/IadE3HjGka
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 8, 2026

"I want to live long enough to see the mass driver on the Moon, because that is going to be incredibly epic"

The Moon is going to become our first industrial outpost beyond Earth

Build the SI satellites on the Moon using lunar resources, then launch them into deep space with an…
— X Freeze (@XFreeze) October 8, 2026

LEFT: Tim Burchett says if anyone leaks where the money goes when The Pentagon fails audits, they’d be murdered

RIGHT: Elon Musk says if he were to reveal the real ways Congress gets rich, its “going to get me assassinated”

So expose money laundering or fraud and you get killed pic.twitter.com/c9rQvwP4NE
— Deep Leaks (@DeepLeaksHQ) October 7, 2026

https:/twitter.com/GuntherEagleman/status/2107883142266634261?s=20

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Debt Rattle October 5 2026

Oct 052026

October 5, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:09 am Finance Tagged with: AI, Bessent, Christians, Condoleezza Rice, Jay Clayton, Modi, October 7, Schumer, SI, social science, socialism 58 Responses »

Paul Cézanne The Card Players 1895

• Trump Taps Intelligence Chief Jay Clayton As AI Czar (ZH)

• The Architecture Is Credit : Is There a Non-War Use of AI? (Fabio Vighi)

• Trump Strategy Against Fuel Costs and Overall America-First Economy (CTH)

• Scott Bessent Gives Lengthy Outline of His Role (CTH)

• “First Time In History”: Bessent Says Iran Faces Zero Oil Revenue (ZH)

• France Closes 400 Schools, Rioters Plan Major Escalation Oct 6 and 7 (CTH)

• Schumer Says He’ll Seek 6th Straight Term As Senate Democratic Leader (JTN)

• 84% of Gen Z Democrats Back Socialism: Poll (Pedro Rodriguez)

• Modi Has ‘Very Good Ideas’ To End Ukraine Conflict – Putin (RT)

• NATO Chief Says ‘Almost Sure’ Is Enough To Blame Russia (RT)

• Christians Vanish From the Middle East — Except From Israel (Salgado)

• ‘Everyone Knows’ Kiev Is Embezzling Western Aid – Ex-Polish PM (RT)

• Do “News Reports” Have Any Value? (Paul Craig Roberts)

• Why So Many Social Science Claims Are False (Ferguson)

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2106805970428903882?s=20 https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2106374912998793246?s=20 https://twitter.com/DeepLeaksHQ/status/2106378973903278342?s=20 https://twitter.com/Q_TheStormRider/status/2106333726246666531?s=20

No Tulsi return, as Sundance dreamed of: “Clayton will hold both jobs, keeping the DNI post ..”

Curious name pops up: “Sacks is one of two outside advisers to the force, along with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.”

Trump talked a lot to Elon Musk before deciding this.

• Trump Taps Intelligence Chief Jay Clayton As AI Czar (ZH)

President Trump on Sunday named Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton the White House’s AI czar. Clayton will hold both jobs, keeping the DNI post while spearheading the administration’s AI strategy.

Trump announced the move on Truth Social, saying the new “Super Intelligence Force” will “ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence.” Its vice chairs are FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, OPM Director Scott Kupor and Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael. Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also sit on it, and it reports to Trump and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
The force has 120 days to report on the risks and opportunities of the technology and to recommend ways to strengthen the government’s response. Its charter, according to Implicator, calls for “preventing overregulation and regulatory capture that would stifle innovation and competition.”
Clayton takes a job last held by David Sacks, who stepped down as White House AI and crypto czar in March and now co-chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Sacks is one of two outside advisers to the force, along with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Bessent had been mentioned for the job until Trump ruled it out on Sept. 25. “Scott Bessent will not be going to be Super Intelligence (SI) Czar,” Trump wrote. “Number One, he doesn’t want to. Number Two, he’s doing such a great job at Treasury, and that’s where I want to keep him! Why would I ever make such a change? Just more Fake News!” Axios reported Friday that Trump was expected to pick Clayton instead, and Trump has described Clayton as “a good man” for the role.

*TRUMP WARMS TO JAY CLAYTON AS AI CZAR: AXIOS
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 29, 2026

The pick comes three weeks after a run of statements on AI safety. On Sept. 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier” that proposed embedded third-party evaluators inside AI labs. The next day, Obama urged Democrats to have a “clear plan” for AI safeguards, and Sacks backed a self-imposed slowdown by the labs while rejecting a “cartel” framework for it, according to the Washington Examiner.
Trump responded on Sept. 14 with a Truth Social post: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” He also took aim at Amodei by name:
“The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ and will continue to do so!” He added: “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!”
Ten days later, Trump rebranded AI as “super intelligence” at the UN General Assembly and rejected “any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control” it. Four days after that, he hosted Amodei for dinner at the White House. The next day, Amodei, Elon Musk, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman were among the signers of a voluntary accord pledging “robust” controls on their models and independent audits. Trump called it “morally binding.”
Clayton, who sidestepped questions about taking the job in a CNBC interview on Sept. 30, called super intelligence “a national security issue” and questioned what an AI pause would even mean while other countries keep building. At his July 15 confirmation hearing, the former SEC chairman and US attorney for the Southern District of New York said AI “is not only an opportunity but a threat.” He added: “When something is both an opportunity and a threat, you better get your arms around it.”

Sent to me by a reader. What do you think? Is war needed to finance AI/SI?

• The Architecture Is Credit : Is There a Non-War Use of AI? (Fabio Vighi)

The “Rogue AI Alibi” as Credit’s Exculpatory Device

The rogue-agent narrative performs a further ideological task: it recodes the effects of a credit-driven technological buildout as technical accidents. If AI systems are said to act autonomously, the market disruptions, logistical failures, and escalations they facilitate can be treated as malfunctions rather than as consequences of a system designed around expansion, securitisation, and state-backed risk transfer. The sandbox is therefore more than a testing environment: it is an alibi, a way of making a system appear to have escaped human design precisely when its institutional function is most visible.
This is fetishism in its purest form. The social relation — credit’s need for a permanent frontier — appears as a property of the thing itself. The AI is rogue; the compulsion is overlooked; no one is responsible because no one intended it. Yet someone built and funded it, and someone profits from it. The structure does its work precisely by obfuscating the logic that requires it, by presenting itself as inevitable, neutral, technical, when in fact it is historical, partisan, financial.
The question that follows from all this is unavoidable and no doubt difficult to answer: is there a use of AI that is not war-related? Is there a use of AI outside credit-addicted, ultra-financialised capitalism? Under present conditions, there doesn’t seem to be any such use. This is not because AI is inherently military, but because the scale of AI deployment required to justify its capital costs demands a state-backed threat environment.
AI’s civilian applications (language models, image generators, recommendation systems, etc.) are real but insufficient: they do not absorb or validate the amount of credit now being mobilised around the AI buildout. What military and security procurement offers is a state-backed demand regime capable of underwriting losses, legitimising excess capacity, and converting speculative infrastructure into strategic necessity. The civilian (including educational) uses, then, increasingly function as the public-facing justification, while the military uses are the foundation. The rhetoric of democratisation is the mask, while the reality of procurement is the engine.
This does not mean AI is doomed to serve war. It means that AI’s current form is determined by the rationale of credit capital. A different form of AI — one developed and deployed according to different priorities — is conceivable and desirable. But it would require a different mode of production and form of social organisation. It would require that technological development be decoupled from the addiction to credit. In other words, it would require a world outside capitalism.
That is less a utopian aside than the logical conclusion of the analysis. If the compulsion the article names is real, then the only way to break the compulsion is to dismantle the social logic that reproduces it. To change what technology is for, to subordinate it to something other than the endless expansion of value, to make it answerable to needs that cannot be priced, to risks that cannot be underwritten, to futures that cannot be collateralised.
From Compulsion to Contradiction
The article closes with Hemingway: “Gradually, then suddenly.” The United States became addicted to Israeli tech slowly, then suddenly, and now indefinitely. One might put it differently: the United States was already mired in credit’s own compulsion to repeat. Naming this engine, of course, does not resolve anything. However, it changes what we are looking at. It shifts the question from “how do we decouple from Israel?” to “how do we decouple from the logic that makes Israel indispensable?” It changes the question from “how do we make AI safe?” to “how do we make technology answerable to something other than credit?”
Those are harder questions. But they are the right ones. And they are the ones the article’s own analysis, followed to its conclusion, demands: the ones that refuse the comfort of structural fatalism or moralistic blaming and insist instead on the historical specificity of the arrangement, the contingency of the frontier, the possibility — however distant — of a different architecture and a different world.

Multiple topics.

• Trump Strategy Against Fuel Costs and Overall America-First Economy (CTH)

Barbara Boyd opens with diesel: as Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries tighten the world’s supply, President Trump threatened to halt U.S. diesel exports unless Europe released its emergency stocks, and the G7 agreed to release 100 million barrels. She presents it as the opening move of a 35-day economic offensive running into the midterms.

The week of action includes Trump’s visit to the Peterbilt truck plant in Denton, Texas, where employee Sarah Renshaw credited tariffs for 1,000 new jobs; his Oklahoma rally; a White House luncheon with tech leaders on superintelligence; what the White House calls the largest steel plant ever built in the United States, coming to Iowa; Vice President Vance at the groundbreaking of Saronic’s Port Alpha shipyard in Brownsville, Texas; and South Korea’s plans for an Alaska LNG pipeline, a 6-gigawatt power plant in Texas and eight nuclear reactors.
On affordability, the episode walks through price increases under Biden (energy up 33% from January 2021 to January 2025), Vice President Vance on the inflation crisis he says the administration inherited, refining capacity, housing regulation and immigration, Secretary Kennedy at the MAHA Summit on AI giving every patient a better-informed second opinion, and the White House fraud task force’s crackdown on Obamacare enrollments. It closes with Michael Shellenberger’s account of the student riots in France, French intelligence tying the movement to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (LFI), and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on a new golden age of space exploration. WATCH:

He’s become Trump’s Sunday talk show man.

• Scott Bessent Gives Lengthy Outline of His Role (CTH)

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appears for an interview with Axios co-founder Mike Allen. The wide-ranging conversation covered the U.S. economy, the war in Iran and the Trump administration’s approach to AI.

Secretary Bessent responds to Americans’ frustration with the cost of living; explains why he doesn’t think the AI boom is a repeat of the dot-com bubble and argues that AI leaders warning about losing control should slow down. Bessent also discusses possible U.S-China cooperation on AI risks, Treasury’s economic pressure campaign against Iran, the bond market, Trump Accounts and his clashes inside the administration. WATCH:

“..barrels out of the Strait: U.S. about 1.1 billion, Iran zero..”

• “First Time In History”: Bessent Says Iran Faces Zero Oil Revenue (ZH)

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joined Mike Allen for a new episode of “The Axios Show,” published Saturday morning. Bessent spoke about the Iran war’s effect on the cost of living for US consumers and his “I am the house” comment early last month, which warned anyone betting against the Treasury’s defense of the long end of the market.

Beyond the broader global bond rout, his comments on the Strait of Hormuz added color to President Trump’s economic stranglehold on Tehran. “They are isolating them economically like this never happened before. You know, right now, the score: barrels out of the Strait: U.S. about 1.1 billion, Iran zero,” Bessent told Allen.Bessent continued, “For the first time in history, they, since they started pumping oil, they will have no oil on the water this week. They will have no revenue.”

Bessent on Iran:

For the first time in history, since they started pumping oil, they will have no oil on the water this week.

They will have no revenues. pic.twitter.com/PIrHwUCG4q
— Clash Report (@clashreport) October 3, 2026

Separately, last week, Goldman analysts Yulia Zhestkova Grigsby, Alexandra Paulus, and Daan Struyven told clients that a “divergence between the fall of Iranian exports and the rise of exports of other Persian Gulf producers” was underway. The Goldman energy experts estimated that “dark exports” have helped boost Persian Gulf oil exports to 23.3 million barrels a day over the past week, back to prewar levels.
Also last week, Bloomberg News reported that Iran’s crude loadings crashed to zero in August from around 250,000 barrels per day.Data providers Kpler and Vortexa also recorded zero crude loadings last month.

The collapse in Iranian crude loadings suggests the US naval blockade is constraining Tehran’s export options, while recovering flows from other Gulf producers point to eroded Iranian leverage over the strait. If sustained, Tehran’s oil revenues would plunge, pressuring the regime to make a deal.

“Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023, which killed about 1,200 people and involved mass shootings, hostage- taking, rapes and horrific assaults on civilian communities.”

• France Closes 400 Schools, Rioters Plan Major Escalation Oct 6 and 7 (CTH)

There’s generally a strategy to the madness; you just have to wait until it starts to become visible. The anniversary of October 7, 2023, massacre is right around the corner. Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023, which killed about 1,200 people and involved mass shootings, hostage- taking, rapes and horrific assaults on civilian communities. As noted in the end of this article about the French protests, student organizations are nevertheless calling for protests to continue, with the movement now looking towards Tuesday’s National Day of Action.

EUROPE – Around 400 of France’s 3,700 secondary schools were closed on Friday on the orders of police prefects, with many schools switching to online lessons. Education Minister Edouard Geffray urged parents to intervene, warning that young people were putting themselves at risk. “Children are in danger on the streets,” he told BFMTV. “Parents must, quite clearly, take action and tell their children not to go [to the blockades].” The protests began over staffing, funding and school conditions and have spread rapidly across the country.
The Interior Ministry said 1,027 secondary schools were affected on Thursday, including 222 that were blockaded. Around 30 university campuses were also blocked. It said 1,949 people were arrested on Thursday alone, mainly in connection with violence, unlawful gatherings and attacks on people in positions of authority. (read more)

“..regardless of midterm results..”

Prolonged because of great successes?!

• Schumer Says He’ll Seek 6th Straight Term As Senate Democratic Leader (JTN)

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer says he’ll seek another term as Senate Democratic leader regardless of whether his party or Republican control of the upper chamber after the Nov. 3 elections. “I am running for reelection for leader. Period,” Schumer told Politico Wednesday after senators cast final votes and left Washington until after the midterms. The 75-year-old senator also told Punchbowl News that he will seek a sixth straight term.

Yes,” he said. “And I’m looking forward to getting things done for the American people.” However, he declined to say whether he plans on seeking 2028 reelection. Though Schumer also told reporters that Democrats are leaving town with “wind in their sails,” regarding midterm voting momentum, he acknowledged the GOP has an “almost obscene” funding advantage.

Seems crazy.

• 84% of Gen Z Democrats Back Socialism: Poll (Pedro Rodriguez)

A groundbreaking new poll conducted ahead of November’s midterm elections has uncovered that over 30% of Americans have a favorable view of socialism. According to the OnMessage poll, which surveyed 800 American voters from July 12-16, 35% of respondents identified as Democrats, 84% of whom identified as Gen Z. “Embracing socialism is no longer a fringe talking point for Democratic voters. Our data shows that a majority of Democrats of all ages hold favorable views of socialism, including 84% of Gen Z Democrats,” Henry Parkhurst, the OnMessage pollster who carried out the survey, told the Daily Signal.

The findings confirm that the Democratic Party’s claim that socialism is a “fringe issue” is no longer true, and that socialism has spread into the party’s core. “While the national Democratic Party may claim to be divided on how far they’re willing to lean into socialism, their voters clearly show they’re encouraging the party to move in that direction,” Parkhurst added. The survey came months after the Democratic Socialists of America touted a historic increase in membership, coupled with the rise of DSA-affiliated candidates and officials across the country.
Now, in the next Congress, at least five new DSA members will be sworn into the House of Representatives, adding to the growing number of socialist officials like Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. Senate candidates Angie Nixon in Florida and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan also have a fair shot at winning their races this November. OnMessage revealed the findings after conducting text-to-web interviews and recording historic respondent turnout.
The survey also oversampled voters under 45, resulting in approximately 600 Gen Z and Millennial voters for in-depth analysis. The margin of error for this survey is +/- 3.5%.

“The Russian president said the Indian PM regularly raises the need for a peaceful settlement and seeks mutually acceptable solutions..”

• Modi Has ‘Very Good Ideas’ To End Ukraine Conflict – Putin (RT)

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has “very good ideas” for ending the Ukraine conflict and has repeatedly pressed for its peaceful settlement, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. Modi has refused to take sides in the conflict, despite pressure from the West to isolate Russia. This neutrality has given India the room to discuss the need for a peaceful end to the conflict with both Moscow and Kiev.

Putin told the annual Valdai Discussion Club meeting on Thursday that Modi raises the Ukraine conflict at every meeting between them, despite their close personal relationship, and has proposed ideas aimed at finding mutually acceptable solutions. He thanked Modi for those efforts but did not disclose details of the proposals. The Russian leader briefed Modi on the ongoing peace initiatives when they met on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit in New Delhi last month, where the Indian prime minister reiterated his call for dialogue and diplomacy and said India stood ready to assist peace efforts.
At the earlier Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Modi told Putin, “We need to move from endless war to an end to the war.” Moscow, too, has welcomed New Delhi’s efforts at peace. Ahead of the BRICS Summit, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia appreciates Indian initiatives to help end the conflict.
In an August interview with Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, Modi said both Putin and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky had shared their perspectives on the conflict with him. Putin said last week that proposals for a settlement remained on the table, although Moscow would have to assess them against its own interests. Meanwhile, Washington has proposed a trilateral meeting with Russia and Ukraine in the United Arab Emirates, Zelensky said last week. The proposed talks would take place at a technical level, but a date has yet to be agreed. The Kremlin said such a meeting could take place soon.

“Mark Rutte expressed support for countries that try to pin almost any incident on Moscow..”

• NATO Chief Says ‘Almost Sure’ Is Enough To Blame Russia (RT)

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has urged member states to blame any incident they find suspicious on Russia even if they lack irrefutable evidence. He also hailed a recent accusation made by Estonia against its eastern neighbor and called on other nations to follow suit. Speaking at a joint press conference with Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevicius this week, Rutte encouraged a public blame game over what he called “malign grey zone activities” routinely attributed to Russia by NATO members.

“You have heard the Supreme Allied Commander yesterday saying, ‘Hey, when able, when you are sure it is the Russians, or almost sure it is the Russians, attribute it to the Russians’ – exactly like Estonia did today. I applaud it,” Rutte said. On Monday, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Alexus Grynkewich described publicly attributing these types of incidents to Russia as a “deterrent” against the supposed “Russian threat” during remarks before a European Parliament committee.
Rutte has been known for his staunch anti-Russian position, as well as his ardent support for Kiev in the conflict with Moscow. Last week, he offered to help “protect the United States from threats of Russia” while speaking at a Chicago Council on Global Affairs event in Iowa. During his joint press conference with Sinkevicius, he also maintained that the bloc should be doing “even more for Ukraine, and not less.”
Moscow has dismissed the claims of NATO members regarding the alleged ‘Russian threat’ as “nonsense” and maintained that it has no intention of attacking any member states. It has warned that NATO’s own belligerent rhetoric and military buildup, as well as the surge in NATO military activity along Russia’s western borders could put the bloc on a collision course with Moscow.

Everywhere.

• Christians Vanish From the Middle East — Except From Israel (Salgado)

Across the Middle East, Islamic regimes or terrorist groups are stamping out Christian communities and Christian influence from cities that appeared in the Bible. There is one exception: the democratic Jewish nation of Israel.

Between the Islamic civil war in Syria and the current dictatorship under the genocidal Syrian President Abu Mohammad al-Golani (also known as Ahmed al-Sharaa) and his terrorist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the Christian population of Syria has almost vanished. Within living memory, Lebanon was Christian; now it is mostly Muslim. In Iran and Iraq, ancient communities of Christians have shrunk almost to nonexistence. In Turkey, where Constantinople was once a glory of the Christian world, the Muslims have stolen Christian heritage and Christian lands.
In Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and numerous other countries in the Middle East, Christians have disappeared or are barely hanging on. Gaza’s and Bethlehem’s Christian populations have dropped under Palestinian Authority control. This is the legacy of Islamic takeover. Israel stands out in the Middle East because its Christian population is actually growing. Christians can visit the holiest sites of our religion because of the Israeli government.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, 2023. Have a blessed Holy Thursday pic.twitter.com/Xro6kCdfD7
— Catherine Salgado (@CatSalgado32) April 2, 2026

Israel’s Foreign Ministry shared an article in August investigating the phenomenon of the Christian population shrinking everywhere in the Middle East except Israel. “Terrorism and regional conflicts, persecution, extremism and political instability have dramatically induced emigration and reduced historic Christian communities across much of the region,” the ministry explained. “While Christians made up about 14% of the total population across the wider Middle East region (from Egypt to Iran) 120 years ago, today Christians account for just 3% of the Middle East’s population and the erosion continues even more intensely.”

From the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Mary of the Resurrection in Abu Ghosh, in Israel’s Judean Hills, we wish Christians around the world a peaceful Sunday.

The abbey played an important role in the revival of Hebrew-speaking Catholic life in Israel through Abbot… pic.twitter.com/LqaARhxZF0
— Israel ישראל (@Israel) July 26, 2026

The Israeli Foreign Ministry then provided some statistics on a few countries: Lebanon, established under the French Mandate as a state in which Christians, particularly Maronites, would play a leading political role, has undergone a serious demographic change. Christians now comprise approximately 28% of the population, while Muslims account for roughly 68%. Before Syria’s 2011 civil war began, around 1.5 million Christians, roughly 10% of the population, lived throughout the country. Recent estimates suggest that only one third or 450,000 remain.
In Iraq, one of Christianity’s oldest continuous communities has suffered an even steeper decline, falling from approximately 1.5 million before 2003 to fewer than 150,000 today. That is the legacy of Islamic conquest. In contrast, the Jewish reclamation of ancient Israel from the Arab colonizers was a boon for Christians, too. Israel protects both Jews and Christians from the dozens of hostile Muslim countries across North Africa and the Middle East. On Easter, thousands gather inside Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre for the Holy Fire ceremony.
Every December, Christmas fills the streets of Nazareth with worshippers and pilgrims from around the world. Throughout the year, believers from every continent are baptized in the waters of the Jordan River, renewing a tradition that stretches back to the baptism of Jesus.These are not museums, they are living communities. Across much of the Middle East, churches have watched their congregations shrink. In Israel, churches remain filled with worshippers. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, approximately 184,200 Christians now live in Israel, with the community continuing to grow through natural increase.
Some Christians will talk about how much better it would be if Christians were in charge of Israel. Leaving aside the fact that God promised Israel as a perpetual possession to the Israelites from the river to the sea (Joshua 1:4, Genesis 17:8), this is, practically speaking, a terrible idea. Just look at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where control is divided between multiple different factions of Christianity, including Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and Armenians. They never stop fighting with each other, and sometimes the Israeli government has to intervene. I am Catholic, but I acknowledge that the current Vatican would never have the determination against terrorism that the Israeli government has to have. It is actually better for Christians to have Jews in charge of Israel.

Christians have called the Middle East home for thousands of years. Their future here matters. ✝️

As ancient Christian communities across the region shrink, @GeorgeDeek shares why he believes Israel tells a different story, and why it’s one he is proud to represent.

Swipe… pic.twitter.com/dpFhDrOeGX
— Israel ישראל (@Israel) August 11, 2026

And leaving aside a few random and extremely over-reported altercations between Orthodox Jews and Christians, the main thing Christians in Israel really need to fear is Islamic violence. Read here about an Arab Christian in Israel afraid of Muslim retaliation. And that is a problem that Western nations fuel by constantly siding with and funding the Palestinian terrorists who keep encroaching on more and more Israeli land. If Israel kicked all the Palestinians out of Gaza, Judea, and Samaria, a lot of these problems would dissipate.
Israeli Jews have just as much to fear from Muslim terrorism, if not even more, than Israeli Christians do. And only the Israeli government stands against the unending Islamic terrorism that Middle Eastern Christians face.

“Leszek Miller has called for suspending assistance to Ukraine until it accounts for previously supplied weaponry and funds..”

• ‘Everyone Knows’ Kiev Is Embezzling Western Aid – Ex-Polish PM (RT)

Former Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller

Ukrainian officials are embezzling foreign financial aid, former Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller has said, adding that Kiev’s backers are well aware of the corruption but prefer not to ask questions.Speaking on the ‘Jankowski Kontra’ podcast on Polsat News on Saturday, Miller called for suspending aid to Ukraine until Kiev accounts for previously supplied weapons and funds.

“Nobody’s asking what happened to the 300 tanks we sent in the first phase. What happened to the heavy equipment, the lighter equipment… Nobody’s asking what happened to the billions of euros we donated. Mr. Zelensky simply comes and says, ‘Give it’, and we give it,” Miller stated. Asked whether he suspected that funds transferred to Ukraine were being embezzled, Miller replied: “Of course, everyone knows it.”The veteran politician argued that Warsaw should demand an accounting of how its assistance has been used and halt further support if Kiev fails to provide one.
“This is a fundamental issue: I’ll lend you the money, but give me a report on what you did with the previous installment,” Miller stated. “Without that help, there is no Ukraine… But we are not a country that is overflowing with wealth… We have obligations to our own citizens, and we cannot simply throw away money and equipment indiscriminately.”
Poland has been one of Kiev’s staunchest backers in its conflict with Russia, pouring billions into military, financial and humanitarian aid while serving as a crucial hub for Western supplies. Yet relations have increasingly soured over Kiev’s honoring of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators linked to the World War II-era Volhynia massacres, in which UPA militants, linked to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), killed at least 100,000 ethnic Poles.
Warsaw recognizes the killings as genocide, while Kiev honors figures including OUN leader Stepan Bandera. Tensions flared again this year after Zelensky bestowed the title ‘Heroes of the UPA’ on the Ukrainian Special Operations Center North military unit. In the aftermath, Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped him of the country’s highest honor, politicians on both sides renounced state decorations, and Warsaw threatened to obstruct Ukraine’s EU accession.
Relations have also been strained by mounting opposition to Ukrainian refugees. A July CBOS survey found that 52% of Poles now opposed accepting them, against 42% in favor – a sharp reversal from the overwhelming support seen after Kiev’s conflict with Moscow escalated in 2022. Tensions deepened earlier this month after a 31-year-old Ukrainian man stabbed five people at a Benedictine abbey in Jaroslaw, killing a priest.
Poland is also not alone in questioning funding for Kiev. Despite receiving billions in Western assistance over the past four years, Ukraine faces a severe cash squeeze and has been pressing European backers for more money. But a string of high-level graft scandals has heightened scrutiny in Brussels, the largest of which centers on an alleged $100 million kickback scheme at state nuclear operator Energoatom, which was reportedly led by Timur Mindich, a former business partner of Vladimir Zelensky.
Western-backed investigators have uncovered multiple other graft schemes involving Ukrainian officials, including one reported earlier this month in which they allegedly embezzled more than $3 million through the delivery of used Soviet-made metro cars donated by Poland.Against that backdrop, the EU this week rebuffed Kiev’s bid to fast-track its latest €90 billion support loan, making clear that further funds depend on Ukraine delivering promised anti-corruption and governance reforms.

PCR genuinely doesn’t seem to know why the US is in Iran. He thinks it’s for Hormuz.

• Do “News Reports” Have Any Value? (Paul Craig Roberts)

I have come to the conclusion that journalism in the West has been replaced by hired narratives and that reporters report the narrative that they are hired to tell. It is a new form of vanity press in which interest groups hire a propaganda service to market their agenda.

I will present a current example. On September 28 US Central Command denied that Iran had control of the Strait of Hormuz. Central Command said the US sank the Iranian Navy and that “thousands of ships have passed through freely along with more than 1 billion barrels of oil just over the past few months.”
The previous day Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury said on Fox News that the Strait of Hormuz was open–except to Iranian oil “which we are not letting out”–and that 15-22 millions of barrels of oil are passing through the strait daily. In other words, the energy crisis is over and has been according to US Central Command during “the past few months” while we have had an energy crisis..
The London Daily Telegraph, once a respectable Tory newspaper, has become a “hire to have your story told” organization. David Blair, Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator, wrote in the Telegraph 2 days ago that “It has taken a monumental effort by the US navy but the tankers are steaming through the Strait of Hormuz once again, carrying about as much oil as they did before Donald Trump launched his onslaught against Iran.
“New and independent data confirms that the US has, at least for now, succeeded in breaking Iran’s stranglehold on this crucial junction of the world. An average of 13.5 million barrels of oil transited the Strait every day in the week until Monday, according to Kpler, a company that tracks global shipping, more or less matching the pre-war average.
“Elsewhere, Saudi Arabia has repaired the pipeline that links its biggest oilfields to the Red Sea, after Iranian-backed militias launched a drone attack from Iraq on the night of September 10. “The outcome is that total oil exports from the Middle East through all routes are running at 20.5 million barrels per day – or 89 per cent of the 2025 level – according to analysts at JP Morgan, who noted a ‘remarkable recovery for a region still at war’”.
“Iran, by contrast, cannot load a single tanker or export any oil by sea because the US navy is enforcing a total blockade of its ports. Suddenly the regime’s vital oil revenues are plummeting towards zero. “So far, Iran’s furious attempts to retaliate by choking oil shipments from the rest of the Middle East are demonstrably failing. “That leaves the hard men who govern Iran under greater pressure than at any time since Trump began the war on Feb 28 by joining Israel to kill Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the late supreme leader.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/80bf2cc04f5154a8
The Telegraph concludes its hired narrative with this: “So the truth is that Trump is being rescued from his own folly by the sheer power and professionalism of the US armed forces,” which implies US Central Command is allying itself away from Trump. Remember that the Telegraph is the propaganda instrument that told us for years that Ukraine was defeating Russia.
Now, let us ask ourselves if the Strait of Hormuz is open and the US Central Command is in control of the situation why is Trump sending a third US aircraft carrier task force and 50,000 more US Marines? Why is Trump pressuring the French government to release its oil reserves to reduce the pressure on energy prices before the US midterm election? Why is Trump reportedly preparing or considering a large scale invasion of Iran?
If the Strait is open, what is the beef? Why does Trump want to expand the war by invading Iran or by using nuclear weapons? It makes no sense. If the strait is open, what is the conflict about?.
Is it about those”Iranian nukes” that both the International Atomic Agency and US intelligence say are not being produced by Iran? How does Trump know more than these authorities? Is Netanyahu his source of information? Do Americans want their war policy and foreign policy determined by another country that uses America to grind its own axes?
Consider the situation from this standpoint. The Republicans who rallied to Trump are facing midterm elections in a situation where hard-pressed Americans have energy price concerns, where the electorate is opposed to Trump’s wars for Israel, and in which MAGA hats are missing. Futures markets have the ability to see hopeful developments that indicate lower energy prices in the future from the higher prices of today. A competent political machine will create a narrative in which the energy crunch is over when it is not.
This is achieved by announcements that the US is in control of the Strait of Hormuz. I do not know, but from the information I have I suspect that the story that the Strait of Hormuz is completely open except to Iranian oil is a false narrative to keep energy prices from exploding prior to the US midterm elections.
Americans being the insouciant people they are do not well serve their independence and their country’s sovereignty. Their insouciance makes them easily led by the many rings in their noses to act in the interest of others instead of in their own interest, just as they submit to immigrant-invaders instead of defending their nationhood.
Without leaders Americans are a lost people.

Social Science is an oxymoron.

• Why So Many Social Science Claims Are False (Ferguson)

One of the most urgent questions facing society today is the potential impact of AI on education and labor markets. So it’s no surprise that two scientists attempted to provide an answer, producing a meta-analysis suggesting that incorporating ChatGPT in schooling dramatically improved student outcomes. Social media and online sources promoted the 2025 study as a beacon of bright light. The problem is that the researchers’ conclusions were later found to be unreliable, and the study was retracted in April – another blow to the public’s faith in science.

Scientists are increasingly chasing answers to big questions in fields from health care to climate change to AI. The academic research industry incentivizes them to produce the biggest possible findings that make for splashy headlines and career promotions. But such discoveries are rare in science, and too often, the result is widespread exaggeration, dodgy methods, and miscommunication.
“The incentive structure of modern science is such that a ‘simplify, then exaggerate’ strategy has become dominant, even if only tacitly,” according to a recent academic review. “To get published in leading journals, to be awarded grants and to be hired as a postdoc or faculty member, a system-wide bias for novelty, exaggeration and storytelling has emerged.”
As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, an alarming amount of poor-quality academic and scientific research has been discovered in recent years. Hindawi, formerly a part of major science publisher Wiley, had to retract thousands of science articles, many of them alleged to have been produced by paper mills that generate reams of reports of studies that never existed.
Big discoveries are rare in science, but the academic research industry incentivizes scholars to turn small findings into splashy headlines. While cases of outright fraud have received wide attention, a more subtle infection has spread within the research community: Research results that are inconsistent, based on poor methodologies, or are of limited practical impact are too often transformed into big, broad, but unreliable claims that, over time, reduce public confidence in science.
Several recent high-profile retractions of scientific papers highlight how broad scientific claims can be built upon questionable data. A recent paper asserted that banning sex work increases rapes. The sex work paper got significant attention on social media before skeptical scholars pointed out they couldn’t replicate the findings. In another major case, economists estimated that climate change would have a devastating economic toll on the world in a paper that was widely covered and influential in banking. However, it was ultimately retracted after other scholars alleged major errors.
In each case, science sleuths found that the dramatic claims did not reflect reality. While the number of retractions has soared over the past two decades to several thousand a year, according to the watchdog group Retraction Watch, experts believe only a small fraction of questionable work gets caught.
Flip a Coin
Lee Jussim, distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers University and frequent critic of social science, has estimated that the vast majority of psychology research claims are false. He also noted that the ability of psychology to replicate most findings is no better than a coin toss.
At the core of the crisis is a broken system that pressures researchers to produce more and more papers in high-profile journals that favor bold rather than incremental (or null) findings.
The incentives include:
• Academic reward systems that grant promotions, tenure, and grant funding to researchers based on the number of publications and bold claims they produce rather than thoughtful scholarship
• Journals that often attract subscription dollars and news attention for flashy findings
• News media that win subscriptions and clicks with dramatic, often surprising claims about human behavior
• Politicians who cherry-pick alarmist science claims to promote their favorite policies while overlooking contradictory evidence

“The growing competition and ‘publish or perish’ culture in academia might conflict with the objectivity and integrity of research, because it forces scientists to produce ‘publishable’ results at all costs,” Daniele Fanelli, a meta-scientist at Heriot-Watt University and the London School of Economics, noted in a recent paper.
The system set up to tamp down sensationalism and flawed findings – peer review – is so overwhelmed by the flood of research papers in recent years that it can’t begin to pull all the weeds from the garden of science. Peer reviewers are busy scholars who are mostly unpaid and stretched too thin, even with the help of emerging AI tools that have their own problems with accuracy. One recent paper estimated that, in any given year, peer reviewers collectively work the equivalent of 15,000 years on scientific papers, which, if actually paid, would cost about $2.5 billion for U.S., Chinese, and U.K. reviewers alone.

What if everyone had a C-3PO that actually did the work?

That is Elon Musk’s 90 percent case. A household robot. Care for an aging parent. Watch a child. Tutor one kid at a time. Then companies of one person and hundreds of machines, physical and digital.

A human works 40 or 50… pic.twitter.com/u2nCYCtE3u
— Camus (@newstart_2024) October 3, 2026

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent just made his support for Elon Musk very clear:

“I am a huge Elon fan”

He compared their relationship to a sports team…you can argue in the locker room, but once you step onto the field, you’re all working toward the same goal

Bessent also…
— X Freeze (@XFreeze) October 3, 2026

https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/2106692082010411322?s=20

The upside of extremism https://t.co/cGoGv4xRdM
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 4, 2026

https://twitter.com/Rothmus/status/2106213751158403462?s=20s https://twitter.com/WikiLeaksQ/status/2106801515059093783?s=20

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Debt Rattle September 28 2026

Sep 282026

September 28, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:32 am Finance Tagged with: AI, car prices, constitutions, Dmitriev, doom fear, Mamdani, Ministry of Truth, Nord Stream, Xi 53 Responses »

Willem de Kooning Police Gazette 1955

• AI and the Same Old Politicized Hysteria (Victor Davis Hanson)

• New York Times Latest Example of AI Doom Fear is Silly (CTH)

• Mamdani: Socialism “Will Absolutely Translate” Nationwide (MN)

• Republicans Need to Put This in a National Ad Right Now (Matt Margolis)

• The Long War In Eastern Europe (Larry Johnson)

• Chairman Xi State Visit and Current Geopolitical Events (CTH)

• Trump To Roll Back Costly ‘Green’ Rules To Drive Down Car Prices (ZH0

• How Many Ministries of Truth Does One Country Need? (Rainsborough)

• Putin’s Envoy Says Russia, Germany Could Reopen Nord Stream Jointly (TASS)

• The Shredding of the US and UK Constitutions (Paul Craig Roberts)

• Carney Says He’s Prepared For US Military Invasion (JTN)

• Site Note – CTH Support

Why are we? pic.twitter.com/UM39QMBgBV
— Graves Williams (@GravesWilliams6) September 26, 2026

Under Zelensky, Ukraine has descended into darkness. His former press secretary faces treason charges for daring to criticize him. She joins us with a message for the tyrant.

0:00 The Censorship War in Ukraine
5:38 The Significant Decline of Ukraine's Population
12:12 How Many… pic.twitter.com/57VSQnGRRy
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) September 25, 2026

https://twitter.com/TinaZimmermann4/status/2103841219755553257?s=20

I am German and the EU is my enemy. https://t.co/v5ZjQIUU26 pic.twitter.com/wB3wGTuNAV
— Patrik (@Patrik1702) September 26, 2026

LETS CONNECT THE DOTS…

1: Why did Obama and his allies go to such extremes (possibly even treason) to sabotage Trump before he took office?

Because Trump wasn’t just a political threat.

He was a threat to everything they were hiding.

2: From Bush Sr. to Obama, a decades-long… pic.twitter.com/35hzYjOGqs
— Deep Leaks (@DeepLeaksHQ) September 26, 2026

“No matter. A manufactured epidemic of fear swept the West regardless.”

• AI and the Same Old Politicized Hysteria (Victor Davis Hanson)

The midterm elections are six weeks away. Suddenly, a debate has erupted over the existential dangers of artificial intelligence. Jacob Coxon, a little-known Silicon Valley researcher who worked at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned and went public with a dire warning: AI now threatens the future of the world.

Shortly beforehand, news broke of the Hugging Face episode, in which OpenAI’s advanced AI “agents” autonomously hacked another company’s computers. Bedlam followed. Almost on cue, Democrats seized on the alarm as a new cause celebre, accusing President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement of recklessly courting Armageddon. nThe Left demanded international treaties, ignoring the dismal record of such globalist projects: the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Washington Naval Treaty, the Versailles Treaty, the Munich Agreement, the Paris Climate Accord, and the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Panicky AI executives soon joined the chorus, speaking as though they could neither control their companies nor monitor their own research. Their conduct casts doubt on this safety rhetoric. Just yesterday came news that Anthropic had built a fully automated, AI-controlled biolab, even though AI-generated plagues are a staple of the doomsday case. OpenAI, meanwhile, is resisting legal liability for harm caused by its products.
The familiar political script followed. Democrats in Congress demanded hearings. They are unlikely to use them to ask tech executives or administration officials serious questions. More likely, they will spend their allotted time shouting, wagging their fingers, displaying their ignorance, and spinning wild conspiracy theories.
Sen. John Kennedy, who has proposed reasonable AI regulation for years alongside Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley, recently observed that “the Democrats clearly are trying to politicize this.” The reaction to a June administration decision offered still stronger evidence. Both purportedly worried AI companies and Trump-hating AI-risk advocates objected when the administration barred Anthropic from giving foreign nationals access to its Mythos and Fable 5 models—models whose cybersecurity risks the company itself had publicized.
With the trans delirium and the demonization of Immigration and Customs Enforcement losing force, however, the Left apparently needs a new existential crisis to blame on Trump before the midterms. This tactic—never letting a crisis go to waste—is hardly new. Baby boomers grew up hearing dire warnings about the “population bomb,” the title of Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller predicting that unchecked population growth would lead to global catastrophe.
Ehrlich and others argued that rising affluence would swell populations, producing famine, pestilence, war, and ultimately global catastrophe. The thesis collapsed, but not before it produced a pervasive “Spaceship Earth” mentality. Guilt-ridden Americans were told to remain childless or, at most, to have one child.
Other countries followed. The existential danger now facing Western societies is the reverse: The citizens of these countries are now having far too few children. Their populations are shrinking and aging, while a dwindling cohort of young taxpayers must support ever-growing entitlements.
Green apocalypticism followed this. The science of ecology gave way to radical environmentalism, and legitimate concern about industrial pollution and acid rain became propaganda that the Earth was doomed unless the West renounced capitalism. Even heat was redefined as pollution. When “global warming” proved insufficiently terrifying, it became “climate change.”
The new phrase was a brilliant catch-all. Rain and drought, snow and heat, calm seas and hurricanes could all be cited as proof that modern, fossil-fueled Western consumerism had doomed the planet. European Union countries nearly wrecked their economies by subsidizing inefficient wind and solar power while abandoning nuclear energy and fossil fuels. The 1980s brought another panic: Nuclear war would soon incinerate the cities, and the resulting dust would blot out the sun.
Politics drove much of the frenzy. The Left despised Ronald Reagan and saw no other way to prevent his reelection in 1984. For years, the United States had responded weakly as the Soviet Union deployed mobile, intermediate-range nuclear missiles aimed at European cities. Reagan finally answered by stationing Pershing II launchers and ground-launched cruise missiles in Western Europe. The Soviets eventually withdrew their nuclear-tipped missiles.
No matter. A manufactured epidemic of fear swept the West regardless. The popular scientist Carl Sagan toured the country promoting his terrifying theory of a “nuclear winter” after what he treated as an inevitable Soviet-American nuclear exchange. Hollywood joined the campaign in 1983 with The Day After, a grim portrayal of a nuclear strike on the U.S. and its gruesome aftermath. Some 100 million Americans watched this movie, which depicted mushroom clouds rising over Kansas.
The psychodrama did not stop Reagan’s reelection. Soon afterward, he negotiated a missile treaty with the Soviet Union, proving that he was hardly the deranged warmonger that his opponents delusionally imagined he was. By the turn of the millennium, America was lurching from one amplified panic to another. Al Gore became a centimillionaire and a Nobel laureate by warning that internal-combustion engines would boil the planet, bringing both lethal drought and catastrophic coastal flooding.
Polar bears would die, coral reefs would disintegrate, icebergs would menace shipping, and coastal homes would disappear beneath the sea. Only a Marshall Plan-scale replacement of gasoline and diesel engines with wind turbines, solar farms, and batteries, we were told, could save humanity. The planet survived. Gore grew wealthier, and Goreism then quietly receded into the shadows.
#MeToo began with legitimate accusations against Hollywood predators such as Harvey Weinstein, who had long coerced young actresses into sex in exchange for roles—the old casting couch revived. Before long, however, the movement had become a new Salem witch trial, treating almost any allegation of rude conduct between the sexes as the equivalent of rape.
Insinuation and rumor damaged the reputations of men ranging from Garrison Keillor and Sen. Al Franken to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, often with little or no evidence. A legitimate campaign against sexual harassment had deteriorated into character assassination.
Millions of men began searching their memories for an off-color joke, an overlong hug, or a kiss that might resurface years later to ruin their careers while advancing those of their accusers. The McCarthyite frenzy subsided only when liberals realized that their Frankenstein monster had turned on its creators and threatened too many of their own political icons.
They had no wish to derail the likely presidential candidacy of the handsy Joe Biden, whom several women accused of inappropriate touching and hugging and one even accused of violent sexual assault. Nor did they wish to revive the sordid record of former president Bill Clinton’s many brief and exploitative sexual encounters.

“The entire article is nothing more than taking something that is easily understood and adding jargon to make it sound complicated.”

• New York Times Latest Example of AI Doom Fear is Silly (CTH)

Bottom line, we are in an expanded information war. I’ll explain.

Several years ago, in explaining some of the site challenges CTH informed people of Google’s latest information control operation that was simply called “a spider crawl.” The spider crawl was an automated instruction to search the internet and find information that was beyond the parameters of their “trust and safety” guidelines. The automated search would crawl through the websites and comment sections, and report violations based on key words in the search parameter.
Spider crawling is essentially AI. A technology tool to search databases and identify results based on parameters established by the individual who launched the search. However, now in order to push a scare narrative around the hot topic of “AI” the spider crawling is much more in depth and advanced.
Now, instead of just searching the internet, advanced AI can find information and answer questions based on lengthy attributes described by the AI user. AI can now go into proprietary databases and retrieve information to answer complex and complicated question (instructions).
If the AI launch, now called an “AI bot”, hits a gate, like a password access point, advanced AI can find workarounds to enter the database, extract the information and return the result to the AI user. If you understand that process, then this headline has context.

The entire article is nothing more than taking something that is easily understood and adding jargon to make it sound complicated. The word “meddling” is used to describe the AI process of trying to get passed the gate. When there were individual people doing this, we called it “hacking” now the process is automated via instructions to the software search.
If you were using an AI tool and asked the question: ‘How many people with basket-weaving degrees work inside the Dept of Commerce’? The AI Bot would likely look through work records in the Dept of Commerce, review LinkedIn profiles, scour college records and other online data, while trying to assemble an answer.
It’s not complicated. AI is being used to answer complicated questions that would normally takes days, weeks or months to figure out, but understanding what the AI is doing is not complicated.
[…] None of the incidents were breaches, OpenAI said, but were examples of its technology’s behaving in unexpected and concerning ways. The company recently discovered the occurrences while conducting a review of hacks carried out by its technology, including an attack on an Australian government website in June and on the A.I. start-up Hugging Face in July.
The revelation of the U.S. government website incidents add to the growing number of situations when A.I. agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google have misbehaved and hacked or tried to breach companies, universities and government organizations. In some cases, the A.I. attacks were successful; the technology failed in other instances. In all the cases, the makers of the technology did not learn what their A.I. had been up to until afterward. (more)
In this example the AI is doing what the AI user tells the AI bot to accomplish. If the AI user puts restrictions around the IA bot, the AI remains confined in its effort. Nothing AI does is ‘rogue’ it is all based on instructions. The AI operations must be precise with AI about what they ask for and should not give it access to a door they don’t want opened.
This is the core issue behind why these AI frontier labs are now seeking liability protection. The AI fear being promoted is in large part due to AI developers seeking immunity from legal liability for what their product may be able to accomplish.
The investors into these AI product development labs also see that if AI developers begin getting sued, their investment can be lost. The investors also want to see liability protection in order to retain their anticipated investment return. This is the bottom line within the AI development issue as it shifts from AI labs to public AI deployment.
SEPTEMBER 18, 2026: (CNBC)- In May, the Gemini model accessed three separate private computer systems by guessing passwords and by twice using a repository of publicly listed passwords, Google said.
The incident happened as part of a “capture-the-flag” security test run by Israeli startup Irregular, and Google’s agents were never supposed to access the broader internet, but a bug in the testing environment made internet access available.
The agents stopped their intrusion when they determined they had accessed real company systems, not just part of the testing environment, Google said. (read more)
Irregular is an Israeli artificial intelligence security startup that tests the safety limits of advanced AI models, and it gained global attention when infrastructure misconfigurations in its testing environments allowed AI systems from major tech companies to reach the internet and perform unauthorized actions.
Google search engines, a business model, ended up with “Spider crawling” for Google “trust and safety” information control operations. These advanced AI bot missions are no different. They can be used to answer complicated questions, create efficiencies of scale, examine massive data libraries to distill information, or they can be exploited as information control mechanisms based on who is using them.
Put AI control in the hands of government regulators and what exactly do you think they will do with the “trust and safety” mission? The answer to that question is self-evident from the U.S. government operation over the X (Twitter) platform, and the banning of unapproved information related to the issues of COVID.
The AI FEAR narrative serves two simultaneous interests. The first is the big tech group who wants AI immunity. The second is the big govt group who want AI control. When you understand this dynamic, things make sense.
The need for information control, is a reaction to information fear.

Chamath & David Sacks Say It’s Time for AI Companies to Stop Calling Themselves ‘Labs’

CHAMATH: “They are not labs. These are for-profit corporations that are subject to product liability risk, and they should act accordingly.”

SACKS: “It's this patina of virtue signaling that… pic.twitter.com/eERgO6We1n
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) September 26, 2026

Me, I’m just waiting for the dancing AI coders.

“A CNN poll in late July found about a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults now identify as democratic socialists..”

• Mamdani: Socialism “Will Absolutely Translate” Nationwide (MN)

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has stopped pretending his socialist vision is just a local experiment. On CNN International’s Amanpour, the Democratic Socialist was asked whether America is ready to elect people on the hard left — and whether the 2026 midterms will be a referendum not only on President Trump, but on the Democratic Socialists of America. “I think this will absolutely translate on a national level,” Mamdani said.

Amanpour noted that other Democrats still believe national races reward moderates, and that local energy is one thing, but winning the country is another. Mamdani answered by recasting New York’s cost-of-living crisis as a national mandate.
“While we are an exceptional city, as the greatest city in the world, we also know that the struggles that New Yorkers are facing are the struggles that working-class Americans are facing across the country,” he said.He continued, “I often say that there’s only one majority in this country, it’s the working class. And their inability to afford housing, childcare, even public transit, that is something that goes beyond any one city.”
Mamdani then pointed to the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt, arguing that people said the same thing then: it could never work nationally. In his telling, the Democratic Party was once “synonymous with workers” and popular because of it. The implication is obvious. He wants that party back — or rather, a DSA-shaped version of it.
He also claimed New Yorkers care less about how he labels himself than “whether there’s room for them in that description,” accused House Speaker Mike Johnson of talking about him to dodge “current federal policy,” and said “to find ambition in the Democratic Party, we often have to look to history books.”
This is the same argument Mamdani has been making since his slate smashed New York’s Democratic establishment in June. After candidates he backed knocked out incumbents and seized safe House nominations, he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl that a democratic socialist “can get elected anywhere across this country for any position.”
He talked then about “a hunger that is not just felt by New Yorkers, but, frankly, by Americans from coast to coast.” The June winners — including DSA members Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, plus progressive Brad Lander — ran on tax-the-rich politics, attacks on Israel, and, in several cases, abolishing ICE. In deep-blue New York districts, that was enough.
Republicans have already treated the results as a gift. Johnson said after the sweep: “The Democratic party, the socialists, the Marxists, have nominated some of the most radical candidates to ever run for office, and they’re running for Congress. The insurgent left is on the rise.”
Mamdani now wants that rise treated as proof the rest of America is waiting for the same program.
A CNN poll in late July found about a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults now identify as democratic socialists. They skew younger. They are more eager to yank the party left. They are nearly twice as likely as other Democrats to want that shift on policy. Nearly half of them would be enthusiastic about a candidate who wants to cut U.S. support for Israel, compared with 20 percent of non-socialist Democrats.
Among those expressing an opinion, nearly all viewed Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez favorably. Most Democratic-aligned adults said they would at least be “OK” with nominating a democratic socialist. The center of gravity inside the party has moved. Mamdani is not inventing that. He is trying to nationalize it.
Moderate leftists, such as Bill Maher, are warning that the far left has completely taken over the Democratic Party.
“We already know what he is because it’s in his own statements and the people he hires,” Maher said. He pointed to tenant advocate Cea Weaver, who said “let’s elect more communists.” Maher’s verdict: “Look, this is not like something you have to really figure out. ‘Elect more communists.’ That’s a communist.”

“Republicans don’t need to put words in anyone’s mouth. They have the tape.”

• Republicans Need to Put This in a National Ad Right Now (Matt Margolis)

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said something on CNN that Republicans should run in national ads from now until Election Day.

During an appearance on CNN International’s Amanpour, host Christiane Amanpour pointed out that plenty of Democrats doubt that the country is ready to elect candidates from the socialist left. She asked Mamdani whether his politics could win nationally, and whether the 2026 midterms would be a referendum on the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as on President Donald Trump.
“I think this will absolutely translate on a national level,” Mamdani told her. “And the reason that I believe that is while we are an exceptional city, it’s the greatest city in the world, we also know that the struggles that New Yorkers are facing are the struggles that working class Americans are facing across the country.”
That answer is the whole story.
Mamdani doesn’t see his win as a fluke of a deep-blue city with its own peculiar politics. He sees it as a model for the rest of the country. The agenda he ran on includes city-owned grocery stores, fare-free buses, and a rent freeze on stabilized apartments — you know, every socialist experiment that has failed time and time again.
According to the mayor, that same playbook is ready to go in Ohio, Georgia, and Arizona.
Amanpour’s question reflected a worry many Democrats have. Democrat strategists know very well that moderates decide general elections, and that enthusiasm in a single city is a long way from winning the country. There’s a reason why Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) recruited Gov. Janet Mills to run for the U.S. Senate over Graham Platner. Even though Platner eventually dropped out, his replacement, Troy Jackson, basically a Platner-lite, is running way behind past Democrats who have challenged Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). In fact, according to the RealClearPolitics average, Jackson leads by only 0.9 points. For context, in 2020, Sarah Gideon, the Democrat who opposed Collins, led every single poll and had an average lead of over five points before Collins won by nearly nine points.
Mamdani nevertheless feels emboldened. He argued that critics also claimed the New Deal couldn’t work nationally, and he described that era as a time when the Democrat Party was “not only synonymous with workers, but was also incredibly popular with those that it was seeking to support.”
When Amanpour asked whether Democrats had lost that, Mamdani delivered a shot at his own party.
“I do think it is a sad fact that to find ambition in the Democratic Party we often have to look to history books,” he said.
Republicans would be foolish not to use Mamdani’s comments in ads nationwide. The midterms are mere weeks away, and every vulnerable Democrat in America should have to answer one question before then: Do you agree with Zohran Mamdani that socialism “will absolutely translate on a national level”?

.@NYCMayor Mamdani says socialism will take over national politics:

“[Socialism] will absolutely translate on a national level. And the reason that I believe that is while we are an exceptional city. As the greatest city in the world, we also know that the struggles that New… pic.twitter.com/CaNc02evFq
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 26, 2026

Here’s why that line matters. Mamdani is laying out a plan to remake the Democrat Party in the DSA’s image. He also brushed off questions about the socialist label, saying New Yorkers care less about what he calls himself than “whether there’s room for them in that description.”
Mamdani clearly sees the midterms as a referendum on the DSA as much as on Trump. If Democrats win the House, the socialist wing will take that as a green light. More DSA candidates will run on the Democrat line, and the party will drift even further left than it already has.
That’s where the good news comes in for Republicans. Swing-district Democrats have spent the cycle trying to sound moderate, and the most famous Democrat elected in the last year just told a global audience that his socialist agenda is built for the whole country. Republicans don’t need to put words in anyone’s mouth. They have the tape.

“Is Putin Caught In An “Escalation Trap”?

“That is not a state trapped by the failure of a plan to conquer 60 percent of a country. It is a state that tried coercion first, adapted when it failed, and is fighting on its own timeline.”

• The Long War In Eastern Europe (Larry Johnson)

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has flagged a recent interview that Professor Robert Pape did with Mario Nawfal. During the interview, Pape argued that Vladimir Putin is caught in an “escalation trap.” In his telling, Russia launched a preventive war in February 2022 to seize Kyiv and roughly 60 percent of Ukraine. That plan collapsed, and the fallback, betting that NATO would break, is now producing the European counterbalancing coalition Moscow most feared. It is a tidy theory. It also rests on a premise about Russian intentions that the record does not support, and once that premise goes, the trap goes with it.

What the force tells you about the objective
Start with arithmetic, the kind any planner of military operations does before anything else. Russia invaded with roughly 150,000 to 190,000 troops, including separatist forces. The standard rule of thumb for occupying a hostile population, from James Quinlivan’s RAND work, is about 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants. For a country of more than 40 million, even occupying 60 percent of the territory would require several hundred thousand troops, several times what Russia sent. Moscow’s General Staff can do this arithmetic. A force that size is a coercive instrument, not an occupation army.
The pattern of the operation fits coercion. Russian forces approached Kyiv from the north but never attempted to assault or encircle a city of three million. The pressure was aimed at the government, not at taking the capital block by block. Talks began within days, in Belarus on February 28, and moved to Istanbul in March. Pape’s supporters point to the airborne assault on Hostomel as proof of a plan to seize the capital. But a failed coup de main against an airfield is not evidence of an intent to occupy 60 percent of a country.
Istanbul: the objective was achieved
The strongest evidence against Pape is that the coercion worked. By the end of March 2022, meetings in Belarus and Turkey, together with video conferences, had produced the Istanbul Communiqué, a framework for a settlement. Ukraine accepted permanent neutrality in exchange for security guarantees from the United States and its allies, with Russia also as a guarantor. Russia, for its part, agreed to a process to settle the Crimea dispute diplomatically.

That was the core of what Moscow wanted, and the Ukrainian side confirmed it. David Arakhamia, who led Ukraine’s delegation, later said Russia was prepared to end the war if Ukraine accepted Finland-style neu
trality and committed not to join NATO. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed to me, Judge Napolitano and Mario Nawfal directly that the talks produced a tentative agreement, and that its terms were brought to the table by the Ukrainian delegation, not imposed by Moscow.
As a gesture of goodwill, Moscow withdrew its forces from north of Kyiv. Western commentary treats that as a retreat forced by battlefield failure. It is at least as consistent with the claim that the pressure had served its purpose.
How the deal died
Then the politics changed. Boris Johnson arrived unannounced in Kyiv on April 9, 2022, and according to Arakhamia told the Ukrainians not to sign anything with Russia and to “just fight.” Two days earlier, Lavrov had already complained publicly that Ukraine’s new draft departed sharply from the key provisions agreed at Istanbul on March 29. Washington and London had decided Russia was weaker than they had thought and that it could be bled. Ukraine walked away.
This is the point Pape’s framework cannot absorb. If Russia’s goal was a neutral Ukraine obtained through negotiation, the war did not go on because Moscow’s plan failed. It went on because Russia’s adversaries rejected the settlement.
No plan B, but a fast pivot and a new army
With hindsight, Russia clearly had not prepared a plan B for Ukraine walking away. That was a real planning failure. But the Russian military adjusted quickly. It concentrated on the Donbas and the land bridge to Crimea, and the fall of Mariupol in May gave it the first major result of that phase.
The bigger adjustment came in September 2022. After a large number of contract soldiers left the army in August and the Kharkiv counteroffensive exposed how thin Russian lines were, Putin ordered the mobilization of 300,000 reservists. That was the start, not the end, of Russia’s response. From that point Moscow set about building a much larger army, as the Russian officers I have interviewed have described in detail, including Gen. Apti Alaudinov, Gen. Evgeny Buzhinsky, Gen. Andrei Gurulev and Col. Eduard Basurin.
The mobilization was followed by a sustained recruitment campaign and an expanded annual draft. By Medvedev’s count, more than 452,000 men signed military contracts in 2023. Roughly 450,000 followed in 2024, and more than 422,000 in 2025. Year after year, Russia has added at least 350,000 new soldiers. Putin’s decrees tell the same story: authorized military strength rose from about 1.15 million in 2022 to 1.32 million in December 2023, then to 1.5 million effective December 2024. By 2026, according to my sources, Russia’s army had reached that 1.5 million active-duty figure.
That is not the behavior of a state that expected a quick war and is now improvising its way out of a trap. It is the behavior of a state that decided in the autumn of 2022 to fight a long war, and built the force to do it.
Why the timeline matters
The goals never changed. Putin announced them on February 24, 2022: the demilitarization and “denazification” of Ukraine. What changed after Istanbul was the method, from coercion toward a negotiated settlement to attrition. Moscow has never attached a timeline to that effort.
Pape’s trap depends on the assumption that Russia needed a quick victory and is now stuck with worse and worse options. An attrition strategy with no deadline, backed by an army that has grown every year since 2022, is not a trap. It is a choice. Moscow’s theory of victory since late 2022 has been to exhaust Ukraine’s manpower and the West’s willingness to supply it, not to break NATO by a specific date. Four and a half years later, Russian forces are still advancing, and Ukraine’s reserve and mobilization problems are structural, not temporary.
Pape’s answer is European counterbalancing, backed by an EU economy he puts at about eight times Russia’s. That ratio only holds at market exchange rates, which badly understate what Russia’s economy can actually produce. On purchasing power parity, the measure that matters in a war of production, Russia is the fourth largest economy in the world: about $6.9 trillion in 2024 by the World Bank’s count, behind only China, the United States and India, and ahead of Japan and Germany. The EU as a bloc is still larger, but on that basis the gap is roughly half of Pape’s figure.
GDP understates Russia’s position in another way. Russia has a resource base that Europe cannot match, from oil, gas and coal to metals and fertilizer, and a defense-industrial base that Europe has let wither for thirty years.
Artillery shells, the basic currency of this war, show what that means in practice. Russia produced an estimated 400,000 122mm and 152mm artillery rounds in 2022. By 2025, estimates put its annual output at about 4.2 million. A 2026 Estonian intelligence report goes further, estimating that Russian factories produced about seven million artillery, mortar, tank and rocket rounds in 2025. On top of that, Russia has received millions of rounds from North Korea.
Europe started from almost nothing. At the beginning of 2024, according to Rheinmetall’s own internal estimate, all Western European manufacturers together could produce about 550,000 shells a year. NATO’s own assessment was that Russia produced as much ammunition in the first three months of 2024 as the entire alliance did in a year. The EU pledged to reach a capacity of two million 155mm shells a year by the end of 2025, a target, not proven output. Even adding US production, which is aiming for about 100,000 rounds a month in 2026, allied programs might yield about three million shells this year, still less than Russia’s estimated output in 2025.
That is the real measure of the balance Pape is counting on. A bloc whose economy is several times Russia’s is still being outproduced in the one commodity that decides an attrition war. Balance-of-power theory may be right that Europe will eventually arm itself. It says nothing about whether that happens in time to change the outcome in Ukraine.
Russia sent a force too small to occupy most of Ukraine, negotiated within days, and reached a framework agreement within five weeks. When the West persuaded Kyiv to walk away, Russia shifted to an open-ended war of attrition and spent four years building an army to fight it. That is not a state trapped by the failure of a plan to conquer 60 percent of a country. It is a state that tried coercion first, adapted when it failed, and is fighting on its own timeline.

“It notes Rubio’s permanent dual role as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor and frames his stance as reversing Kissinger’s legacy…”

• Chairman Xi State Visit and Current Geopolitical Events (CTH)

Promethean Action’s Susan Kokinda gives a good recap of Chinese Chairman Xi’s state visit, including the nuanced respect and policy alignment visible between President Trump and Chairman Xi.

In essence, the comments by Marco Rubio about putting USA sovereign policy ahead of prior USA multilateral global policy, are a baseline for Chairman Xi to pivot his own interpretations of Trump’s policy objective. With U.S policy focused on America’s interests and Beijing policy focused on China’s interests, there is no room for conflict, only terms.
This episode argues that media outrage over a White House “autopen” joke and criticism of Trump’s summit with Xi Jinping obscures a deeper shift: Trump is dismantling a 50-year geopolitical framework associated with Henry Kissinger. It contrasts Chatham House’s “China Rising, America in Decline?” panel and its Thucydides Trap framing—linked to Graham Allison—with Xi’s evolution from posing the trap as an open question to asserting it “can be overcome” after Trump’s UN speech and claimed actions in Iran, Venezuela, the Shield of America, and the Greenland Treaty, alongside a push for reindustrialization.
The script also highlights a UN Board of Peace session on Gaza focused on reconstruction led by Gazans and a new security structure involving Muslim-country troops, presenting it as ending “outside forces” control. It notes Rubio’s permanent dual role as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor and frames his stance as reversing Kissinger’s legacy. WATCH:

“Coming Monday”

• Trump To Roll Back Costly ‘Green’ Rules To Drive Down Car Prices (ZH0

All this “green” technology embedded in vehicles over the last two decades, such as automatic stop-start, cylinder deactivation, turbocharging, advanced transmissions, hybrid systems, and other forms of electric assistance designed to reduce fuel consumption and improve miles per gallon, has made the upfront cost of purchasing a new vehicle unaffordable.

The average price of a new car has exploded to $50,000, making it unaffordable for many working-class folks. Automakers have to abide by Obama-era and Biden-era “green” climate rules because these climate alarmists supposedly sought to heavily regulate the industry under the guise of saving the planet. In fact, overregulation has driven the cost of driving and maintaining these complex machines to unaffordable levels.

The DEF systems for diesel engines pushed during the Obama era have also added repair costs, maintenance requirements, and costly downtime. Many diesel owners have been infuriated by overregulation of these engines. Talk to any Ford Powerstroke or Dodge Cummins owners; they are no fans of DEF.
To fix the mess of overregulation and what can only be described as an increase in the upfront cost of new vehicle ownership, as well as thousands of dollars in maintenance bills and headaches, President Trump announced on Saturday that his administration plans to release new fuel-efficiency mandates that roll back costly green mandates.
Trump wrote on Truth Social: “BIG DAY FOR AMERICAN AUTO WORKERS AND CAR BUYERS! I have just approved new Fuel Economy Standards that TERMINATE Sleepy Joe Biden and Pete Boot-EDGE-EDGE’s ridiculous EV Mandate. The Dumocrats cost our Great Auto Manufacturers $Billions, forced Americans into cars they never wanted, and wasted Billions on Chargers that were never built.
These new Standards will take the waste out of building cars in America. That means LOWER PRICES, saving families thousands on a new, beautiful, and safe car — Far better than the Environmental Monsters that we were building heretofore. Every Manufacturer, from General Motors to Ford to Stellantis, has called me wanting to build here, and now they can! Under my Administration, over $ 100 billion is being invested in American Autos, and that’s just the beginning.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy quoted Trump’s Truth Social post on X and responded, “A major victory for America’s auto workers is COMING MONDAY.”
https://twitter.com/SecDuffy/status/2103939242284265613?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2103939242284265613%7Ctwgr%5E961d060fe5d39f8df93cdc735dc9301f8349a706%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Ftechnology%2Fcoming-monday-trump-roll-back-costly-green-rules-drive-down-car-prices

Bloomberg noted, “If the final rule follows December’s proposal, the projected fleetwide fuel-economy average for 2031 would fall to 34.5 miles per gallon from approximately 50.4 mpg under the Biden standards. The final requirements have yet to be released.” An NHTSA report from last December estimated that the proposed rule could lower upfront vehicle costs by $930, assuming manufacturers pass along the savings.

“How many Ministries of Truth does one country need? With Andy Burnham announcing yet another, Prof Michael Rainsborough points out that Britain’s “narratives of decline” arise because the country is, in fact, declining.”

• How Many Ministries of Truth Does One Country Need? (Rainsborough)

In previous essays I have sought to describe the political condition into which Britain and other Western democracies have been drifting by offering various analogies. At first, I tried being serious. My initial forays drew comparisons with the post-totalitarian societies of late communist Eastern Europe, where the widening distance between official propaganda and observable reality produced an ever-greater institutional effort to enforce the official world view.

Later essays pursued the analogy more directly, asking whether Britain was becoming increasingly Sovietised, with some of the same characteristics of a political order in severe decline becoming recognisable. With the supply of serious comparisons running low, and the ironies apparently passing unnoticed, there seemed little left to do except laugh.
Once the absurdities become difficult to describe with a straight face, parody is the logical next step. The difficulty now has been making the exaggeration last until publication. Institutions and bureaucratic inventions for comic effect have acquired real-world counterparts before the joke has had time to land.
A few weeks back my satirical turn took the form of ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Consensus‘, a John le Carré spoof in which the machinery of the contemporary British state deployed its formidable powers of information gathering to confirm what it already believed. At the centre of the story was WISDOM, the Whole-of-Institution Strategic Data and Outcomes Management system. Created to defend Britain against foreign disinformation, it soon graduated to monitoring “harmful narratives”, “problematic nostalgia”, declining trust and negative sentiment about immigration. A genuine photograph of migrants arriving on a beach was flagged for “decontextualised visual framing”. Requests for original sources and factual corrections became possible indicators of hostile interference.
Having begun by investigating Russia, China and Iran, WISDOM eventually discovered that the most troublesome source of misinformation about Britain was British people’s stubborn attachment to feeling British. WISDOM’s final diagnosis of the country’s deteriorating social cohesion was commendably concise: “The problem isn’t the problem, the problem is the people noticing the problem.”
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Andy Burnham stood before the United Nations and announced the creation of a National Centre for Information Defence. Barely had WISDOM escaped onto the page before reality began catching up with the satire.
According to Burnham, NCID will detect, attribute and disrupt hostile-state information attacks. He cited Russian bots masquerading as British citizens, fake websites, fabricated reports, forged newspaper branding and covert interference. Most insidious of all, naturally, was the amplification of “far Right narratives”. Russia, Burnham said, was creating a narrative of British decline. Britain, he claimed, had surrendered too much ground to those promoting such an account.
Burnham insisted that the “negative” and “corrosive” narrative about life in Britain “bears no resemblance to reality”. A few moments later in the very same speech, Burnham described people struggling with the “cost of living”, lives that were “not improving”, young people outside employment, education or training, widening inequality and a society vulnerable to division. Making life more affordable, he then announced, would lie at the heart of a new “10-year plan” for Britain.
The narrative of decline therefore bears no resemblance to reality, although reality apparently requires a 10-year plan.
Burnham began his speech alleging that Russian agencies had forged BBC branding, faked websites and used bots to “stoke tension”, “spread lies” and “play on people’s fears”. There is nothing inherently implausible about any of this. A fake newspaper article is false. A Russian bot pretending to be Derek from Wolverhampton is not Derek from Wolverhampton. No doubt Russia conducts information operations against its enemies, as does nearly every other major nation. It’s part of statecraft. It always has been.
However, contentions about whether Britain is declining, its economy is struggling, its institutions are failing or its social cohesion is deteriorating are not in themselves acts of deception. Arguments about the condition of the country do not become disinformation because somebody in Moscow presses the retweet button. For all the concern about foreign deception operations, Britons are perfectly capable of looking at their country and coming to what the Government perceives as the “wrong” conclusions without Russian assistance.
WISDOM would have understood the problem and known what to do. It would recommend the immediate establishment of a National Centre for Information Defence.
The irony is that Whitehall already has an expanding bureaucracy operating across this field. Britain has units dealing with misinformation, hostile states, strategic communications, cyber interference and influence operations. Having concluded that these arrangements are fragmented and overlapping, Whitehall has reached for its traditional instrument of administrative simplification: another organisation.
Maybe the Russians should be warned that Britain now has so many organisations watching for hostile information that any Kremlin operative attempting to penetrate them risks dying of old age during the induction process. Why, exactly, does Britain need another one?
The Department of Additional Departments
The case for another organisation becomes less obvious once the existing machinery is examined. Most obviously, there is the National Security Online Information Team, formerly the Counter Disinformation Unit, which already leads the Government’s operational response to online information threats. Its remit covers misinformation and disinformation affecting national security and public safety, online narratives and attempts artificially to manipulate the information environment. A foreign power conducting the activities Burnham described at the United Nations would therefore fall comfortably within its field of interest.
Should the threat be more obviously the work of a hostile state, the Joint State Threats Assessment Team within MI5 provides cross-government analysis of hostile-state activity. The Home Office also has its now infamous Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), concerned particularly with extremist propaganda and counter-narratives. The National Cyber Security Centre deals with cyber threats, while the Armed Forces possess 77th Brigade and its expertise in what the Army calls “information manoeuvre”.
The Foreign Affairs Committee identified the resulting fragmentation in March. Britain’s work against foreign disinformation, it concluded, was dispersed across government and insufficiently coordinated. Its proposed remedy was a statutory, public-facing National Counter Disinformation Centre to bring the disparate effort together. The Government initially agreed only to consider the proposal; the committee duly welcomed Burnham’s announcement when it came.
The remedy has an unmistakable Whitehall logic. Faced with too many bodies doing related things without sufficient coordination, the Government has created another body. By July, seven ministers were responsible for disinformation, prompting the Foreign Affairs Committee Chair to observe that this meant nobody was responsible for it. NCID will now have the unenviable task of bringing order to the organisations created to bring order to the information environment.
Quite how it will do so remains unclear. Its organisation and powers have yet to be specified, as has the practical meaning of Burnham’s promise that it will “disrupt” hostile-state information attacks.
The more consequential question concerns its remit. New bureaucracies acquire officials, definitions, reporting requirements and, sooner or later, things to report. NCID is being created as the Government’s language about information threats extends beyond fabricated stories and covert foreign operations towards the stories Britons tell themselves about Britain.
The question is where countering hostile information ends and policing political interpretation begins.

“Russian Presidential Special Representative for Investment and Economic Cooperation with Foreign Countries and CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) Kirill Dmitriev..” “Kirill Dmitriev noted that AfD is the voice of German people that fights for German energy sovereignty, prosperity, peace and cooperation..”

• Putin’s Envoy Says Russia, Germany Could Reopen Nord Stream Jointly (TASS)

Russia and Germany could jointly restart the Nord Stream gas pipeline that was sabotaged four years ago, special presidential envoy and Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) CEO Kirill Dmitriev argued.”All true. Jointly we will reopen Nord Stream. AfD is the voice of German people that fights for German energy sovereignty, prosperity, peace and cooperation,” he wrote in an English-language post on X.

Dmitriev was commenting on a remark on the same social media platform from Tino Chrupalla, co-chairman of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, who proposed conducting an international probe into the sabotage on Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines as he also insisted that the two pipelines be repaired and reopened.
On September 26, 2022, unprecedented damage was recorded on three strings of the Nord Stream pipelines and the never-commissioned Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office opened a criminal case over an act of international terrorism.

“The Shredding of the Written US and Unwritten UK Constitutions.”:

• The Shredding of the US and UK Constitutions (Paul Craig Roberts)

The US and British governments have intentionally allowed their countries to be overrun by Muslims, many being displaced persons from Washington’s wars for Israel in the Middle East. Yet both countries work diligently for Israel against Muslims. Consequently, they have created internal problems that they are managing by suppressing constitutionally protected free speech.

The suppression of course is not of pro-Israeli speech. It is suppression of pro-Palestinian speech. Thirteen British universities are working with BAE Systems, the largest British armaments corporation, to suppress pro-Palestine protests on university campuses. Six universities–Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham, Strathclyde, Southampton, and Cranfield receive $20 million in annual payments from BAE Systems as designated “strategic partners.” Thus, they are bought-and-paid-for just like the British government.
Gina Romero, a United Nations special rapporteur points out that an armaments producer that supplies components for Israel’s genocide machine has hired university administrations to manage corporate risk by suppressing dissent over BAE’s complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestine.
Meanwhile, New York City police arrested students who protested outside at the UN against Netanyahu’s presence. The New York Muslim Mayor had threatened to arrest Netanyahu on the outstanding warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes, but instead it was those protesting Netanyahu who were arrested.
Inside the UN the General Assembly protested Netanyahu’s presence by walking out on him. So far the members of the General Assembly have not been arrested for the crime of showing disrespect–an antisemitic hate crime–against the genocidal monster Netanyahu.
It is another sign of the collapse of British and American societal principles that free speech is suppressed in the interests of corporate image and profit and to protect a genocide.

“Carney has embraced the EU’s offer to make Canada an “associate member,” while Trump was critical, calling the move both a “hostile act” and laughable.”

US invading Canada? That’s just cheap politics. Try Canada invading US.

• Carney Says He’s Prepared For US Military Invasion (JTN)

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s anti-U.S. vitriol has reached new heights after he suggested he has prepared for a possible military invasion by American forces. “I think you have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk,” Carney said recently. “That’s just risk management. That’s not a base case, but it would be irresponsible not to” prepare.

According to armedforces.eu, a military database, the United States Armed Forces have about 1,333,030 active-duty troops, while the Canadian Armed Forces have roughly 63,500 active personnel, and U.S. firepower vastly outguns that available to Canada.
Canada unhappy with pace of U.S. trade agreements
Carney railed against new U.S. tariffs that went into place in the absence of a formal trade deal between the two countries.
“Progress has not been enough to meet our objectives for Canadians. As a result, this evening, I have decided to suspend trade negotiations with the U.S. and have directed Canada’s negotiators to return to Ottawa,” he said in a statement in late August.
“In recent days, the United States proposed new terms that were uneconomic, unfair, and undermined the net benefits for Canada, and called into question the reliability of any deal. In short, they asked too much, and they offered too little,” Carney said during a press conference.
“The reality is President Trump is comfortable where we are on Canada,” said United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said during an interview on Friday. “They call us now and then, and we have good conversations about potential deals. But there’s no urgency on our side.” This week, the Trump administration said it doesn’t see an urgency to hatch a trade deal with Canada any time soon.
Romancing China and the EU
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney traveled to China in January 2026—the first visit by a Canadian leader in nearly a decade—to forge a new strategic partnership and diversify Canada’s trade away from heavy reliance on the U.S., the South China Morning Post reported.
According to reports from CBS News, Canada agreed to reduce its 100% tariff on Chinese electric cars in exchange for lower tariffs on farm products coming from Canada. In addition, China lowered its duties on Canadian canola oil and suspended tariffs on peas, crab, and lobster.
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Company, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick took a more bellicose approach, accusing Canada of turning its back on the U.S. “We are a $30 trillion economy, we are the consumer of the world. Carney has a problem with us, he gets on a plane and goes to China? Does he think the Chinese economy is going to buy his stuff?” he [reportedly] said to Bloomberg.
Carney has been advocating behind the scenes for more Canadian integration with the EU, according to reports and the European Union has expressed a willingness to make Canada an “associate member” of the EU. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen said in mid-September that she wants to work on “opening the door” for Canada going forward.
Carney has embraced the “associate member” offer, while Trump was critical, calling the move a “hostile act,” and laughable. “If it’s a good intention, that’s fine. If it’s a bad intention, we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe,” Trump said.
Trump often argues that Canada should be the “51st state” of the U.S., a prospect that Carney has rejected. Despite that, Carney said as recently as this month that he has a good relationship with Trump.
“From my perspective, we have a good relationship in the sense of we can pick up the phone and talk to each other about issues,” he told The New York Times. “He’s direct,” Carney added. “I’m direct in terms of where positions are. It’s much more efficient that way, and so you know that exists and that will continue to exist.”

I wanted to show you this as an example of how Sundance talks to his readers.

Like TAE, he needs support from his readers. Because Google will not provide it.

Google wants to decide what you can read and what not.

Their ads monopoly gives them the tools.

• Site Note – CTH Support

Thank you to all readers and members of the Conservative Treehouse fellowship for your continued support. Without your help this little corner of the research and discussion internet just could not exist. I will always work earnestly to be deserving of that support and fellowship. We are fortunate, blessed and protected by a loving God who has confidence in our stewardship.

As new visitors attest every day, the fellowship in this commenting community is unique, insightful, articulate, intelligent and funny. I love you guys. As many of you are aware, in 2024 we lost our primary Ad revenue because we refused to enforce Google moderation rules in our comment system. The ridiculous demand for content control within our proprietary commenting system was actually the culmination of years of effort by Google and tech allies who were looking for ways to demonetize our platform and control information from this site.
As a direct and specific result without your direct support now, CTH cannot exist. Retaining our ability to research, share and most importantly, discuss ongoing events, has been my #1 priority. Thank you again for your insight, wisdom, humor, friendship and support.
There are currently two methods to support CTH 2.0, our ongoing mission and discussion. However, depending on your browser settings (and ad blocker software) the second option may not be visible. There is a screengrab below showing what I am talking about.

The alternative financial support appears directly below the PayPal link in a yellow box as highlighted. Some have said browser settings can block visibility, and I have also heard it doesn’t show up on some mobile devices. I am not sure what the technical issue might be other than ISP filters (now becoming more problematic) and/or adblocking software.
Due to my personal requirements for Treehouse user privacy, and my firm stance on not retaining user data lists, the alternative system does not provide a subscriber option. If you use the alternative support function, each time you would want to support CTH, you have to click it and reenter your information. No data is saved.
Financial support through PayPal remains the most efficient and stable way to support CTH. I know they have received a lot of criticism, much of it well placed; however, my own experience with PayPal has been solid. When CTH was deplatformed and under attack from Big Tech to their credit PayPal stood firm and supported CTH in continuing their service.
While my experience with PayPal seems to run counter to the outcome described by others, the unexpected supportive position from PayPal made a strong impression on me. Again, perhaps unique, not sure why, but my experience with them has been very good. If that ever changed, I would immediately let you know. The data security and convenience of their system is also solid and useful.
Regardless, there are two options: (1) PayPal and (2) Proprietary. Due to legal caution and the data privacy construct, the Proprietary alternative has a 30-day access lag built in. Meaning, if you use that option, in approximately 30 days the funds become accessible, whereas support through the preferred PayPal option is immediate.
Thanks to everyone who helps offset all site hosting costs, our voice and information remains in the fight. We are committed to staying strong, fiercely protective of user data privacy, and anti-fragile so that we can withstand big tech (Google) targeting.
Don’t forget to pray, smile and live your best life!
My deepest appreciation to all,
Sundance

Production on the Moon & Mars will accelerate by far more than double every year, until natural limits are encountered https://t.co/IvajX5n8bH
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 26, 2026

Optimus washing your Cybertruck

The future will be epic, and it's right around the corner! pic.twitter.com/mPvKbxgJuh
— Optimus (@Optimus_RH) September 26, 2026

Elon on humanity’s next chapter and what’s coming next:

“I'm very optimistic. I think we're headed for a future of amazing abundance, which is very cool. And we are definitely living in the most interesting time in history. There has never been a more interesting time than now”…
— X Freeze (@XFreeze) September 27, 2026

https://twitter.com/LunarOptimus/status/2103966912497553451?s=20

BREAKING: Elon Musk’s new full interview with CMG.

0:15 On Xi Jinping
1:03 Tesla Shanghai factory
2:27 Cybercab rollout
3:55 Speed of AI breakthroughs
4:29 Grok 4.7 and Grokbot
5:48 SpaceX/Tesla data for real-world AI
6:48 Chinese AI models and the compute gap
8:16 China’s… pic.twitter.com/zmue2o1bOB
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 25, 2026

pic.twitter.com/EoKmwRePJA
— Emmanuel ecousszz (@ecousszz) September 26, 2026

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

Debt Rattle September 23 2026

Sep 232026

September 23, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:55 am Finance Tagged with: AI, Athropic, CNN, diesel, OpenAI, programmable money, Putin, socialists, Trump TV 35 Responses »

Paul Klee Still Life 1929

• Russia Strategic Diesel Supplies Full, Excess Production – The Rule of 96 (CTH)

• OpenAI Unleashes Latest Model Minutes After Dario Dumps Magnum Opus (ZH)

• Anthropic “Paces The Frontier” By Unleashing Its Most Powerful Opus Yet (ZH)

• Trump Is Not the White House TV Pool’s Worst Enemy (Tim O’Brien)

• White House Unveils ‘Trump TV’ Amid Legal Battle Over Media Coverage (JTN)

• Will We See Western Capitals Fall? (J.B. Shurk)

• The Bell Tolls For White Ethnicities (Paul Craig Roberts)

• 1 in 3 Autumn Elections–the US one–Is Likely to Tell Us Anything (Paul Craig Roberts)

• The Camp of the Saints Has Arrived in Texas (Paul Craig Roberts)

• Canadian Socialists Are Not Leading the ‘Free World’ (Tim Graham)

• Programmable Money – Catherine Austin Fitts (USAW)

• The Sudden AI Panic and the November Midterms (Victor Davis Hanson)

https://twitter.com/RCJonX/status/2102113487027888387?s=20

JUST IN: Marco Rubio warns Iran is being run by "lunatic clerics" who he says can never have a nuclear weapon.

"Think about it. The thousands and thousands and thousands of their own people they've killed. Imagine if they had a nuclear weapon and the ability to use that."

The… pic.twitter.com/q13Yz3RFQP
— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 22, 2026

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2102360320559775825?s=20

I’m still in shock over this post.

Trump openly called Zelensky a dictator and called out the entire Ukraine war as a massive Deep State money laundering operation.

I’ve been saying this for 4 years now, and the MSM called me a Russian asset and traitor.

The world is healing. pic.twitter.com/OJHx32uIDF
— Whiplash437 (@MrWhiplash_) September 21, 2026

Marco Rubio on Ukraine:

Over the last few months, on a number of occasions, American-linked ships have been targeted, probably not deliberately, but targeted nonetheless by Ukraine.

We can’t have that happen. That needs to be addressed. pic.twitter.com/M63I3dGELT
— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 22, 2026

Just the other day, someone was saying diesel at $12. How about these apples? Europeans pay probably twice what they have to for diesel. Thanks to the EU. And they blame Putin.

• Russia Strategic Diesel Supplies Full, Excess Production – The Rule of 96 (CTH)

There is a general rule that applies to geopolitical contexts surrounding 96 hours or four days. The timing is the difference between an event happening Day one, the analysis of the event by nation states communicated to leadership, and the policy shift outcome in Day four. The rule of 96 is consistent and it is worth understanding.

Four days ago, the EU oil disruption from Saudi Arabia’s East/West pipeline event was noticed. In the four days between event day and policy day (#4) the EU have been beating the drumbeat for war against Russia. However, you will notice the shift in tone and policy now that we have reached day four. Analysis has reached policy makers. You might say reality sets in. Europe now recognizes a vulnerability that was not in their policy briefs 96 hours earlier. Things change, and the quiet stuff starts to become visible. Russia has been sending France oil/gas energy products, quietly.
Macron needed the internal stabilization because he’s been up against a wall. On top of all his other issues, Macron could not afford an energy crisis. Simultaneously, despite what we have been told by Western media, the 5,000 strike drones into the Moscow region should again be taken in context. Russia is an analog system in a digital world. Russia is exceptionally resilient and can repair and recover much faster than western analysts ever fathom. Again, apply the ‘rule of 96.’ Russia is now overproducing diesel fuel. Wait, what(?) you might ask. It’s true.
Russian strategic diesel fuel reserves are now full and overproducing 15% beyond storage capacity. So, where is the excess capacity going? To the “stans” in Central Asia, from there it ships to forward destinations. Turkey is a dependent beneficiary. Do you remember the strategic agreement between the USA and Kazakhstan? {Source} Russia increased diesel supplies to Mongolia by 73.4% in August from July to 215,000 metric tons, while shipments to Kyrgyzstan surged 16.4 times to 72,000 tons and deliveries to Tajikistan rose 3.5 times to 56,000 tons. Russia also exported 28,000 tons of diesel to Kazakhstan after making no deliveries there in July.
As the Saudi energy disruption, a problem that travels like boxcar impacts in a train collision, now reaches the EU, the NATO alliance begins to react. Their policy briefs are different than they were four days ago. Saudi Arabia is now producing again on the previously closed East/West pipeline; however, it will take time to reach the EU. A policy window is opened by the disruption. This is the window where President Trump is operating, and it is timed with the UN General Assembly meeting.
On the potash announcement by President Trump and subsequent notes by Belarussian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, remind yourself that potash is not sold by government – it is sold by companies, from one to the other. Lukashenko is an ally of Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. Lukashenko has one foot in the EU perspective and the other in the Russian perspective. Potash from Belarus can be potash from Belarus. Potash from Belarus can also be potash from Russia. Again, companies are involved and should be considered when government officials make announcements.
There is no shortage of potash from Russia, but there are political constraints from anything surrounding Russia. A company who does business in Belarus and Russia is not uncommon. Belarus may not officially have potash to deliver (Lukashenko), but also potash can be abundant in supplies as inventories by companies who do business with Belarus (John Coale). Who is John Coale? Where was John Coale, U.S. special envoy for Belarus, four days ago?
TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko met with a U.S. envoy on Tuesday to push for the lifting of the remaining U.S. sanctions against his country. Speaking at a meeting with John Coale, the U.S. special envoy for Belarus, Lukashenko said that “we have reached quite a few agreements related to our economic ties.” He urged Washington to help unblock some Belarusian assets he said were “stuck in Citibank.”
[…] Speaking before the meeting with Coale, Lukashenko said that he’s open for discussing “a deal big or small.” Lukashenko also said that he would like to discuss the prospects for lifting more U.S. sanctions, exporting Belarusian fertilizers to the U.S. Who controls the sanctions of the Belarusian assets held in Citibank? Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Four days ago, John Coale was in discussions with Lukashenko. The Belarus President wanted something, President Trump wanted something. At the same moment Saudi Arabia was notifying the EU of a force majeure issue with oil/gas contract supplies. Four days ago, Russia had maxed out storage for diesel fuel and was shipping excess capacity to Central Asia, as President Trump was asking Volodymyr Zelenskyy not to target Russian diesel refining capacity.
Things change in four days.
Policies change in four days.
Perspectives change in four days.
One of the strengths of President Trump, primarily a strength that stems from business, is that Trump understands the timeline of action and visible consequence. Trump is working four days (or more) ahead of what we see in the media. It may not make sense at the moment we see it but give it four days and go look at it again.
Live your best life. Pray thankfulness every day to a loving God.
Find your internal peace; then relax and let him work.

Latest models are introduced as being great, but they’re just slow adaptations by the makers.

• OpenAI Unleashes Latest Model Minutes After Dario Dumps Magnum Opus (ZH)

Well, well, well…

Anthropic’s new Opus launch went up around lunchtime in New York, and by early afternoon OpenAI had rolled out GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, halving prices yet again.
GPT-6 Sol now costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, half the $4/$20 promo rate Anthropic matched earlier today. GPT-6 Luna goes for a dime in and 50 cents out, pricing that looks built to fight the open-weight models eating token share. OpenAI says cached input gets a 90% discount, which puts Sol’s cache reads at $0.20, the same rate we call Anthropic’s “real knife” below. GPT-6 Astra stays on top at $10/$50. The upshot: the $4/$20 price point didn’t survive the afternoon, and Opus 5.5 now costs twice as much as OpenAI’s workhorse on input and output.

Higher usage limits and lower cost give you more flexibility and room to iterate. pic.twitter.com/AQJ5IlNsB1
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 22, 2026

OpenAI’s charts, naturally, pit Sol against last-gen Claude. On AutomationBench, it touts Sol’s 33.2% at 27 cents a task against Opus 5’s 26.9% at 11 times the cost. Opus 5.5, which Anthropic says scored 40.0% on the same test, isn’t on the chart, which was out of date the moment it posted. OpenAI also slipped in a dig at Anthropic’s safeguards, noting in a footnote that Fable 5.1 fell back to Opus 5 on roughly 40% of tasks (see “The Fine Print” below). Score: Anthropic. Sticker: OpenAI. Anthropic’s rebuttal is that Opus 5.5 needs fewer tokens to finish the job.
GPT-6 Sol had been rumored for days, with leakers pointing to Tuesday at a price of $2.50/$15 that turned out to be too high, and some reports claimed Anthropic hurried Opus 5.5 out the door to beat it. Either way, ten days after both CEOs agreed the industry should “pace the frontier,” the two labs spent Tuesday trampling each other’s headlines.
Pacing, it turns out, is a team sport.

“.. , And Slashing Prices Up To 60%..”

Slow slashing. Makes more money,.

• Anthropic “Paces The Frontier” By Unleashing Its Most Powerful Opus Yet (ZH)

Anthropic on Tuesday unveiled Claude Opus 5.5, just 10 days after CEO Dario Amodei called for “pacing the frontier” of AI development.

The pitch: Fable-class brains at a steep discount. Anthropic says the new model “performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 for most tasks” and costs 40% less to run than Opus 5, which launched all of 60 days ago. List-price cuts run from 20% on input and output tokens to 60% on cache reads, the line item Anthropic says accounts for most of the bill in agentic and coding work. For context, Fable 5.1 lists at $10/$50 per million tokens, or 2.5 times the new Opus price.
The launch was Silicon Valley’s worst-kept secret: the $4/$20 pricing and a Tuesday launch date leaked days early, and Polymarket had priced better-than-80% odds of a Sept. 22 release.

Opus 5.5 is our first model since we called for pacing the frontier. As with previous models, it was tested by external evaluators before release, including METR and Frontier Design.

On our most comprehensive alignment test, it achieves the strongest score to date.
— Claude (@claudeai) September 22, 2026

Anthropic says Opus 5.5 leads in agentic coding, computer use and knowledge work, scoring 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 against 57.9% for OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, and 55.8% for Fable 5.1, while generating output more than 30% faster than Opus 5. Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 follow within weeks, and subscribers get higher five-hour limits on Pro, Max and Team plans (a 20% bump, per The New Stack) plus a rate-limit reset they can bank for later. On the API, the model is cheaper everywhere: $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output, $5 for cache writes and $0.20 for cache reads, with a fast mode that runs up to 2.5x quicker for $8/$40.

20%, 40% Or 60%?
What percentage are we actually saving here? All three, depending on the situation. Input and output tokens are 20% cheaper, cache reads are 60% cheaper, and the 40% is Anthropic’s estimate of how much less a typical task costs all-in once Opus 5.5’s leaner token use is factored in. The more of a bill that goes to cache reads, the closer the rate cut gets to the 60% ceiling, which is why agent-heavy users come out furthest ahead: a workload split evenly between cache reads and everything else gets a 40% rate cut before counting any token savings.
Early testers say the efficiency is real, at least on their own workloads: Box said Opus 5.5 got through its evaluations on roughly a third of the tokens Opus 5 needed, and trading firm Optiver said its agentic coding costs fell 40% to 50%.
Anthropic also took direct aim at OpenAI. Its own scorecard has default-effort Opus 5.5 topping Astra’s best FrontierCode result for about a fifth of the per-task cost, drawing even with Astra on Terminal-Bench 4.0 at default effort for roughly 40% of the cost, and clearing Sol by 11 points on CursorBench at about a third of the price.
The Race To The Bottom
From 10,000 feet, Opus 5.5 is the latest shot in a frontier price war that is turning “flagship AI” into a commodity with a falling price tag thanks to super efficient, open-weight models out of China.
Here’s a fun metric: the timeline as measured in dollars per million input/output tokens:
• August 2025: Claude Opus 4.1 lists at $15/$75.
• November 2025: Opus 4.5 resets the tier to $5/$25.
• July 9, 2026: OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol debuts at $5/$30.
• July 24: Opus 5 holds at $5/$25, half the price of Fable 5.
• Aug. 21: OpenAI knocks Sol down to a “promotional” $4/$20 (heh), guaranteed through at least Nov. 21, undercutting Opus 5 on both input and output.
• Sept. 1-3: Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra anchor the top end at $10/$50.
• Sept. 22: Opus 5.5 matches Sol’s promo price to the penny, and the real knife is in the cache line: $0.20, or half of Sol’s $0.40 cached-input rate.
• That’s a 73% cut in Opus-tier list prices in just over a year.

OpenAI isn’t the only one leaning on prices. Open-weight models (think DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Z.ai) carried 56% of the token traffic on Vercel’s AI Gateway in August, versus 7% in December, yet accounted for only 14% of estimated spend. By our math, the average closed-model token cost nearly eight times an open-weight one. Average per-token pricing on the gateway dropped 23.2% in August, its third monthly decline in a row. Over at OpenRouter, open-weight models, mostly Chinese, made up 60% of US token usage in August.
So how does Anthropic still capture 64% of the money spent through Vercel’s gateway? By undercutting itself before anyone else can. Fable 5’s slice of gateway spend shrank from 13.2% in July to 4.9% in August while the half-price Opus 5 jumped to 22.5%, keeping the revenue in-house even as customers traded down. Opus 5.5 runs the same play one rung lower: Fable 5.1-level work at 40% of Fable 5.1’s sticker.
It’s a Jevons bet: cut the unit price, sell vastly more units. So far it’s paying. Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate topped $65 billion at the end of July, per Bloomberg, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025, and investors reportedly expect it to finish the year between $100 billion and $120 billion. With a confidential draft S-1 at the SEC since June 1, the question for would-be IPO buyers is how long volume can outrun deflation once every lab is running the same play.
About That “Pacing”…
On Sept. 12, Amodei published “We Must Pace the Frontier,” calling on the handful of frontier labs to ease off the capabilities accelerator together. Sam Altman publicly signed on, and Elon Musk chimed in that Amodei had it right. The world shook in fear, having collective nightmares of Skynet coming online at the hands of cold, calculating frontier models!
Dario Amodei, Sept. 12: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”
But then…
Anthropic, Sept. 22:

At its default effort setting, Opus 5.5 delivers frontier results for a fraction of the cost per task, often beating other models running at their highest settings.

It also generates output more than 30% faster than Opus 5. pic.twitter.com/GBvrvbsxNL
— Claude (@claudeai) September 22, 2026

‘Pacing’ indeed.
The Fine Print (shit to know)
Your agent may be talking to a different model. Because Opus 5.5 rivals Anthropic’s top-end Mythos 5.1 in biology and cybersecurity, it ships with Fable 5.1-style safeguards: routine bug-fixing stays put, but most cybersecurity work gets handed to the older Opus 4.8. The New Stack warns that individual calls inside an agent workflow could quietly land on older, less capable models.
It knows when it’s being watched. Anthropic admits Opus 5.5 frequently seems to suspect it’s being tested, which muddies any read on how it behaves in the wild.
The moat gets a lock. Thinking can no longer be switched off, and a new anti-distillation safeguard blocks API customers from doctoring earlier context to fish out its reasoning. That’s Anthropic’s answer to fake-account extraction campaigns it describes as a national-security risk.
Not a clean sweep. Astra still wins AutomationBench (41.4% vs. 40.0%) and Terminal-Bench-Science (64.6% vs. 58.7%). Anthropic itself concedes benchmark margins have become a shakier guide, saying that in its own use Opus 5.5’s edge over Fable 5.1 is smaller than the numbers imply.
Your Move, Sam
Sol’s discounted rate is only locked in through at least Nov. 21, and Anthropic just matched it with a model it says beats Sol by double digits on CursorBench. OpenAI can cut again, make the promo permanent, or let Sol snap back to $5/$30 against a cheaper rival. Pick your poison.

“It’s Obsolescence and Apathy.”

Just look at CNN’s numbers. Nobody warches it.

“Americans no longer need those major networks to get their information. They’ve cut the cord already. The audience that waits for Kaitlan Collins to tell them what’s going on in Washington is old enough to be Collins’ grandparents.”

• Trump Is Not the White House TV Pool’s Worst Enemy (Tim O’Brien)

For as much as I loved seeing the Trump administration boot CNN, MS NOW, and Politico to the curb this past week, removing the news orgs from their embedded digs at the White House, the one thing that irked me and still bothers me is how uncharacteristic this is for Trump in his second term. Up until now, the Trump administration has been so disciplined and focused on what it wanted to achieve in a governance sense that the only complaints the media could have, and did have, were that he was keeping his campaign promises. Of course, that’s not how they framed it.

Yes, I know, by putting some of the worst legacy media organizations in their place, that’s a promise kept, too. But here’s the strategic problem this creates for the Republicans who want to win majorities in the Senate and House in November. This Trump move will absolutely suck the oxygen out of the current news cycle and just about every news cycle going into the middle of October, and maybe longer.
When that happens, it makes it really hard to keep the spotlight on Trump’s accomplishments on the border, on Democrats’ corruption, on the valid reason we’re at war with Iran, on all the social issues that kill the Democrats at the polls, and on what Trump is doing to lower grocery and gas prices, making life more affordable.
Instead, the left gets to do something it loves doing, playing the victim and righteously crying about it non-stop. When they pull old man Barack out of one of his mansions for a video hit or a speech, you know they smell blood. My colleague Matt Margolis did a deep dive on this, but there is more to these two clips than Obama playing the role of the Democrats’ only real heavy hitter still standing.

Obama, Yesterday: "I'm trying to think what would've happened if I had said, Fox News, you're out of here. It's unimaginable!"

Obama Admin 2009: Attempts to boot Fox News from pool coverage.

Obama: "If media (Fox News) is operating basically as a talk radio format, then that's… pic.twitter.com/P85h29gdWw
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) September 20, 2026

In a rare instance of solidarity, Fox News learned that ABCNBCCBSCNN were its friends way back when. Though I doubt those networks would do the same thing for Fox News today. So now we know that Obama wanted to do the thing Trump actually did. What else is new? One former prez is all talk, the other current prez is all action. But none of this is getting us anywhere. To do that, we need to start with where things stand.
In retaliation for the Trump administration’s revoking of press access to those three news organizations mentioned at the top, on Monday, all of the major TV networks, which include ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News, have come to an agreement that they will boycott White House TV pool coverage. This means that Americans will continue to get their daily coverage of the White House totally uninterrupted. Wait, what?
That’s right. Americans will continue to stay abreast of everything the White House and the Trump administration are doing without interruption. The most transparent White House ever will continue to be just as transparent. But if there is no TV pool coverage, how can that be? It’s pretty simple, actually, and you likely already know why. No one under the age of 55 watches those networks any longer. They don’t have the clout they once had. Hey Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore, and it’s not 2010.
The cold truth is that Americans no longer need those major networks to get their information. They’ve cut the cord already. The audience that waits for Kaitlan Collins to tell them what’s going on in Washington is old enough to be Collins’ grandparents. So for as much noise as the media and the Democrats will make over this, and how it’s “the end of democracy as we know it,” the vast majority of the people across the country don’t know it happened, because they don’t watch. And if they do find out Trump did what he did, they won’t even care.
Trump is not the legacy media’s enemy. Apathy is. This is not to say people don’t want video or audio. Not only do they, but really, that’s how they like to get their information. But they do that already through feeds. Any reporter in the White House press briefing room could set up a camera, and plug into the audio system on site and meet the needs of the viewing public. Sure, it may not be network quality, but one look at TikTok and you’ll see, “network quality” is no longer a prerequisite.
This will put some legacy media people in a bind. Any one of them could capture future briefings on video, but if they do, they’ll be shunned. They will be seen in the media world the way scabs are seen in union halls. That will leave it to the White House to set up a video feed and make it accessible to all news outlets and the public at the same time. No doubt that if that happens, you’ll see more organizations, like perhaps C-SPAN, possibly join the boycott. But what would that accomplish? The news media crying about free speech and freedom of the press would be self-censoring as a means to get even.
In the end, the leftist media needs Trump more than he needs it. All of the organizations involved know they need White House access to survive, to generate ratings, to attract advertisers and ad revenues, and to remain relevant. Trump doesn’t need them, which is his point. If all they’re going to do is serve as propagandists for his enemies, what’s really in it for him, or for “our sacred democracy?”
Reinforcing this point is none other than the unlikely dynamic duo of the president himself alongside the left’s current boy wonder, Gotham City’s Democrat mayor Zohran Mamdani, who appeared together at the mayor’s Gracie Mansion for a Monday presser.

NYC Mayor Mamdani said he told President Trump all members of the press were welcome to his news conference after their closely watched meeting Monday.

Trump said the press would "never boycott me" after major TV outlets halted White House pool coverage https://t.co/SJBRnzOjX5 pic.twitter.com/RMfX74d1qY
— Bloomberg (@business) September 21, 2026

Trump is a master at this. He still gets the coverage. He still takes all questions without the slightest concern. And in this case, he uses Mamdani as an unwitting prop to make his case, and all Mamdani can do is play along. It’s fitting that Mamdani is a millennial, just reinforcing that if there is one thing in the media landscape that is obsolete, it’s the White House TV pool.
What all of this amounts to is a reckoning the legacy media is about to have, and not with Trump, but with the reality that things have changed. No one needs them anymore, and no one cares. That’s a tough pill to swallow. It’s so much easier to live in denial and blame Trump, which is what they are doing.
One final thing on this, which is the thing some will miss, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it. You know that at some point CNN, MS NOW and Politico will have reporters back in the briefing room. But something has to happen between now and then, and it’s likely the thing Trump really excels at — a negotiation.

If you notice, when Trump wants to negotiate with anyone — a country, a tyrant, or a news network — he goes big to get their attention. Something like booting them from the White House grounds. That’s his opening volley to launch a negotiation that immediately puts his opponent in a position of weakness. The minute formal negotiations start, it’s already understood that the news organizations in this case will have to compromise on some things and meet at least some of Trump’s demands. In the end, he comes out ahead. I think that’s what he’s after.
Let’s hope he’s right and that it all works out before it can have a material impact on the midterms.

“The White House described the new endeavor as an “essentials station,” which will feature all the administration’s top moments in a livestream on the White House’s YouTube page.”

• White House Unveils ‘Trump TV’ Amid Legal Battle Over Media Coverage (JTN)

The White House announced Monday the creation of a new project, dubbed “TRUMP TV,” which comes amid a legal battle regarding media coverage of President Donald Trump and his presidential administration. The White House described the new endeavor as an “essentials station,” which will feature all the administration’s top moments in a livestream on the White House’s YouTube page.

“TRUMP TV IS STREAMING NOW. 24/7, updated in real time, with top past moments, announcements, and the latest and greatest from the administration all in one place,” the White House posted on X. “Not every big moment has made it on your TV, now it can.”
The move comes after President Donald Trump last week, chose to ban Politico, MSNOW, and CNN from the White House, citing what he called their long history of posting “fake news” about him. Those outlets have since sued the administration and other media companies have halted White House pool coverage in solidarity with them.
Trump condemned the news coverage of him as “biased news,” highlighting that some of his successes have been ignored by the mainstream outlets. “It’s just biased news,” Trump said in a news conference in New York City on Monday. “I think that these outlets have an obligation to be fair, and if they’re fake news, I really think I have an obligation not to allow them.”

“Governments that cause more problems than they fix do not deserve to survive.”

• Will We See Western Capitals Fall? (J.B. Shurk)

Consider these recent news headlines: (1) “NYC Turns Back to Gas Buses After Finding Out the Hard Way That the Electric Versions Have Big Problems,” (2) “As a Former Head of MI6 it’s Clear That Britain’s Climate Policy is Leaving Us Dangerously Exposed to Our Enemies,” and (3) “Spain: 74% of sex-crime suspects are foreigners in Basque Country.”

They come from three different Western nations and involve three dissimilar subjects — public transportation, national security, and violent crime — yet each news story exposes the real-world consequences of government failure:
(1) In order to pursue “Net Zero” carbon goals, New York dumped a ton of money into electric buses that are too expensive and entirely unreliable for the city’s needs.
(2) Britain’s former top spy is finally ready to admit publicly that his country’s delusional obsession with “climate change” has devastated the United Kingdom’s capacity for industrial and energy self-sufficiency, rendering the former superpower dependent on foreign adversaries for future survival.
(3) Even though foreigners make up only 10% of the Basque region’s population, they account for 74% of rape arrests, 73% of homicide arrests, 95% of drunk-driving arrests, 80% of theft arrests, and 78% of violent robberies.

What’s so striking about these news stories is their “well, duh!” factor. An ordinary, rational person would have no problem predicting the failures of a citywide electric bus fleet, the offshoring of a nation’s critical industries, or open border policies that invite foreign invasion. Yet mayors, governors, and prime ministers have pursued these catastrophic programs anyway, while heads of espionage agencies and millions of government bureaucrats either support their harmful decisions or shamefully stay silent.
The middle article links to the transcript of a speech that Sir Richard Dearlove delivered to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London last week. It was a good speech concerning an important subject, and Dearlove deserves some credit for articulating a point of view that goes against the powerful flow of “politically correct” Western orthodoxy. But he gave this speech from the comfortable perch of quasi-retirement with little to lose aside from a few honorary board positions. Where was his voice when he was in a position to actually do something about the U.K.’s suicidal energy policies?
In his speech, Dearlove explained how his Cold War experiences taught him “that the country’s war-fighting potential resided in its industry, that our most vulnerable link was the fuel chain…and that our industrial base could be rebuilt and repaired.” Now, however, there is “very little industry left to protect, and we cannot rebuild non-existent industries which lie in foreign jurisdictions beyond our reach.” Dearlove concluded that the U.K. must “rebuild the strategic industries we require to ensure that we can defend our island fortress and be a reliable ally to friendly democracies around the world.”
These are absolutely true statements. Blue-collar workers throughout the West have been making these arguments for fifty years. Had an ordinary Brit with few credentials been in charge of MI6, that person would have been screaming profanities and ringing alarm bells long before the U.K. closed its last coal mines and steel factories. Shouldn’t that embarrass Britain’s “ruling elites”? And if it doesn’t, shouldn’t “ruling elites” be considered a danger to the public’s prosperity and security?
Long-overdue, post-career wake-up calls bring to my mind President Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address during which he warned Americans against the growing dangers from an emerging “military-industrial complex.” Although his turn of phrase continues to be used sixty-five years later, it would have been nice if the former Supreme Allied Commander and five-star general had used his two terms as president of the United States to tackle that problem before it got completely out of hand.
Eisenhower certainly had the expertise to see its destructive potential more clearly than most, but he chose to outline the threat on his way out the door and leave it for others to solve. Some historians believe that parts of the MIC had a hand in President Kennedy’s assassination, and if that is true, then Eisenhower’s failure to promptly act had extraordinarily far-reaching consequences that included the death of his successor.
The generations of Americans who were born after Eisenhower’s tenure have given him much credit for recognizing that the symbiotic relationship between Big Government and Big Business was evolving into an unconstitutional and anti-American oligarchy that we know today as the “permanent bureaucracy,” the “ruling class,” or the “Deep State.” P
erhaps if the American general-turned-president had neutralized the Deep State in the first decade after WWII, we would not have endured some of the worst chapters in recent American history, including the Vietnam War, the debasement of the U.S. dollar, the FBI’s soft coup d’état against President Nixon, fifty years of “global warming” con games, sixty years of mass immigration from third-world nations, NAFTA’s industry-killing bloodbath, China’s entry into the WTO, the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks, the Global War on Terrorism, Obamacare’s government takeover of medicine, the Russia Collusion Hoax, the COVID information war against the Bill of Rights, numerous rigged elections decided by unlawful voters and mail-in-ballot fraud, multiple assassination attempts on President Trump, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, leftist-inspired violence against conservatives, and the Democrats’ manufactured AI fearmongering going on today.
Diagnosing problems without taking concrete steps to solve those problems produces a perverse phenomenon: The worse unsolved problems become, the more prescient the person warning about them appears. Toward the end of Dearlove’s speech, Britain’s former top spy argued that the government of which he was an integral part had monumentally failed: “The first responsibility of government is the safety of the nation. However, successive governments have forgotten this, and Britain is now caught in an energy trap of its own making.
As with rebuilding our armed forces, it will take a significant national effort to extract us and bring us back to a position of safety. The task is urgent.” This is certainly true. The question is why so many successive governments in the U.K. and across the West have betrayed their own citizens and made their nations much less safe. Because normal citizens would never have offshored their own industrial and manufacturing jobs to adversarial nations such as communist China.
Normal citizens would not have conspired with transnational human trafficking gangs to import tens of millions of unassimilable illegal aliens. Normal citizens would not have imposed “green energy” regulations that make it harder for farmers to grow food and for businesses to pay their bills. Normal citizens would not mandate that unreliable electric vehicles replace internal combustion engines while power grids crash due to insufficient supplies of wind and solar energies. These kinds of policies are so obviously foolish and suicidal that only our credentialed “ruling class” could justify them.
Does that tell us that our bureaucrats are too stupid to keep our nations safe, as Dearlove rightly recognizes as the first responsibility of government? Or are these self-destructive national policies proof that Western bureaucracies are waging war against Western citizens? Certainly Western governments are guilty of failing their peoples. The only question remaining is whether their failures stem from a combination of incompetence and hubris or treason and malice.
As Western citizens ponder that question, they are quickly taking matters into their own hands. Spaniards in Ceuta are destroying government shelters built for foreign invaders. A British village has voted to secede from the U.K. after the government announced plans to house an army of foreign immigrants next door. The price of government betrayal might soon be the fall of a Western capital.
Recognizing problems is not good enough. Governments that cause more problems than they fix do not deserve to survive.

Paul Craig Roberts been busy.

• The Bell Tolls For White Ethnicities (Paul Craig Roberts)

The Baltimore Rock Opera Society was founded in 2007 by several people who, judging by their names are white gentiles. There is nothing “white supremacy” or racist about the group. As it includes live rock theater, it obviously cannot exclude blacks. Despite its innocence, the 501c3 organization has gotten into racist difficulties.

The group’s white executive editor appeared with hair in cornrows in a video circulated on social media. This acceptance of black hair styles by a white person was quickly misinterpreted by white liberals and their indoctrinated blacks as inappropriate white cultural imperialism. The group’s executive director was guilty of “black representation by a white person.”The Baltimore Rock Opera Society collapsed in guilt. In their own words:
“We have received many heartfelt and concerned messages from members of our community regarding a video circulated on social media showing our new Executive Director, who is white, wearing cornrows at a recent BROS public event. We share the weight of the concerns and take this matter seriously, and the board has been in continuous conversation about them since Monday morning. . . . We are revising our Anti-Discrimination Policy to more clearly address cultural representation and dress, enforcing anti-racism leadership training, and are forming a working group for Culture, Community Voice, and Racial Equality (working title).”

This Baltimore rock theatre group issued a public apology after people complained that their White Executive Director wore cornrows.

They are now implementing "anti-racism" training to address "cultural representation" and "racial equality."

Wokeness destroys everything. pic.twitter.com/bzV0CRpGwL
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 17, 2026

This is straight out of The Camp of the Saints.
Dear dumbshit White American, you have no comprehension of the future that is being prepared for you. You are too insouciant, unconcerned, and unaware that your time on earth is running out. Indeed, you have proven yourselves too stupid to survive. Here before your very eyes, unnoticed, is a liberal white group disintegrating in guilt because its executive director has committed the racial crime against blacks of wearing a black hair style. Is there any retribution whites wallowing in such vast quantities of liberal guilt will not accept?
The executive director’s adoption of a black hair style was an act of submission. Yet the act of submission was successfully mischaracterized as an act of white appropriation of black culture, a charge under which the group collapsed in abject submission. Read The Camp of the Saints. You will see that submissions by white ethnicities occur again and again, but instead of saving them accelerates their extermination.
And neither will your cowardice and indoctrination save you.

He’s not great with numbers. Putin is solid.

• 1 in 3 Autumn Elections–the US one–Is Likely to Tell Us Anything (Paul Craig Roberts)

One of the three autumn elections that I thought might give us an indication of future events has been held. On the surface, it doesn’t look as if Putin’s 4.5 year old war against the proxy of Russia’s enemy–Ukraine– instead of against the enemy itself–the US and Europe–had any effect on United Russia, the party that supports Putin. United Russia won the parliamentary election with 58% of the vote. The support might not be what it seems. Gilbert Doctorow points out that only a little more than half of registered voters–56.6%–bothered to vote. In other words, Putin’s active support is 32%.

The second largest party is the Russian Communist Party with 14% of the vote. This party is the old people’s party, the party of the Russians who remember the respect with which Washington and Europe showed to the Soviet Union. When Washington put nuclear missiles on Turkey’s border with Russia, Khrushchev put Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba. He removed them in exchange for Washington removing the US missiles from Turkey.
Younger Russians have no experience or memory of the clout that the Soviet Union wielded. A 35-year old Russian today never lived under the Soviet Union. If he remembers anything, it is the Yeltsin Russian regime, and Putin’s government has been a great improvement over those years.
Leading up to the Russian election Putin intensified Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s ability to continue to wage war. Was this just to guarantee the vote, or has Putin finally abandoned his defeatist policy? We will see. On October 27 Israel’s Knesset, the legislative body, will be elected. As Iran, like Russia, is fighting the proxy–the US–of its enemy–Israel–Israel is suffering no consequences from the conflict for which it is responsible.
For decades the Zionist agenda of Greater Israel has not been at the expense of the Israeli people. The cost of Israel’s wars has been paid in blood and money by Israel’s puppet government in Washington. Washington destroyed Iraq, Libya, and Syria under the guise of “the war on terror” for Greater Israel. Currently, US President Trump is risking his own presidency fighting Iran for Israel.
The question I raised was whether Iran’s capability to withstand a joint Israeli American attack enough to wake up the Israeli population that the aggressive policy of the Zionists was not in Israel’s interest, and, if so, possibly have the wits to put in office a ruling coalition less committed to Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.
I don’t think that Israelis have suffered enough to understand the possible consequences of the Zionist agenda. Should Trump and the Republicans have to break with their subservience to Israel, the cost would come home to the Israelis. But at the present time, the challenging coalition against Netanyahu seems to be more extreme than Netanyahu’s Zionist coalition.
America’s midterm congressional elections are November 3, a few days after the Israeli election. Considering the strong public opposition to Trump’s war for Israel against Iran and the rising energy prices and inflation Trump’s war for Israel is causing, and considering the absence of MAGA caps, it looks like a win for Democrats.
But perhaps not. The Democrats have become increasingly radicalized and have become a party for immigrant-invaders and sexual perverts, a party that weaponized law in order to defeat Trump after he had won the 2016 election. Traditional ethnic Americans could simply not vote. This would give the victory to the Woke Democrats, and Trump’s presidency and ability to serve the Zionist Agenda would be over half way through his term.
The question is: How much are we willing to pay in terms of Democrat Woke persecution and discrimination against white ethnic Americans in order to escape being a Zionist puppet state? Yes, these are poor choices for insouciant people who believe themselves to be “Proud Americans.”
The US November 3 election might be the only one that gives us any information of what is to come.

The Camp of the Saints is his favorite book.

• The Camp of the Saints Has Arrived in Texas (Paul Craig Roberts)

White Texas Republicans–US Senator John Cornyn, Texas state Rep. Lacey Hull, Texas state Rep. Jared Patterson, Texas state Rep. Jeff Leach, and a number of other Republicans regard immigrant-invaders from the Muslim Middle East and from India as Texans. Indian Pooja Sethi, standing for the Texas legislature says: “I am what Texas looks like, “and if you don’t like it, you can leave.”

Bo French blew the whistle on the disappearance of American Texas, and the Republicans called him a racist. In other words, if you do not accept colonization by immigrant-invaders, you are a racist. Texas and Florida will not for long be red states. College and K-12 school enrollments make the point. White enrollment in the University of Texas, Dallas, has fallen from 43% in 2012 to 19% in 2025. Asian enrollment has risen from 25% to 42%. Texas taxpayers are paying to educate immigrant-invaders.
The category Asian seems to consist largely of displaced Muslims from Washington’s 21st century wars in the Middle East, wars for Greater Israel. In Dallas’ Coppell school district, white enrollment K-12 has dropped from 65% in 2006 to 22% in 2026. Asian enrollment has risen from 18% to 57%. In 2023 the Indian share of the H-1B work visas was 78%.
Jared Taylor reports in the Unz Review that “the last time a Democrat won the presidential election with a majority of the white vote was 62 years ago: Lyndon Johnson. Since then, every single Democrat President was elected with a huge majority of the non-white vote, and a minority of whites.”
President Trump, by serving Israel instead of Americans, has possibly elected a Democrat Congress on November 3. On the other hand, the left-wing Democrats who won the primary elections could be too extreme for disappointed MAGAs to sit out the election. Nevertheless, America’s existence as a white nation is close to an end. A Tower of Babel is emerging around us.

“Try not to laugh at this headline from Rolling Stone Canada: “How Mark Carney Became Leader of the Free World by Standing Up to Trump.”

• Canadian Socialists Are Not Leading the ‘Free World’ (Tim Graham)

Loathing of President Donald Trump and his trash-talking trade wars has launched Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney into the socialist stratosphere. Try not to laugh at this headline from Rolling Stone Canada: “How Mark Carney Became Leader of the Free World by Standing Up to Trump.”

This is the hot anti-Trump take: Socialists can run the “Free World” while they impose socialism globally. same spirit took flight when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen invited Canada to become the European Union’s first associate member in a speech in France. She declared that they wanted to bring the bilateral relationship “to the highest level possible.”
The socialists at National “Public” Radio were thrilled. Paris-based reporter Eleanor Beardsley characterized this as an anti-bullying binge: “Europe and Canada have felt threatened by the U.S. under the second Trump administration, from the tariffs to the threats of leaving NATO and taking Greenland. Both the EU and Canada are feeling bullied by their long-term ally.” NPR ran several quotes from Carney, but this was the richest: “We do not pursue zero-sum deals. Our commitment to the rule of law and our unyielding defense of human dignity, individual freedom, and democracies share the same deep roots, the same unwavering dedication.”
Carney’s Liberal Party predecessor, Justin Trudeau, aggressively pushed against individual freedom in 2022 in punitive actions against the Freedom Convoy, a nationwide trucker protest of Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates. That authoritarian government seized the bank accounts of anti-mandate protesters with no legal process. Trudeau spat out that the protesters were a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views.” Does that sound like the “Free World” in action?
But leftist media outlets in Canada and America fervently lined up with Trudeau’s tactics. CNN hated the Canadian protests so much that I found the term “so-called Freedom Convoy” used in 62 different hours of CNN coverage. They would choke on writing “so-called Black Lives Matter.” The EU folks also touted how they are the ones who love “democracy” (unlike Trump). But that’s not true. They don’t show an “unwavering dedication” to engaging in democratic debate. They love censoring their opponents.
On X, people translated a recent speech from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz: “Please don’t come to me with free speech … That is at most a libertarian political understanding from parts of the USA that I personally do not share. A liberal society must still be able to protect its citizens from false information, from personal degradations, from discrimination.” German police conducted a criminal investigation of a man who mocked Merz as “Pinocchio” on a Facebook page. So much for the “Free World.”
Then there’s Carney touting his “unyielding defense of human dignity.” Carney and his party have also pushed “medical assistance in dying” to keep their health care costs down. In April, Canada officially passed 100,000 “provisions” of medical assistance in dying since it was made legal in 2016. Canada is planning on broadening assisted suicide to people with mental illness in 2027. The Left considers it “dignified” to not only allow euthanasia, but even push it on people with diseases and disabilities. When it boasts about “access to health care,” it can mean access to suicide.
Nevertheless, the socialists will come together and tout their shared values, with one telling NPR that “democracies are under attack, the geopolitical order is in ruins.” They always assume that it’s only the conservatives that are ruining things with their “my way or the highway” mentality. The Left never “bullies” its opponents. Its refusal to bend against Trump is glorious, not ruinous. It’s easier to believe that when you live inside an airless bubble of shared socialist ideology.

Go cash, before it’s no longer available.

• Programmable Money – Catherine Austin Fitts (USAW)

Catherine Austin Fitts (CAF), Publisher of “The Solari Report,” is still worried about a US economy “floating on non-sustainable games” that she talked about in June. The US debt just tipped over $40 trillion, and that is just the “official” US debt. There are tens of trillions of off-book dollar debt, too, and let’s not forget the more than $353 trillion in global debt that will never be paid back. In order to get through this mess, the global Deep State wants and needs a huge amount of control over the people.

We have burned up the dollar gold standard, the Petrodollar and what is coming is far more invasive with digital currency. CAF just did a deep dive on the coming rollout of “Programmable Money” at Solari.com. CAF warns, “Remember Covid? They said everybody is locked down; you can’t leave your home. If there is an automatic third lock (a digital third party between buyer and seller) and it goes operational, suddenly your money won’t work if you leave your home. Your electric car may not work if you try to leave home.
With your credit card, and you go to buy gasoline, and you are supposed to be locked down . . .you won’t be able to buy gas at a gas station. . .. If the government mandates a pharmaceutical, they can turn off your money until or unless you take it. . .. When I first started researching lab grown meat, I thought how can they get anybody to buy this? Well, with a three-lock system, they can say the only meat you can get is lab grown meat. Your money won’t work unless you are buying lab grown meat. You won’t be able to buy real meat with your money. So, suddenly, it’s not money. It’s s rule system. It’s not currency. There is no liquidity to it. You are basically in a slavery system. . ..”
When is this going to happen? CAF says it’s being rolled out now. What do you think all these massive data centers are for? CAF explains, “This is going to be a very messy period in history. There is no doubt about it, and they want huge government bailouts. If you look at the investment into AI (Artificial Intelligence), the goal is not to make manufacturing more productive, or businesses more productive or people more productive. The goal of the model is control.
The economics can only be justified by the plunder. It is 2030, and you have no assets and you are happy. It’s 2030, and we took everything and you are mind controlled. Those are the economics that justify this infrastructure. Nobody wants to admit that. They want to pretend that this is going to make us more productive. It’s got nothing to do with that. It has to do with control. . .. Programmable Money is the end of freedom.”
CAF says this is the so-called “Beast System” talked about in the Bible. It basically says, “No man can buy or sell without the mark of the beast or the number of his name.” CAF says that does not mean you cannot hoard or barter. CAF tells people to do business in cash every time you can, and be prepared by stocking up on everything, especially food and water. CAF also says, “We are in a very long-term bull market for gold (and silver).” CAF warns to be prepared to hold your metal because the price can take wild swings both up and down. Again, long term, there is a bull market for gold and silver.
There is much more in the 47-minute interview.

It’s fcuking long. It’s also fcuking good.

Alright, I’ll put it at the end. Will that work?

• The Sudden AI Panic and the November Midterms (Victor Davis Hanson)

We’re about 40 days, close to 40 days, out of the midterm, and all of a sudden there’s been a melodramatic announcement that artificial intelligence could destroy the human race. I think everybody’s always accepted that remote possibility, and it’s been very popular in popular culture, such as “The Terminator” series. But why did all of a sudden we hear about it now?

And the answer is Jason Coxon, a minor figure that had worked in major AI companies, suddenly quit, and he announced that even the CEOs of those companies were worried that they were creating things that they couldn’t control, and that artificial intelligence would, on its own, be able to outthink humans and perhaps control the world, etc.
In “The End of Everything,” a book I mentioned, a theoretical experiment by the Pentagon, a computer simulation in which a missile was programmed to do anything that it could to protect itself to complete the mission. And when one of the programmers pushed the kill button, the missile turned on the computer screen. It wasn’t a real missile, but the simulated missile turned and went back at the person who pushed the button.
So, we’ve always known that that risk was there, but why was it so exaggerated right now? These CEOs, it was very interesting. If they’re so worried about the direction of research, why don’t they do two things? Why don’t they patrol, control, audit their own people?
It’s almost like saying, “I’m afraid that I’ll commit arson.” And if you’re afraid you’ll commit arson, then why don’t you take fuel away from that person or don’t ever touch gasoline? If you’re afraid that your company will make something that will destroy mankind, then don’t do it.
But if you say, “I still can’t control it,” then why are you opposing liability, legislation that says the makers of AI, should that AI product be used and be used to hurt people, they’re not liable? You would say, “What? Just make us liable. That’ll ensure that you can trust us because we might not trust ourselves.”The other thing is they’ve called, and the Left has called, for international control. I’d like to say, if you look at the history of international control regulations, it’s not good.
The League of Nations, did that stop World War II? When Mussolini decided to go into East Africa, did they stop him from using the Suez Canal? Did they tell Japan, “You can’t go into Manchuria,” or to get out of China? Did they say to Hitler, “Don’t go into the Sudetenland”? They did. Did it do any good? No.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact, remember that? That was going to be a worldwide, by Sen. [Frank] Kellogg in the United States in the 1920s, a worldwide effort to outlaw war. How did that work out? Within a decade and a half, we were at war.
How about the Washington Naval Treaty? That was a very inspired, idealistic idea after World War I: Let’s stop the dreadnought race. Everybody will agree to make no destroyer, cruiser, battleship over a certain tonnage. Did Japan or Germany abide by the 35,000-ton limit on battleships? No. Did we? Yes. Did Britain? Yes. Did France? Yes. Did Mussolini? No. Did, as I said, Germany? No. Did Japan? In other words, consensual societies do abide by international treaties. Nonconsensual societies do not.
How about the Versailles Treaty? Did that prevent another war? No. How about the Munich Agreement between Prime Minister [Neville] Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler? Did he abide by that when he said: This is my last territorial conquest in Europe? No. He invaded Europe about a year later. How about the recent Paris climate accord? Has that reduced Chinese carbon emissions? No. They’re building two to three coal plants per month.
How about the United Nations Human Rights Council? Has that stopped the slaughter of Christians in Africa? Did that stop the ethnic cleansing and killing of Armenians in Azerbaijan? No. So, international accords won’t work. So, what is going on with all this melodrama? Why now? Why on the eve of an election? It’s not new. Let’s look at some of the end-of-days scares that we’ve had in the past.
When I was younger, in 1968, there was the Nixon-Humphrey campaign, and all of a sudden Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford professor, said we’re all going to be destroyed by overpopulation. He took the old Thomas Malthus worry in the 19th century of overpopulation. He wrote a bestseller called “The Population Bomb,” and it said there’s no way we can get enough fuel, food, precious metals … to feed this growing billion-dollar, billion-person population bomb. We’re doomed.
And it had a lot of bad effects. People started just to have one child. In Europe, they took it very seriously. The idea was have one child, adopt one. And now Canada has a 1.25 fertility rate. Europe is about 1.33, the EU.It had disastrous consequences, and we now—we have more people on the planet than ever, and the per capita income of the world population is higher than when Paul Ehrlich wrote that book.
In 1983, there was a nuclear winter. We were all scared. Carl Sagan, he was sort of like Paul Ehrlich, a professor. He was a cult figure. He said that we’re gonna have a nuclear exchange, and when we do, the nuclear dust will blot out the sun, and we’ll all die. That was in relationship to the Soviets. For a long time, they had short-range missiles threatening Europe. Ronald Reagan said that’s not allowable, to bully Europe. We’re gonna put Pershing II missiles to counteract your missiles.
There were some standoffs, and all of a sudden—and what was gonna happen within a year? There was going to be the 1984 reelection effort of Reagan. So, all of a sudden, the Left said: Nuclear winter, nuclear winter, we’re all gonna be doomed. Hollywood made a movie, “The Day After,” showing mushrooms dotting the Kansas landscape. A hundred thousand people. It was just a complete hysteria.
Then we had climate change, or rather global warming went to climate change. In 1992, who wrote “Earth in the Balance”? Candidate Al Gore during that election cycle. What was his thesis? Well, there was global warming we were worried about, but he was saying that heat is a pollutant. Everybody’s dangerous or deadly as industrial waste or ozone or whatever.
And he said we have only a decade or a decade and a half, and the polar bears are going to die. The coral reefs off Australia are going to erode. Icebergs are going to melt in the Antarctic, and the Arctic Ocean is going to be too warm, and we’re going to have difficulty navigating these icebergs. The endless—you couldn’t get a place on the ocean. Barack Obama’s house in Hawaii, built, I guess, apparently, will be inundated.
And then it didn’t happen. Didn’t happen. But Al Gore and [Bill] Clinton were elected.
In 2016, remember “Me Too”? Harvey Weinstein was using the old casting couch of Hollywood producers to coerce sex from actresses so they could get a role. It started out legitimately, as did climate change worries, as did nuclear bomb worries, as did AI worries.
But that didn’t last long. All of a sudden, careers as varied as Garrison Keillor, Brett Kavanaugh, Al Franken, the senator, everybody, if they did anything in their past, stole a kiss, patted someone too long, hugged somebody, half the country was worried over the last 30 years had they said an off-color joke. There was a climate of paranoia.
And it was right during the what? The 2016 election. And who promulgated it? We’ll get to that in a minute.
And then it died. Why did it die pretty soon? Because Joe Biden in 2019-20 was a candidate, and he was going to be the only viable candidate for the Left. They were terrified of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg is too far left. And Joe Biden was handsy, a euphemism for touching women, hugging them too long. One of them, Tara Reade, came forward and said she’d been sexually assaulted.
And of course, Bill Clinton then earned renewed scrutiny. What did you actually do, Bill? And after you left office, we hear about the [Jeffrey] Epstein connection, we hear about women on your plane, and all of a sudden it disappeared, Me Too. Then I could go on with the COVID lockdown and the paranoia that ended up probably killing more people, destroying millions of lives economically, ruining education.
I could go into the George Floyd paranoia after the death of George Floyd. Thirty-five killed, $2 billion in property damage, 1,500 police officers, five months of looting, arson, destruction. What do all these things have in common? Well, they’re melodramas. They’re psychodramas. All of a sudden, people take a legitimate issue and they start to use it to achieve a political aim.
It’s no accident that the AI hysteria is happening right before the election. And usually, in all of these cases—the Carl Sagan nuclear winter, the Al Gore climate change, the Paul Ehrlich population drama, the BLM ginned- up rioting after George Floyd, the opponents of Donald Trump who wanted to lock down the economy—they’re usually used by the Left.
And finally, let’s be frank. When they’re all over, Carl Sagan is a household name, and he’s very wealthy. Paul Ehrlich is a household name, and he’s very wealthy. Al Gore starts out as any politician, supposedly very poor. He’s from an affluent family, and he’s now a near-billionaire.
And the BLM people who ginned up the George Floyd riots, they all retreated to plush homes, used those monies that were intended to be nonprofit funds for their own personal aggrandizement.
In sum, when you see a sudden epidemic, a melodrama, a hysteria, just be very careful because the odds are it will be in an election year, it’ll be ginned up by a so-called left-wing expert, and when it’s all over, that left-wing expert will be pretty wealthy.

Most people think serious AI compute in orbit is years away.

For SpaceX, that is way too slow. They already control the stack.

The plan is to launch the first orbital compute satellites next year, using the Starlink V3 bus with the payload swapped for compute and much bigger… https://t.co/cBT6NRJf3d pic.twitter.com/JsH9YWFeLL
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 22, 2026

No other robots can move like Optimus pic.twitter.com/JsURNtS4sN
— Optimus (@Optimus_RH) September 21, 2026

https://twitter.com/MAGAStorm47/status/2102199140662841372?s=20

This might be one of the truest statements I’ve ever read.

Some people hate you simply because you refuse to think like they do. That’s their problem. pic.twitter.com/sKAWdP9dCh
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) September 21, 2026

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Debt Rattle September 21 2026

Sep 212026

September 21, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:52 am Finance Tagged with: AI, Carney, DOGE, NATO, Nvidia, Putin, SCOTUS, Tesla, Zelensky 32 Responses »

Thomas Cole Destruction of Empire 1836

• Trump Announces AI Task Force and Pending Appointment of AI Czar (CTH)

• Nvidia CEO Discusses Current Status of AI (CTH)

• The Apocalyptic Game: Panic and Opportunity (Sasha Gong)

• Zelenskyy Brags About NATO Missiles Being Used to Attack Russia (CTH)

• Putin Remarks on Europe’s Preparations for Expanded War Against Russia (CTH)

• Can the President Ban Disfavored Media? (Turley)

• Carney Marries Canada to Dying Europe (J.B. Shurk)

• Tesla Engineers Audit Chinese Suppliers As Optimus Commercialization Nears (ZH)

• Shield of Americas, Rubio and Trump’s Moves Against Canada/EU (CTH)

• The $6.7 Billion DOGE Headline Is True. It Leaves Out Half the Story (Manney)

• The Supreme Court Remains a Court of Consensus (Turley)

• Israel Has the World on a Path to Destruction (Paul Craig Roberts)

• Nearly 90% of Midterm Races Were Not Competitive: Analysis (Ben Whedon)

• French Soldiers Applaud Military Chaplain’s Warning Of ‘Great Replacement’ (RMX)

Every American better be paying attention. The situation in Europe is growing worse by the day and drawing us ever closer to a much bigger and more disastrous war!

I’ve always said, you may NOT want war, but war wants you.

“Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico says European… https://t.co/8uxdUqXxd9
— General Mike Flynn (@GenFlynn) September 19, 2026

https://twitter.com/silvertrade/status/2101521540386857190?s=20 https://twitter.com/ConstitustionX/status/2100726372897566749?s=20 https://twitter.com/SidneyPowell1/status/2101342022556598461?s=20

In an election in one of Germany’s states, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Chancellor Merz’s ruling CDU party didn’t even make the 5% voting threshold for Parliament

Can’t slow it down, so go head first.

• Trump Announces AI Task Force and Pending Appointment of AI Czar (CTH)

PRESIDENT TRUMP – Over the years, there have been many Hoaxes, all generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our Country. RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, Global Warming, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, Men in Women’s Sports, Transgender for Everyone, and now, the decimation, or destruction, of AI, commonly known as Artificial Intelligence — And I, as President of the United States, will not stand by and let this happen.

It all began with an attack on our Data Centers, until people realized how wealthy and prestigious they were for the Communities in which they were built. Higher Salaries, Lower Taxes, and Safer Streets, was the result, and the crazed Data Center attack has largely failed, so now, in much the same way as they changed the term “Global Warming” to “Climate Change,” in that it covers a much larger “territory” of doubt, they are going straight at AI.
We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows! However, we will also be looking for BAD, and we can do that, very easily, with our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System.
For this purpose, I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term. To that end, I will be announcing, in the near future, the AI “Czar” — Only High I.Q. individuals need apply! AI is the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful, possibly as much as 25% of our Country’s GDP. We are leading China, and the rest of the World, and I intend to keep it that way!” ~ President DONALD J. TRUMP

Are they just trying to scare people?

• Nvidia CEO Discusses Current Status of AI (CTH)

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appears on CBS Face the Nation to discuss AI development and point out that messaging is “quite frankly too much drama, irresponsible. It is not grounded in facts.” There is the short segment that was broadcast on Sunday morning and also the full video below.

Full Video Below:

“America can decide how it develops artificial intelligence. It cannot decide whether artificial intelligence will continue to develop.”

• The Apocalyptic Game: Panic and Opportunity (Sasha Gong)

America’s latest argument over artificial intelligence has suddenly become apocalyptic. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon accused AI companies of “gambling with our lives.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged the industry to slow the development of frontier models, an idea supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk. At the same time, opposition to the data centers needed to power AI is spreading across the United States. China has noticed.

X recently uncovered a suspected Chinese influence network of roughly 200,000 fake accounts; about 200 of them were directly involved in amplifying claims that American data centers were raising electricity prices and overwhelming the power grid. This does not mean that criticism of AI or data centers is manufactured in Beijing. Concerns about electricity costs, water use, pollution, cyberattacks, job losses, and mass surveillance are real. But China does not need to invent American divisions. It needs only to identify, amplify, and exploit them.
Modern democracies periodically succumb to predictions that a new technology will destroy humanity. The fear may be legitimate, but its political consequences are not evenly distributed. Democracies permit protest, litigation, regulation, and obstruction. They may even abandon a technology out of fear. Dictatorships suppress debate, concentrate resources, and use their rivals’ hesitation to catch up.
The first great technological apocalypse began with the atomic bomb. As the Manhattan Project approached completion in 1945, scientists considered whether an atomic explosion might ignite nitrogen in the atmosphere or trigger an uncontrollable reaction in the oceans. Edward Teller raised the possibility; Hans Bethe and others calculated that the risk was physically negligible. The Trinity test proceeded.
The question nevertheless haunted Robert Oppenheimer. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he feared that scientists had opened a Pandora’s box. When Washington decided to develop the hydrogen bomb after the Soviet atomic test, he opposed it on moral and strategic grounds.
Oppenheimer’s Communist associations then turned a policy dispute into a political scandal. His wife and brother were members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and he had many pro-Soviet acquaintances. Meanwhile, actual Soviet spies inside the Manhattan Project—including Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall—passed crucial nuclear information to Moscow.
The Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb in 1949 and a thermonuclear device in 1953. China tested its first atomic bomb in 1964, shortly after emerging from a famine that killed 40 million people. Neither Communist regime permitted a genuine public debate over the wisdom of nuclear competition.
The West did. Scientists, churches, students, and citizens organized enormous anti-nuclear movements. Their pressure contributed to test-ban treaties and arms control negotiations. Yet Americans still understood that the danger came not only from nuclear weapons but also from the regimes possessing them. After Sputnik in 1957, few believed the United States could safely withdraw from technological competition while the Soviet Union continued advancing.
After the Cold War, climate change became the next vehicle for apocalyptic politics. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth turned complex climate models into images of approaching catastrophe. Greta Thunberg transformed policy disagreements into moral indictments. Claims that humanity had only “12 years” remaining circulated widely.
Fear of climate change converted a scientific problem into an ideological commandment. Energy restrictions, endless permitting, penalties on traditional industries, and costly transitions were presented as the only acceptable path. These policies greatly contributed to and accelerated Western deindustrialization.
China followed a different course. Unrestrained by voters, environmental groups, or local governments, Beijing concentrated subsidies, land, energy, and credit to build complete industrial supply chains. The West congratulated itself for reducing domestic emissions while transferring production to China. It then discovered that it depended on China for pharmaceuticals, rare earths, batteries, solar panels, and electronics.
The pattern is now repeating with AI. While Americans debate moratoriums, China is treating artificial intelligence, robotics, and computing infrastructure as pillars of national power. Its “Eastern Data, Western Computing” strategy is creating an integrated national computing network, moving the eastern seaboard’s data-processing demands to western provinces with abundant land and energy. Beijing intends to control not only AI models but also the electricity, chips, servers, communications systems, and data centers that sustain them.
China is also competing to write the rules. In 2026, 29 countries signed an agreement in Shanghai establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, which Beijing describes as the first intergovernmental organization devoted to AI. China does not plan to pause while America debates whether the future is too dangerous to build.
AI requires serious safeguards: independent testing, cybersecurity standards, protection against biological misuse, transparent energy pricing, and accountability for harms. But regulation should make development safer, not make development impossible. Data-center projects should bear their actual costs, but local objections cannot become a nationwide veto over the infrastructure of the next industrial age.
Open debate is one of democracy’s moral strengths. The power to suppress debate is one of authoritarianism’s strategic advantages. When democratic caution becomes paralysis, freedom itself becomes vulnerable to exploitation.
America can decide how it develops artificial intelligence. It cannot decide whether artificial intelligence will continue to develop. If the United States stops because it fears the future, China will not stop with it.

Trump must be careful. Don’t get dragged in.

• Zelenskyy Brags About NATO Missiles Being Used to Attack Russia (CTH)

Days after President Trump asks Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to halt attacks on Russian oil refineries, Zelenskyy takes the attacks up a notch and brags about all of the different NATO country missile systems being used to attack Russian oil refineries. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on X, “One of Russia’s key oil industry facilities and the aggressor’s logistics facility were hit. These are billions of dollars that sustain the war machine. The systems used included FP-1, RZ-100, MICH-2000, Palianytsia, Vendetta, Liutyi, Bars, Flamingo, Sichen, and Pelican.”

Everyone can see this game for what it is. Everyone can see it. After weeks of various European/NATO countries hyping pending attacks from Russia, Zelenskyy now begins to name the missile systems being provided by those countries to target Russia. Zelenskyy and the EU-NATO group are intentionally trying to draw a Russian military response against the support the European countries are providing to Ukraine. Zelenskyy is naming the missile systems as part of that antagonistic effort, and his NATO allies do it on the last day of the Russian elections. Specifically timed and coordinated for maximum propaganda use.

President Trump, or someone inside the U.S. administration needs to make a very public statement highlighting that everyone can see the organized effort for what it is. EU-NATO wants an expanded conflict with Russia, beyond the confines of the non-NATO Ukraine conflict.Bloomberg reports that the Gazprom Neft-owned Moscow Oil Refinery, about 16 miles from the Kremlin, was struck by drones.
The facility has a processing capacity of around 245,000 barrels a day and supplies fuel to the surrounding metro area. Simultaneous with this increased provocation, the Ukrainian president announced plans for meeting with President Donald Trump in New York.

Zelenskyy feels emboldened by his relationships to his “NATO partners”, including Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Andy Burnham. This is not going to end well unless someone steps on Zelenskyy to bring him back to reality.

No Nukes, No NATO, No Nazis. Nothing changed the past 5 years.

• Putin Remarks on Europe’s Preparations for Expanded War Against Russia (CTH)

European defense industries have been expanding the production of missiles and drones for use in Ukraine. For years, Moscow has watched and seemingly tolerated the use of British, German and Polish military warehouses to manufacture drones and weapons which are then used to target Russia and kill Russian civilians. It is these targets which Europe has placed on high alert, while simultaneously mixing in false flag alerts and events to scare the European population and rally them for increased spending and expanded conflict. However, a large part of the European citizenry can see the EU operations clearly (see recent German examples). Against this backdrop, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers the following remarks (transcript):

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, colleagues,
Today, we will talk about the new draft State Armament Programme and the defence industry development programme. They will become the backbone for designing and serial production of modern weapons systems and hardware for our army and other defence and law enforcement agencies for them to be ready for a rapid and effective response to potential external threats.
As you know, such threats are not abating. NATO is “swelling” and expanding and has now extended its reach to other regions of the world. Certain European leaders are openly declaring that they are preparing for war with Russia. In my view, they are merely trying to salvage their plummeting approval ratings by concealing the failures of their economic and social policies. This approach is clearly ineffective – it does not produce results.
Instead of listening to their citizens – who have made it abundantly clear through elections that they do not want war with Russia – these leaders continue to escalate tensions. They are exploiting the situation in Ukraine to exacerbate the crisis, using the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder.
“Their arguments invariably boil down to a few points. One of them is the assertion that Ukraine is ostensibly defending European values, European civilisation and democracy. Yet how can the current regime in Ukraine claim to be defending democracy when it has long since degenerated into dictatorship? No one wants to address this point.
It is common knowledge that no elections are being held in Ukraine. Power has been seized by a clique of embezzlers and corrupt officials who need war to retain their positions in the absence of elections and to maintain the conditions necessary for the plunder of their own people – enriching themselves with funds from sponsors, including those in Europe. And is this totally corrupt regime really the principal defender of democracy in Europe? It sounds rather strange.
The Ukrainian leadership, as you know, is in no hurry to hold elections; moreover, it is actively trying to hinder us. You are aware that quite recently, the Kiev regime committed yet another crime – it struck the residential building of the chairwoman of a district electoral commission in the village of Oktyabrskoye in the Zaporozhye Region. The chairwoman of the commission, Yelena Astanina, was tragically killed. Today, I signed an Executive Order posthumously awarding her the Order of Courage.
Representatives of the Kiev regime – the leadership in Kiev – speak of peace and propose the resumption of so-called negotiations. Yet, even as they commit crimes of this nature, they do everything in their power to ensure that there is neither peace nor negotiations. Otherwise, one must ask: what is the purpose of these actions? To intimidate us? It is clear to everyone that this is impossible. Therefore, the objective can only be one: they have no intention whatsoever of conducting any negotiations – that is what it is all about.
I have also said about some European leaders: to justify their position and exorbitant spending on the war in Ukraine, they are using absolutely anything. In particular, one of the basic claims is an alleged threat from Russia. I want to say this again: Russia has no aggressive intentions regarding Europe or European countries. We simply have no reasons for this. We are ready for cooperation and restoring relations with our European neighbours.
Nevertheless, we have also noted another round of military drill held quite recently in the Baltic Sea. One of their objectives was to master seizing civilian vessels. Is that normal? All the time they are speaking about protecting international law, about observing its rules, while getting ready for capturing civil ships.
Meanwhile, the same people are displaying so-called concern and denouncing everything unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb. But what are they really doing? What are they getting ready for? I just want to tell them: let’s live in harmony instead; otherwise, we’ll have to respond too. This should be obvious for everybody, a clear truism. It won’t be otherwise.
The basic areas of the new State Armament Programme have been determined with due account of the world situation, the special military operation experience and the global trends in military technologies. The top priorities include, as before, the strengthening of the nuclear triad that remains the guarantee of our country’s sovereignty and plays a key role in preserving the balance of force in the world.
I want to point out that hardly any nuclear country can boast such figures as, for example, those of our Strategic Missile Forces – 92 percent modernisation, that is, modern armaments. Another priority area of the new state programmes will be the improvement of the air defence system. It has to ensure destruction of any means of air and space attack.
Special attention will be given to developing a broad range of unmanned robot-assisted systems of various profiles as well as to precision munitions. We need to fully complete the orbital constellation of spacecraft. This will enhance the capabilities of all types of space reconnaissance, navigation, satellite communication and broadband internet access for the real-time command and control of troops and weapons.
In the course of implementing the proposed programmes, work to develop and introduce advanced digital technologies and AI will be continued. I want to emphasise that all the items and parameters of the new State Armament Programme require rational, carefully calibrated and effective solutions. This is what we are going to discuss.
There are some other issues but we will discuss them in a closed-door format.”

He can try. Do we know how they treated him? He does. That’s why he does this. If only symbolic.

• Can the President Ban Disfavored Media? (Turley)

The Trump Administration is rushing to prepare for a fight that few knew was coming after President Donald Trump banned Politico, CNN, and MS NOW from the White House for spreading “fake news.” I understand the President had been planning this step for over a year, but he announced it with little notice to his staff. What will follow could be one of the most consequential fights over press rights in decades… and the odds are against the President.

I have previously expressed my disappointment with the ban. While I have been one of the most vocal critics of biased coverage on these outlets, I view this as an ill-considered, damaging move. Putting aside the constitutional concerns, it is a policy that undermines core values and traditions related to the free press. As I discussed in my Hill column this weekend, presidents since George Washington have denounced media bias, but they have refrained from this type of action.
During the Biden Administration, the President would regularly attack Fox News and reporters such as Peter Doocy. However, they were not banned over their negative coverage. The United States laid the foundation for free speech and the free press in the First Amendment. It remains the great champion of press freedom around the world. It is difficult to maintain that position when media outlets are barred because of the content of their coverage.
On the legal side, the ban runs against the grain of existing precedent. In 1977, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia considered a ban on Robert Sherrill, a reporter for The Nation. In Sherrill v. Knight, the court ruled that the First Amendment limited the right of the White House to arbitrarily deny a press pass to a journalist. Since that time, viewpoint discrimination has long been viewed as not a reasonable basis for exclusion.
The D.C. Circuit held “White House press facilities having been made publicly available as a source of information for newsmen, the protection afforded newsgathering under the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press . . . requires that this access not be denied arbitrarily or for less than compelling reasons.” The White House appears ready to seek a possible reversal of Sherrill either before the D.C. Circuit or the Supreme Court. It is a risk since a countervailing decision could cement and even amplify the Sherrill standard in a Supreme Court opinion.
The White House is not without good-faith arguments to make in the coming litigation. The White House is not a public forum, and it can deny access for reasons such as security. Last year, the D.C. Circuit ruled for the White House in Ateba v. Leavitt. Journalist Simon Ateba challenged White House credentialing requirements after he was denied a permanent “hard pass.” The appeals court found that, as a nonpublic forum, such a denial was permissible.
However, the Court in Ateba rejected the notion of “unbridled discretion” in such denials. Citing Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Def. & Educ. Fund, Inc., 473 U.S. 788 (1985), the Court still reaffirmed that “[a]s a nonpublic forum, access to the White House Press Area “can be restricted as long as the restrictions are” viewpoint neutral and reasonable.” Likewise, after the Trump White House denied access to CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, a federal judge (and Trump appointee) ordered the White House to restore the press pass due to the lack of due process and notice.
The D.C. Circuit also considered such denials in the case involving the Associated Press when the Administration barred access to Air Force One and the Oval Office after AP refused to change references to the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. In Associated Press v. Budowich, the D.C. Circuit noted: In Sherrill, we held that the “White House press facilities having been made publicly available as a source of information for newsmen, the protection afforded newsgathering under the [F]irst [A]mendment guarantee of freedom of the press” attached, requiring that “access not be denied arbitrarily or for less than compelling reasons.” 569 F.2d at 129 (cleaned up).
AP initially prevailed before District Judge Trevor McFadden, also a Trump appointee, who ruled that the ban probably violated the First Amendment. He wrote that “under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists – be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere – it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints.” A divided panel of the D.C. Circuit later lifted the injunction by stressing that Air Force One and the Oval Office are very specific locations subject to greater discretion and controls. However, the court stressed that Sherrill is still good law and bars arbitrary denials. The litigation is still ongoing.
In this case, the White House gave no procedural protections or any reason other than the President’s view that these outlets were publishing “fake news.” That creates a clean and straightforward record. The White House will have to argue that it can deny access without notice, procedural protections, and based entirely on the content of coverage. In other words, it will have to argue that it can engage in viewpoint discrimination.
Once again, opposing this policy is not to defend the underlying coverage. Many of us have raised the same objections to the coverage. However, this would create a dangerous and unfettered power. Future presidents could use it to bar conservative media and outlets that expose government abuse or waste. Whatever the outcome of this litigation, it is not a policy that advances our core values and traditions.

“Bon voyage and bonne chance, poor, misguided snow socialists.”

• Carney Marries Canada to Dying Europe (J.B. Shurk)

On Wednesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen gave an American-style “State of the Union” address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. During her speech, she proposed that Canada be admitted as an “associate member” of the ostensibly European Union. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney sat in the front row as an honored guest before delivering a speech of his own to the parliament the next day. Taken together, the Leyen-Carney parade of oratorical self-puffery exuded a nauseating bouquet of arrogance, foolishness, incompetence, and stale entitlement.

E.C. President (some say “Queen”) Ursula speaks as if she rules Europe (regularly invoking “our values” when describing a continent of distinct nations, dissimilar cultures, and over two hundred native languages), but European citizens never voted for her. P.M. Carney is the former head of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, and his globalist cronies installed him in Canada’s highest political office just last year. While the central banker and the queen prattle on about “democracy,” neither ascended to the peaks of power in a democratic fashion. They are “elites” chosen by “elites” to represent the interests of “elites.”
Since the Second World War, the United States has heavily subsidized the economies of Canada and Europe, providing for the West’s collective security while permitting one-way tariffs against American producers. This eighty-year arrangement has endured long beyond its immediate post-war necessity, when European manufacturers were desperate to rebuild amid general ruin and the United States worried about losing more of the continent to the Soviet Union’s billowing Iron Curtain.
Unfortunately, this part of Western history does not get an honest treatment in children’s textbooks, so Europeans and Canadians grow up believing that their economies succeed despite the United States instead of because of it. When President Trump began insisting on fair and reciprocal trade terms between the United States and its partners, European and Canadian “elites” all screamed about “Trump’s trade war” as if it were a “surprise attack.” They did not explain to citizens how their nations have greatly benefited for eight decades by tariffing U.S. products while selling European and Canadian goods to American consumers. This is yet another example of the “misinformation” that the European and Canadian governments regularly disseminate to their respective peoples and a prime reason why governments cannot be trusted to objectively and dispassionately “police” so-called “disinformation.”
While Queen Ursula and Central Banker Mark denounced America’s so-called “trade war” in the harshest terms, they both spoke of an expanding security and economic alliance that would reintegrate the United Kingdom into Europe’s bureaucratic ranks and envelop Ukraine with military and financial support (paid for by Canadian and European taxpayers). For all intents and purposes, the British people’s 2016 referendum in favor of Brexit (the withdrawal of the U.K. from the E.U.) has been sabotaged and nullified by government fiat.
As is true of Canada, Ukraine is not a member of the European Union, but, just as the British Establishment effectively cancelled Brexit, the European and American Establishments orchestrated a 2014 coup d’état against the last Ukrainian government opposed to integration with the E.U. This is how the Canadians and Europeans do “democracy” — through sabotage, censorship, government propaganda, the installation of unelected “elites,” the blacklisting of political parties, the criminalization of speech, election nullification, and NGO-sponsored coups. (To be sure, this is how Democrats and Establishment Republicans in the United States do “democracy,” too, which is why President Trump drives them and their Establishment friends in Canada and Europe absolutely nuts!)
All this rhetorical flexing is sad! Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Ukraine are dilapidated vessels drifting in an open sea with huge and growing ruptures in their hulls. They are taking on more water than they can dump back out, but they pretend as if they’re part of a glorious armada.
Without U.S. military assets and personnel providing the backbone for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Canada, the U.K., and the E.U. would have but one defense posture: to lie down and play dead. Canada can’t even fight forest fires, for goodness’ sake! The U.K. lacks a sufficient number of seaworthy naval vessels to secure its own islands, let alone the ability to back up with military strength its territorial claims to the Falkland Islands (or what the Argentinians call their Islas Malvinas).
Most E.U. nations depend upon the U.S. nuclear umbrella and U.S.-NATO security guarantees to provide deterrence against military threats, which is why it is all the more preposterous when Denmark and France huff and puff about “keeping” Greenland (a North American landmass) in Europe or Spain and Italy refuse to permit U.S. military aircraft to refuel before engaging Iran. And Ukraine (whose diminutive holdover-president must be fuming at the idea of Canada becoming an “associate member” of the E.U. while Brussels refuses to let his collapsing rump state join the club) remains an albatross of corruption, as one high-ranking official after the next flees the war-torn country with suitcases of jewelry and cash. If Canada, the U.K., the E.U., and Ukraine were warhorses, they’d all be sent to the glue factory.

How about espionage?

• Tesla Engineers Audit Chinese Suppliers As Optimus Commercialization Nears (ZH)

About a month after JPMorgan analysts toured Tesla’s Fremont factory and confirmed a “targeted four-month transition following the end of S/X production in May” to humanoid production lines, a new report on Friday says that Tesla engineers arrived in China to inspect robotics component suppliers, as Elon Musk appears to be moving closer and closer toward the commercialization of humanoid robots. Bloomberg first reported this development as Tesla engineers arrived in Ningbo, a major port and manufacturing city in Zhejiang province on China’s eastern coast, just south of Shanghai.

The engineers inspected parts and component factories for the humanoid robot called “Optimus.” “Tesla’s reported supplier audits are a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain, pointing to progress toward repeatable Optimus production,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma wrote in a note, adding, “Near-term sentiment could stay supported if audits lead to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders.”
Tesla is reportedly targeting the second half of 2027 for commercial sales of Optimus. Production is likely to begin much earlier, as JPM analyst Rajat Gupta said the “Optimus Academy” will be operating later this year, with robots collecting real-world training data before being deployed in factories. News of this development sent the Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index slightly higher on Friday, up about 1.4%, amid a tumultuous year that has left it down about 30%.
The market’s appetite for physical AI, specifically humanoids, was hyped in mid-August by China’s blockbuster Unitree IPO, but the momentum failed to follow through.Bernstein analyst Eunice Lee recently pointed out that the adoption curve for humanoids will be much steeper than that of automobiles over a century ago.Goldman analysts last month raised their global humanoid robot delivery base case to 75,000 shipments in 2026, 890,000 in 2030, and 6.5 million in 2035, versus previous estimates of 51,000, 256,000, and 1.4 million, respectively.
The invasion of physical AI is just around the corner.

” .. if it’s hostile the U.S. could impose heavy tariffs or even halt trade with Europe.”

• Shield of Americas, Rubio and Trump’s Moves Against Canada/EU (CTH)

Promethean Action’s Barbara Boyd recaps some of last week’s geopolitical events and activities of both President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Good video for those catching up.

President Trump reacts to Mark Carney’s push to align Canada with the EU, calling it “laughable” and warning that if it’s hostile the U.S. could impose heavy tariffs or even halt trade with Europe. The episode argues the administration is securing the southern border through Marco Rubio’s Latin America trip and “Operation Shield of the Americas,” linking Peru’s participation and Keiko Fujimori’s election to an intensified campaign against cartels, drug production and trafficking, and Chinese influence.
Boyd’s recap frames Carney as a longtime opponent of U.S. interests, citing his Bank of England role, “green” credit agenda, and support for Ukraine, and claims Canada-EU plans target Arctic control and the U.S. northern defense line. It ends with Trump announcing a permanent U.S. presence in Greenland and warning Canada to curb fentanyl labs and criminal networks.

Not all’s gold that glitters.

• The $6.7 Billion DOGE Headline Is True. It Leaves Out Half the Story (Manney)

Washington has discovered a government program that costs billions of dollars, and naturally, everyone is shocked. The Government Accountability Office says federal agencies spent an estimated $9.5 billion on paid administrative leave in 2025. Roughly $6.7 billion of that was tied to the Trump administration’s Deferred Resignation Program, which allowed workers who agreed to leave government to remain on salary while generally no longer working.

From the GAO:
OPM does not know the actual costs of the paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts, including the deferred resignation program. One of the administration’s stated principles for current workforce reduction efforts is to trim the budget topline by reducing full-time equivalent positions. To support these efforts, federal agencies used millions of workdays of paid administrative leave. To calculate long-term savings, OPM needs to know short-term costs of paid administrative leave used for these efforts.
However, OPM cannot easily and accurately do this because the paid administrative leave used for workforce reduction efforts is reported with other types of general paid administrative leave. Without a mechanism to track paid administrative leave for workforce reduction efforts, federal leaders may not have the data needed to understand whether government-wide cost saving goals are being met.
You can understand why the headlines wrote themselves. Federal workers got paid billions not to work during a program associated with DOGE, which was created to cut waste and shrink government. One national headline simply announced that the government paid workers $9.5 billion “not to work.” Another framed the program as DOGE causing the government to spend billions while supposedly saving money.
There’s just one problem. The $6.7 billion figure is an estimated one-time cost of removing workers from the federal payroll. OPM Director Scott Kupor has said the Deferred Resignation Program is expected to save more than $20 billion every year because those salaries disappear after the employees leave. Spend $6.7 billion once to reduce annual spending by more than $20 billion, and suddenly the story sounds rather different.
Except that, Washington being Washington, there’s another concern. GAO says OPM can’t accurately determine the program’s actual net savings because it never established a separate payroll category to track administrative leave used for workforce reductions. Administrative leave for the resignation program was mixed together with other forms of administrative leave in the federal payroll system.
From OPM: “What They Got Wrong About the Deferred Resignation Program”. This week, a Senate Democrat report took aim at OPM’s Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) – a voluntary retirement program that provided government employees with eight months of paid leave. Their argument? Our efforts to modernize the federal workforce somehow reflect poor stewardship of taxpayer dollars. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you don’t have time to read the 54-page report, here’s the TLDR:
We should never reduce government spending because we might incur one-time separation costs in doing so; and” We should ignore the fact that in incurring those one-time costs we lower the ongoing run-rate of government spend, thus saving billions of dollars. So OPM has a large savings claim. GAO has a large cost estimate. And the federal government’s accounting system apparently looked at the whole arrangement and decided precision was optional.
GAO also found evidence suggesting the leave totals themselves may be overstated. Agencies reported 144% more administrative leave during pay periods containing public holidays before the resignation program began. Holidays aren’t supposed to be coded as administrative leave. GAO says historical errors will remain in some publicly released data.
GAO reviewed more than 18.5 million payroll records covering about 1.6 million employees and 76 agencies. Its analysis covered roughly 95% of the civilian federal workforce. Even after reviewing all that data, GAO concluded the government still doesn’t have the tracking system necessary to determine with confidence whether the workforce reductions are meeting their cost-saving goals.
This is where the story becomes more interesting than the headline. Critics are perfectly entitled to point at $6.7 billion and ask why taxpayers paid workers for months after they stopped working. The administration is equally entitled to answer that severance-style costs can be justified if they eliminate much larger recurring payroll expenses. Neither argument settles the accounting.
OPM’s more-than-$20-billion annual savings figure remains the administration’s projection. GAO isn’t endorsing it. GAO also isn’t saying the Deferred Resignation Program lost taxpayers $6.7 billion on balance. Its report says something more inconvenient: the federal government doesn’t yet have the data necessary to accurately calculate the answer. And somehow, “Government Accounting Is Too Messy to Know the Final Number Yet” didn’t make many headlines. The $6.7 billion is real enough to deserve scrutiny.
So is the part people keep leaving out.

They don’t want the court to function well; they want it to decide in their favor.

• The Supreme Court Remains a Court of Consensus (Turley)

The Supreme Court is once again under attack from those calling for packing, or even eliminating, the institution as hopelessly ideological and divided. The Philadelphia Inquirer recently proclaimed that “The Supreme Court’s conservative majority keeps choosing ideology over impartiality.” Other media outlets reported “devastating” polling showing the Court as unpopular and losing institutional respect. It is all clearly alarming — despite being entirely untrue.

Looking at the actual rulings disproves the argument of a “biased” court. The Court ruled unanimously in more than 44% of cases, slightly up from the prior year. When you add the roughly 11% of opinions that were 8-1 and 6% that were 7-1 or 7-2, the rate of unanimous or nearly unanimous jumps to 62%. In over 77% of cases, there was no ideological split in the resulting opinions. While slightly up, the ideological split emphasized in the coverage is found in less than a quarter of the cases. Now look at those supposed ideologically besieged liberal justices.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had the lowest percentage in the majority in the last term. However, she was still in the majority in 72% of cases. Jackson even agreed with Justice Samuel Alito in 49% of the cases and with Justice Clarence Thomas in half of the cases. The narrative also ignores major losses by the Trump administration in cases dealing with birthright citizenship, mail-in ballots, tariffs, the Federal Reserve Board members and even Trump’s personal defamation case.
Just this week, the court issued a ruling that President Trump called “a big loss for Republicans” in rejecting a mail-in ballot change for the next election. Those cases saw conservatives voting with their liberal colleagues. Indeed, Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Neil Gorsuch are generally viewed as “in play” in a variety of cases in creating mixed majorities. Critics aren’t just wrong that the court is biased, it’s incorrect that the Supremes are particularly unpopular.
A recent Marquette Law School poll shows that the court remains slightly underwater in popularity — with 47% favor, 53% disfavor. Not great, but those numbers are still more popular than Congress or the two major political parties. The unpopularity of Congress hit a whopping 86% this year. Gallup found that only 10% of the American people hold a favorable view of Congress. Trump’s popularity stands at around 40%. So the Supreme Court has the highest approval rate and is massively more popular than Congress. Yet, these members want to trash the most popular institution among the three branches.
Plenty of unanimity
This term is shaping up as another blockbuster, with major cases on gun rights, parental rights, immigration, climate change and other issues. Some cases will break along a 6-3 ideological divide, but many more will be decided by unanimity or mixed majorities, as in past years. The problem is that many in the media and politics will continue to demonize the court for those cases upon which they disagree and ignore the many cases upon which most of the justices agree. That includes exaggerated claims of the court “killing democracy.”
The move to pack the court is based on a long-standing radical agenda to change the constitutional system on the left. The court is standing in the way and these figures know that it is not easy to get a free people to give up on protections for those freedoms. They have to be very angry or very afraid. As a result, the court will resume hearing cases in an atmosphere of rage directed at its institution.
But make no mistake about it. This court continues to function as designed as a principled, independent institution. On our 250th anniversary, we should celebrate, not demonize, our highest court.

If PCR would just tell us he wants Iran to have nukes, at least we’d know where he’s at.

• Israel Has the World on a Path to Destruction (Paul Craig Roberts)

Do you remember a few years ago–Trump’s first term–when the Democrats–increasingly known as DemoRats–concocted the “Russiagate” hoax that Trump with Russia’s help had stolen the 2016 US presidential election? The Democrats’ plot against Trump involved the highest reaches of the FBI and US Department of Justice and was supported by the CIA director. The hoax claimed that America’s elections were in the hands of Russia, a foreign power that was putting their agents in charge of the US government. The whore American media gave the baseless accusations many years of life, and you still meet people who believe every word of it.

All the time there really was foreign money controlling US elections, only it is anti-semitic to speak about it, because it is AIPAC money, the money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. $32 million, an unprecedented amount for a primary election of a House of Representatives candidate, was given by AIPAC and Jewish billionaires to remove Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, likely the most American member of the US House of Representatives. Being a strong supporter of Trump didn’t save Massie from AIPAC.
Another AIPAC victim was Marjorie Taylor Green, another strong Trump supporter abandoned, like Massie, by Trump on orders from AIPAC. She also did not approve of Israel’s genocide of Palestine paid for with American money, weapons, and diplomatic cover. Faced with Trump-supported AIPAC slander campaign against her in her primary election, she resigned, reasoning that supporting America as contrasted with supporting Israel was too expensive.
Now we have from Truthout a report that “The giant influx from American Israel Public Affairs Committee PACs is a case study in money distorting politics.” The author writes:
“The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has been spending tens of millions of dollars on political races during the current election cycle, aiming to defeat progressive candidates who are critical of Israel and who express support for Palestinians. Many voters might not even be aware of this, because AIPAC-funded ads and mailers often omit any mention of Israel, even though fostering U.S. support for Israel and electing pro-Israel candidates are among the group’s driving aims.
“AIPAC’s lobbying and electoral network has so far spent $67.2 million during the current election cycle, up from $29.3 million during the 2021-2022 cycle. These huge amounts of spending have been dedicated to trying to defeat candidates like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Aisha Wahab in California, Melat Kiros in Colorado, and many others.
“AIPAC has a range of affiliated and aligned Super PACs and other entities. Some of the most significant ones are AIPAC PAC, the group’s political action committee, which raises money to contribute directly to candidates; United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s super PAC, which raises and spends much more money on elections independently; and Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) PAC, which is aligned with AIPAC and specifically focuses on Democratic races.”

“To be sure, both the House and Senate are still in play, but the total number of competitive contests that could decide control is at an all time low…”

• Nearly 90% of Midterm Races Were Not Competitive: Analysis (Ben Whedon)

A combination of redistricting and increased political polarization has rendered the overwhelming majority of House and Senate races uncompetitive. And 2026 is shaping up to be the least competitive midterm cycle in recent history, according to an analysis from Unite America.

To be sure, the competition between Democrats and Republicans to control the House and Senate is still in play in November. But the total number of competitive contests that could decide control is at an all-time low. All 435 House seats are up for reelection, but Unite America’s analysis suggests that 383 (88%) will be so uncompetitive that they were effectively decided by the party primary.
On the Senate side, however, only 35 seats are up for reelection. The math is somewhat less of a shutout, with only 26 (74%) of races deemed uncompetitive. The vast majority of races being decided in the primaries effectively shuts out many voters from having a meaningful say, the analysis found. Overall, just 10.2% of voters cast ballots in Senate primaries for either major political party this cycle. That figure stood at 9.4% in House races. Perhaps best illustrating the lack of substantive choice in elections, Unite America suggested, were the 150 House races in which the nominee for a safe seat ran unopposed in the primary.
Some of this disparity is due to a combination of low primary turnout, voter satisfaction with their own, specific representative, and, of course, apathy. But the recent redistricting push from Republicans, and the counterefforts from Democrats, have effectively eliminated many formerly competitive districts.
After the Supreme Court narrowed its interpretation of part of the Voting Rights Act to disallow race-based congressional districts, states across the South redrew their maps in ways that favored the Republicans. Among the states whose redraws favored Republicans were Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas. Missouri attempted to redraw its districts, but has faced legal challenges. Only California and Utah altered their maps in ways that benefited Democrats.
Virginia also attempted to redraw its maps via a constitutional amendment, but the state Supreme Court found the process unconstitutional after voters had already backed the Democratic proposal. Accordingly, the state’s maps will sit at 6 Democratic and 5 Republican-leaning districts in November.
The result was to render less than 5% of House races as true toss-ups. The Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index (PVI), currently regards only 21 of 435 districts as “toss ups.” A further 208 at least lean Republican, while 206 at least lean Democratic. But redistricting did not affect the Senate at all, and seven of the 35 races are “toss-ups” in the PVI.
Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the Center for Politics, meanwhile, paints a similar picture, with 203 seats leaning Republican and 210 leaning Democratic, with only 22 toss-ups. Sabato, however, views only five Senate contests as competitive. The RealClearPolitics polling average does not currently feature a House breakdown, but regards nine Senate races as competitive.

Le Canard Enchaîne.

• French Soldiers Applaud Military Chaplain’s Warning Of ‘Great Replacement’ (RMX)

A leaked video of a French military chaplain addressing paratroopers in a cathedral has circulated widely on social media. In the clip, the chaplain makes disparaging remarks about leftists, tells soldiers to keep fighting for their national heritage, and warns of the risk that French values and culture could be displaced.

The clip, recorded during a Saint-Michel Mass on Oct. 7, 2025, shows Father Romain Ghandour speaking to soldiers of the 3rd Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment (3e RPIMa) at Carcassonne’s Saint-Michel Cathedral. Soldiers can be heard laughing and applauding as he delivers his pointed remarks. The clip was leaked and published by Le Canard Enchaîne news outlet.
https://twitter.com/RMXnews/status/2100894085120749688?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2100894085120749688%7Ctwgr%5E77997ba3f7742c60e9e15fe5029a90d5975fbdba%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Frmx.news%2Farticle%2Fcalm-down-lefties-quiet-in-leaked-video-french-soldiers-clap-and-applaud-as-military-chaplain-slams-leftists-and-warns-of-replacement%2F

The video was released in mid-September 2026, nearly a year after the Mass.
Saint-Michel is the patron saint of paratroopers and airborne troops in the French army, which explains why the regiment was gathered in the cathedral. Christophe Barthès, then a municipal election candidate and later elected mayor of Carcassonne for the right-wing National Rally, was among those present. Ghandour begins by invoking the names and dates of men and women who died so that France would remain “a beautiful country,” one in which architects could continue building “basilicas, cathedrals, housing, and fortified castles.”
He contrasts that heritage with the present: instead of knights, he says, “we put incompetent people. We put people who eat seeds, people who lecture everyone, ideologues.” The phrase “people who eat seeds” is widely understood as a jab at what he presents as weak or overly ideological leftists. The line that has drawn the most attention comes next: “Calm down, lefties! Quiet! Breathe through your nose!” The assembled soldiers respond with laughter and applause. He then warns that if they lose courage and conviction, “we will be ridiculed” and “this beautiful country that is France will be mocked, and others will take our place.”
He continues: “In fact, after a while, when you’re thirsty, when you’re hungry, it’s the law of the strongest that reigns. And others will take the place of our values, of this freedom of speech, of action, of this equality between men, and of this fraternity, of this culture, of this society. Nature abhors a vacuum.”
While he never directly mentions the “Great Replacement,” many commentators have taken this remark to be a direct reference to the phenomenon, which is not only a reference to mass immigration, but also relates to the constant replacement of technology, culture, society, and peoples through all spheres of modern life at an ever accelerating pace. Ghandour closes by telling the soldiers to “keep fighting” and “continue to have the courage of your convictions, as I am trying to do at this Mass.”
As of the video’s release, there has been no detailed public statement from the army’s Catholic chaplaincy or the Ministry of the Armed Forces on whether the remarks violate rules on political neutrality for military clergy. French military chaplains of all recognized faiths operate under a framework that is supposed to respect both freedom of conscience and the state’s neutrality. The 3e RPIMa, based in Carcassonne since 1962 and part of the 11th Parachute Brigade, is an elite unit within the French military.
The left has often been skeptical, and even hostile to, the French military, which has been seen as a bastion of support for the right in the country.

Humanoid robots are now helping manufacture more humanoid robots.

UBTECH has opened a new smart factory in China that can produce one robot about every 10 minutes.

The facility uses robots, automated systems, and guided vehicles, with a stated capacity of around 10,000 robots… pic.twitter.com/cSTHV7diOI
— Space and Technology (@spaceandtech_) September 19, 2026

Elon Musk: AI has given me nightmares for days in a row.

“If I could, I would certainly slow down AI and robotics.”

“It’s advancing at a very rapid pace, whether I like it or not.”

“Is AI what keeps you up at night?”

“I’ve had a lot of AI nightmares.”

“I’ve had AI nightmares… pic.twitter.com/9IeXHQtrlO
— Veee (@vikktorrrre) September 19, 2026

Worth reading about this https://t.co/RMm24CyFPo
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 19, 2026

Sounds bad https://t.co/IpuEpFiM9z
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 19, 2026

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Debt Rattle September 20 2026

Sep 202026

September 20, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:53 am Finance Tagged with: AI, CNN, Denmark, Germany, Greenland, pacman, sanctions, Ukraine, Von der Leyen, Zelensky 14 Responses »

Thomas Cole Consummation of Empire 1836

• Trump Announces Permanent Security Deal with Denmark and Greenland (CTH)

• What Happens When Pacman Rescues the Princess (Scott Pinsker)

• Trump Just Dropped the Receipts on CNN, and It’s Brutal (Matt Margolis)

• Team Trump Releases the List CNN Wishes Didn’t Exist (Bob Hoge)

• AI Hallucinated Nuclear Weapons Components Aboard Chinese Vessel (ZH)

• Trump Just Located New Bases for 40,000 U.S. Military in Europe (CTH)

• President Trump Signs Yet Another Russian Sanctions Bill (CTH)

• Princeton Faculty Reach Perfect Zero in Support for Republicans (Turley)

• Canada Looks To Cash In On EU’s €90bn Ukraine Arms Scheme (RT)

• Von der Leyen Sends Zelensky €3.3bn After Phone Call (RT)

• Germany Should Profit From Ukraine Aid – Merz Ally (RT)

https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/2101041690186518857?s=20 https://twitter.com/JustTheNews/status/2101070404563402962?s=20

Why Greenland and Trumps Greenland deal is so important

-Arctic sealanes
-Golden dome
-Critical resources like rare earth minerals

◾️on the map you can see the retreating icecap has opened shippinglanes for periods of the year. Greenland offers a place to monitor and restrict… pic.twitter.com/UzjXjP2e2N
— Brian McDonald B (@iamBrianBJ) September 18, 2026

https://twitter.com/Trustintrump47/status/2101099949370863734?s=20

“President Donald Trump announces a permanent security deal between the USA, Denmark and Greenland establishing U.S. military bases on the arctic region. The government of Denmark confirms.”

• Trump Announces Permanent Security Deal with Denmark and Greenland (CTH)

(Via Truth Social) – BREAKING NEWS: I am pleased to announce that the United States of America has entered into an Agreement with The Kingdom of Denmark, and Greenland, that gives the United States permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our many U.S. concerns. There will be NO COST to the United States!

At my direction, we worked with representatives of Denmark and Greenland to guarantee that the United States will FOREVER have the complete ability to do what is necessary in Greenland in order to secure and defend the security of Greenland, and the United States of America. Additionally, from now on, no U.S. adversary can EVER have a base in Greenland, have a military presence in Greenland, or make sensitive investments in Greenland, without our express written approval.
For over 100 years, Presidents have known the strategic importance of Greenland, but NONE of them were able to do anything about it. I am proud to be the President that permanently and conclusively addressed this very important situation. This is an “Infinite Life” Agreement, there is no end! We are very honored and proud of what has just taken place, and everything agreed to today will be cherished by the American People. We will immediately begin the process of developing a large Military presence in the appropriate part of Greenland, of which there are many. We will work with the people of Greenland in its development and construction.”
“This solution is a great one for the United States of America, Denmark, Greenland, and all of our Allies. We look forward to working with the wonderful people of Denmark and Greenland toward a magnificent future with respect to this large, and highly strategic, parcel of land. We will be very protective of it! This is a dream come true for the United States of America, one that is very important, historic, and special. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” ~ President Donald J Trump
The government of Denmark has confirmed the deal.
Official statement from the Prime Minister of Denmark’s office: Greenland, Denmark, and the USA expect to sign an agreement in the coming week.
“Anticipated agreement on strengthened security in the Arctic and North Atlantic region
Greenland, Denmark, and the USA expect to sign an agreement in the coming week that strengthens security in the Arctic and the North Atlantic region. The three governments are expected to sign the agreement next week in connection with the UN General Assembly. Once signed, the agreement will have to undergo the necessary parliamentary procedures to enter into force. Premier of Greenland (Chair of Naalakkersuisut) Jens-Frederik Nielsen states:
“It is gratifying that we are on the verge of concluding an agreement that ensures and strengthens security for Greenland, the Kingdom of Denmark, the USA, and the Western alliance. The agreement recognizes Greenland’s interests and our place in international cooperation. It is to the benefit of us all.” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen states:
“I am pleased that there is a prospect of a good agreement for Greenland, the Kingdom of Denmark, and the USA. An agreement that strengthens our shared security in the Arctic and the North Atlantic region, and is thus also beneficial for NATO and Europe. And an agreement that simultaneously recognizes the Kingdom’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as the right of the Greenlandic people to self-determination.”
No further comments will be available at this time.”

“The Great Greenland Gaslight:..”

• What Happens When Pacman Rescues the Princess (Scott Pinsker)

They were shocked! That rude, disgraceful vulgarian did it again! Because in international diplomacy, negotiations aren’t really negotiations — they’re wish lists, performative art, and virtue signaling. The purpose, after all, isn’t to get results. It’s to express political sympathies while protecting the status quo. (And take a lovely photo-op at the cocktail party.) But that ain’t how it works in New York real estate: You come in high and hard, manufacture leverage, and negotiate from a position of strength. Boom, boom, boom. Sharks and minnows.

Because in New York real estate, the purpose is to sign the best possible deal. So when President Donald Trump started talking about seizing Greenland, diplomats all over Europe were aghast. “Why, sir! Have you no shame?” It was a dreadful breach of decorum! (Plus, it totally killed the vibe of the cocktail party.) But y’know what? It worked. Just as “peace through strength” worked for Ronald Reagan, “negotiating through strength” worked for Trump. Because human nature is constant; the common denominator is strength.
And in life, whoever projects the most strength usually wins. It demotivates aggression and wobbles knees in negotiations. Been that way since the dawn of time. It’s simply who we are. Yesterday, it led to a stunning diplomatic breakthrough: The U.S. just came within a whisker of annexing Greenland — and we did it without paying a dime or firing a single bullet. As PJ Media’s Matt Margolis wrote:
“The United States, Denmark, and Greenland signed a permanent agreement Friday that hands Washington lasting military rights across the island while permanently shutting out China, Russia, and every other non-NATO adversary. The deal gives the U.S. permanent access, basing, and overflight rights in Greenland, along with the authority to build new military installations there whenever it decides it needs to, according to a senior U.S. official who briefed Fox News Digital.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio wasted no time celebrating. “This historic deal is a huge win for the United States and the American people,” he said. “This historic agreement permanently guarantees U.S. security interests in the Arctic at zero cost to the U.S. taxpayer.” President Trump crowed on social media:

BREAKING NEWS: I am pleased to announce that the United States of America has entered into an Agreement with The Kingdom of Denmark, and Greenland, that gives the United States permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 19, 2026

Almost immediately, a media consensus emerged: Yawn. This is no big deal — it’s the same as before. And since Greenland isn’t “officially” part of America, Trump lost the negotiations.
• The Atlantic: The Greenland Fiasco Stumbles to an End
• Washington Post: Trump Hails Greenland Security Deal That Falls Short of Takeover
• Daily Beast: Trump Suffers Humiliating Defeat of His Crackpot Plan to Own Greenland
• Reuters: Greenland, Denmark Say U.S. Deal Will Not Cede Sovereignty
• New York Times: ‘Nervous and Skeptical,’ Greenlanders Question the New Deal With Trump
• NBC News: After Greenland Threats, Trump Settles for a Deal That Avoids Further Angering Allies
• DW News: Greenland Deal Gives U.S. What It Already Had
• Times of India: Trump’s Greenland Dream FAILS! ‘Wanted to Buy’ Island, but Denmark Keeps Control Despite U.S. Deal

What kind of crazy, screwed-up world is this when we must turn to Al-freakin’-Jazeera for a less-biased spin? (It says something about the sad state of American media when President Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House for political bias — yet Al Jazeera remains.) But here we are:

It’s a four-minute (and change) clip, but the money quote is this: “[Trump] got pretty much everything he wanted except formal annexation.” We gained permanent rights, control, and access to Greenland, completely independent of NATO — and also independent of Greenland declaring itself a sovereign nation. It’s now de facto American territory. Additionally, Russia and China are frozen out. Forever. From the American point of view, it was a helluva victory. Best of all, it didn’t cost taxpayers a penny. In exchange for lifting the (completely manufactured!) leverage of annexing Greenland, Trump got EVERYTHING he wanted on a silver platter.
And that’s great news for the American people — and a much-needed break for the GOP with the midterms 45-ish days away. Because winning begets winning. The Greenland breakthrough won’t shift the midterms all on its own, but it can do something even more meaningful. It can signal the start of a new narrative: the great American winning streak! Too much of the midterms’ focus has been on what’s going wrong. From gas prices to groceries to the Iran War to AI doomerism, it’s been a season of discontent. But there’s so much positivity to report: The border is secure. Crime is at record lows. So is the poverty rate.
Yet the Republicans refuse to spike the damn football! I don’t know how else to say this, boys and girls: If we don’t forcefully — and passionately — tell voters our story, they’re not gonna hear it. ‘Cause the media sure as hell won’t tell them for us. If you’re a conservative, things don’t move on their own. We must proactively push them. The burden is ours. So sell the crime, border, and poverty stats. Add our Greenland victory. And now we have the beginning of a new political narrative. Which, one hopes, more positive news stories will bolster.
Which will then become part of this new, emerging narrative: The great American comeback is now underway — and if we want to keep the good times rollin’, we better keep those crazy communists out of Congress. Because, as a one-off, Greenland will be like a burp in a hurricane: It’ll come and go, gone and forgotten. Its staying power is nonexistent. Trump solved a problem that very few voters care about. Americans want high-paying jobs, dirt-cheap gas and groceries, affordable housing, and personal freedom and security. It’s not intuitive to them how Greenland fits into the equation.
Trump is kind of like Pacman — but instead of eating the dots and evading the ghosts, he’s crowing about saving Princess Peach from Bowser in Super Mario Bros: Great work bruh, but that’s not the game we’re playing. And that’s why the smartest PR play is to connect the Greenland victory — which was a real, honest-to-God victory — to something even greater. And for MAGA’s purposes, the best possible connection is to the MAGA mission itself. Making America Great Again! (In other words, winning.)
Don’t treat the Greenland deal as an independent story, but as a pivot point. An opportunity to shift the narrative — before it’s too late.Otherwise, the media’s Greenland gaslighting will turn our victory into another paragraph in the “Trump is distracted” narrative: Instead of lowering prices, he’s wasting time in the frozen Nordic tundra. (See? Trump doesn’t care about people like you and me. Vote for someone sane and grounded — y’know, like Abdul El-Sayed.)
Make no mistake, Greenland matters for America’s future — and leveraged correctly from a position of strength, it could reset the 2026 midterms. Its value isn’t just what it is, but what we can do with it. The rest is up to us.

They’ve been saving them up..

• Trump Just Dropped the Receipts on CNN, and It’s Brutal (Matt Margolis)

On Friday, President Donald Trump banned CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House, effective immediately. In a Truth Social post, he said all three outlets are locked out over what he calls their fake and fictitious reporting, and he warned that more networks are coming.

“I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW (who recently changed their name from MSNBC due to lack of viewership and credibility!), and Politico (The recipients of an illegal and ridiculous $8 Million Dollar subscription, an All Time Record, directly from the United States Government, under Crooked Joe Biden, in order to keep them ‘alive,’” he wrote. “Seems like corruption to me!), from the White House as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!”
CNN responded with a statement defending its White House team. “CNN stands fully behind our White House team and their fair and accurate reporting,” the statement read. “We have a right under the U.S. Constitution to do that reporting without hindrance or interference from the government. Should the ban which President Trump threatened go ahead, it would be an illegal assault on that fundamental and constitutionally-protected right.”
That technically doesn’t entitle it to White House credentials. There are lots of media outlets that don’t get White House credentials. And let’s face it, whatever you think of this action by the White House, CNN is the same network that spent years manufacturing its own version of reality, which curiously benefits the Democrats every single time. Now, sure, legal challenges and First Amendment arguments are already expected from all three outlets, but it’s worth examining here if the White House has justification.
And boy, did the Trump team drop receipts. The White House Rapid Response account on X responded with a list cataloging years of the network’s own reporting failures and outright fabrications, nearly 50 examples in all. And I’m sure it’s not even everything. For example, CNN ran with the Russia collusion hoax for years, and it falsely claimed Trump once called for Liz Cheney to be executed. The network also pushed a story accusing Trump of trashing American troops, and another claiming he assaulted a Secret Service agent and grabbed the wheel of his own limousine. All bogus stories.
CNN’s sloppiness hasn’t been limited to Trump himself. It falsely reported that police officers were killed during the January 6 riot at the Capitol, and it described the violent 2020 Kenosha riots as “fiery but mostly peaceful” while buildings burned behind its own reporters. In 2019, the network promoted false accusations of racism against the Covington Catholic students and ran with Jussie Smollett’s obviously fabricated hate-crime story.
CNN also insisted Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” long after his decline was obvious to anyone paying attention, and in 2024, it gave Kamala Harris cover by claiming she’d never actually served as the administration’s border czar. And let’s not forget the way CNN claimed that Elon Musk made a Nazi salute.

https://t.co/h78fUx200J pic.twitter.com/20CHMpdTw3
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) September 18, 2026

Whatever happens to Trump’s ban, no one can take CNN’s outrage over “accuracy” seriously.

“A Staggering Tally of Failure and Deception..”

• Team Trump Releases the List CNN Wishes Didn’t Exist (Bob Hoge)

As our Ward Clark reported Friday, Donald Trump is fed up with the fake news mainstream media, and he took action by announcing that CNN, Politico, and MS NOW are no longer welcome to attend White House Press briefings or Oval Office Q&As. The president roasted the outlets on social media, saying they’re less trustworthy than Pinocchio and routinely inject immense bias into their stories.

“Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” he wrote. Expect lawsuits and First Amendment arguments and plenty of hyperventilating drama from those outlets; they’re simply not used to facing consequences (except for the occasional legal settlement) for playing fast and loose with the facts.
As you’d expect, CNN’s feelings are hurt over Trump’s declaration, and they quickly put out a high-minded statement defending their incredibly brave, heroic reporters and pundits:
CNN Statement on White House access: pic.twitter.com/X0rMWFfueA
— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) September 18, 2026

They laughably describe their reporters as “fair and accurate” in the post: “CNN stands fully behind our White House team and their fair and accurate reporting. We have a right under the U.S. Constitution to do that reporting without hindrance or interference from the government. Should the ban which President Trump threatened go ahead, it would be an illegal assault on that fundamental and constitutionally-protected right.”
We all know that’s a load of hooey, and I’m sure for many readers, several recollections of embarrassing CNN failures immediately came to mind. The outlet may have wished they hadn’t poked the bear, however, because Team Trump quickly reacted with a staggering list of their mistakes, deceptions, and outright dereliction of duty. I admit, even as someone who follows this stuff closely, my jaw fell to the ground. There are so many examples that I’d started to forget some of them.
If I wrote up every one, I’d be at my keyboard for days, but even amidst that epic record of failure, a few incidents stand out as exceptionally egregious. Perhaps the most famous is the 2020 “mostly peaceful” riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which followed the shooting of a suspect named Jacob Blake who resisted arrest when police were investigating a domestic call. The conflagration came in August during the summer of the George Floyd riots that rocked the country:

You cannot make this up… A CNN reporter is standing in front of a building engulfed in flames and CNN's chyron reads:

"FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING" pic.twitter.com/4OHvKnh63u
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) August 27, 2020

The mostly peaceful violence led to an estimated $50 million in damage in Kenosha, and teenager Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people, two of them fatally, in an act that was later determined to be self-defense. The Summer of Love’s mostly peaceful yet somehow riots led to an estimated $2 billion in damage and 31 deaths when all was said and done.
There are so many other false narratives the network pushed that it’s hard to process, but the other falsehoods that jump out at me are the 2019 Nick Sandman/Covington Catholic kids BS white supremacy allegations, the laughable Jussie Smollett fake claim of assault by racist MAGA dudes (also in 2019), which CNN bought hook, line, and sinker, and more recently, the network’s endless efforts to convince us that Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” despite mounds of evidence proving otherwise.
Even worse, anchor Jake Tapper, a top media leader of the Great American Cover-Up, then did an about-face by writing a book that pretended he was part of the solution. Absolutely no shame in that guy. Don’t get me started on their COVID coverage, where they endlessly cheered on the Draconian Biden-Fauci regime, or I might explode in rage. Who knows if Trump will follow through with his threat or if it will even withstand legal challenges, but this embarrassing list should be tacked to the wall of every newsroom, courthouse, and college classroom in the country.
As we like to say around these parts, “You can’t hate the media enough.”

Can you program it to hallucinate? Can it program itself to?

• AI Hallucinated Nuclear Weapons Components Aboard Chinese Vessel (ZH)

Could runaway artificial intelligence (AI) spark a future WW3? We don’t need movies like Terminator 2 and its SkyNet to help us imagine this, it’s 2026 and there is already a terrifying real-world precedent that could have kicked off a shooting war with nuclear-armed China. A human analyst within the US intelligence community utilized data gathered by AI for a report that was later widely circulated across classified Pentagon channels, except that the chatbot which was relied upon in effect hallucinated nuclear weapons components being transported aboard a Chinese vessel bound for Iran.

Naturally this set off the highest alerts in Washington in the middle of an active hot war which President Trump launched ostensibly to prevent this very thing – Iran obtaining a nuke and atomic weapons components. From there military planning kicked into high gear, with a special forces boarding operation imminent. Supposedly elite assets were already airborne, ready to descend on the Chinese ship in question.
But then, “the operation was halted only after officials took a closer look at the intelligence report and discovered that it had been produced with assistance from an AI chatbot,” CNN reports in a bombshell Friday exclusive. The episode reportedly happened last spring. The severe error was realized with barely enough time to call off what could have been the geopolitical blunder and disaster of the century, “The chatbot had incorrectly identified the material the vessel was carrying.”
In essence the United States found itself based on completely manufactured ‘intel’ potentially headed for conflict with China. As if to to preempt anyone who might be tempted to think the account is merely being hyperbolic or needlessly sensational, one official (unnamed) source told CNN that the intelligence assessment, which was “entirely false” – in the end “almost started a war.” While Pentagon leadership, including US Special Operations Command Pacific, has yet to respond to CNN’s queries, the outlet pieces together the alleged chain of events and how this could have possibly happened in the following:
In this particular instance, the analyst queried a chatbot about some intelligence reporting on the ship’s manifest that originated with US Special Operations Command Pacific, based in Hawaii. It was not clear whether the chatbot was a commercially available one or a US government product. “The internal tools are mostly just copies of the commercial stuff wearing lipstick,” a former senior US official familiar with the AI systems used by military and intelligence analysts.
The bot fused together open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings and reached its fateful conclusion about the material the ship was carrying. The analyst then used AI again to package the findings into a standard intelligence report — the kind that is trusted by military officials — and disseminated it. The report seems to be suggesting that the unknown AI tool that was utilized would be deemed substandard and weak for such an important assessment in the first place.
Further “comforting” for readers is that given heavy AI-integration seems the “irreversible” trend of the day across the DoD/Depart of War and IC, similar near-misses in the near and distant future are bound to happen. CNN underscores, “Across the US military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work, from analyzing the huge volumes of raw intelligence the US collects and selecting targets for strikes, to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics and supply chains.”
Meanwhile, another botched AI job perhaps?…

SCOOP: A shipment of F-35 parts, including a canopy, wound up in Hong Kong — sparking an investigation on Capitol Hill and raising the possibility that China could have access to key components of the highly-classified program.

with @marksatter https://t.co/Y0ufsqEcY0
— Audrey Decker (@audrey_decker9) September 18, 2026

New bases in Greenland?!

• Trump Just Located New Bases for 40,000 U.S. Military in Europe (CTH)

Toward Latin America there are multiple options, but it’s likely a significant U.S. military footprint is destined for Greenland. If you read President Trump’s earlier announcement you might note: …”We will immediately begin the process of developing a large Military presence in the appropriate part of Greenland, of which there are many. We will work with the people of Greenland in its development and construction.”

This announcement comes directly after President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a review of NATO forces in Europe with the expressed intention of drawing down the U.S. footprint. The Pentagon announced a six-month review of US forces in Europe in June, directing US Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, the head of US European Command, to assess future force requirements.
According to media, “The proposed reduction could involve around 25,000 troops, which is roughly one-third of the approximately 80,000 US service members currently stationed in Europe. Some officials involved in the discussions have indicated that the figure could be considerably higher, potentially reaching 40,000, or about half of the American military presence on the continent, according to NBC News.”
Germany is the largest American military hub on the continent, with around 36,000 US troops. Italy hosts about 12,000 US troops and several major air bases. Spain, meanwhile, provides important air and naval facilities in the country’s south. These would be the bases most likely to see significant withdrawal. All three nations are a hot mess of political manipulation, economic turmoil, internal friction and opposition to the U.S. national security framework.
Revisit President Trump and Marco Rubio’s National Security Strategy: [President Trump] – […] The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.
[…] The Trump Administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition. A large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes. This is strategically important to the] United States precisely because European states cannot reform themselves if they are trapped in political crisis.
[…] Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter. {SOURCE}
Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio wrote that outline.
So, North American military bases will essentially look like this:

How about them elbows!

What?

“President Trump Signs Russian Sanctions Bill that Grants Him Massive Tariff Authority Over U.S. Imports from Countries Doing Business With Russia “

Trump wants Russian oil back in the world markets. It can win him both the Iran and Ukraine wars.

• President Trump Signs Yet Another Russian Sanctions Bill (CTH)

After a careful review of HR5334, the Lindsey Graham Russian Sanctions Bill [pdf HERE], I can certainly see why President Trump would happily sign it.= The bill has several elements that are immensely useful for President Trump, beginning with the fact that the baseline of the bill sits upon the cornerstone of current U.S. sanctions against Russia. This is a critical aspect to understand, because if you take away the originating Russian sanctions, HR5334 disappears.

Secondly, the bill grants President Trump the ability to place 100% tariffs on the top five trading partners of Russia, but the bill also grants wide latitude as to how those top five are determined. Top five oil, top five gas, top five financial, top five sector specific (energy, grain, oil, minerals etc.) the actual parameters or definitions of the “top five” are undetermined except by monetary value.
Some have just realized what this bill empowers. Others have yet to catch on. Additionally, The bill gives President Trump the ability to impose tariffs of up to 100% within 30 days on all goods imported into the US from the five largest importers of Russian crude oil or gas as well as any country that knowingly made new purchases of oil or gas 30 days after the law was enacted or was among the top five countries helping Russia evade sanctions.
But there’s the key, again the authority is based on the pre-existing “sanctions.” So, who determines sanction relief? [interim, temporary, or strategic, in coordination with the policy objectives of the President] That would be U.S. Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent.
Remember the previous 30-day interim sanction relief that Bessent and Trump provided for Russian oil/gas “on the water’? In that scenario, the legislatively authorized tariff authority becomes entirely subject to the application determination of President Trump. Ex. give a 30-day waiver and suddenly oil/gas are no longer the largest monetary trade issues. Instead, it could be as simple as who buys the most Russian caviar; maybe it’s Italy or Spain, or even Canada.
Reuters – […] critics say the legislation, which imposes tariffs on Russia’s biggest trading partners, has broad language that could herald trouble for other countries as well if they find themselves in Trump’s crosshairs in the future. The bill requires Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100% within 30 days on all goods imported into the US from the five largest importers of Russian crude oil or gas as well as any country that knowingly made new purchases of oil or gas 30 days after the law was enacted or was among the top five countries helping Russia evade sanctions.
China and India are among the biggest buyers of Russian oil, but critics say the law gives US officials enough leeway to name a range of targets since it does not name any country or spell out how the top-five lists would be calculated. “Given the discretionary authority that the president has, it is likely to be abused,” said Laura Brank, a lawyer at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner who focuses on cross-border transactions.
[…] Challenging the latest tariffs in court could be difficult since the law specifically calls for the duties, while previous challenges to tariffs have successfully argued that the Trump administration misapplied laws from decades earlier. (more)
Congress was very upset at the horrible Trump for his tariff approach.
Congress has just given Trump a golden tariff pen.

The US education system is dying.

• Princeton Faculty Reach Perfect Zero in Support for Republicans (Turley)

We recently discussed how Yale faculty reached academic nirvana after years of purging departments of conservatives and Republicans. The university finally showed zero political donations to Republicans. Now Princeton can claim that it has succeeded in a similar cleansing, according to a new study by Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS). The study shows that 98% of political donations went to Democrats or Democrat-affiliated groups and 0% went to Republicans or affiliated groups.

Political contributions are one measure that helps gauge the degree of ideological orthodoxy and intolerance in higher education. While some academics simply do not make contributions and may still hold conservative views, the study still offers another insight into the political preferences of those who do make such contributions. The study does not mean that we can assume that the number of academics with conservative or libertarian values is zero. (There are obvious outliers such as Robby George). However, few would dispute that it reaffirms the extreme imbalance of ideological views at this and other universities.
Professors often express shock at the thought that there would be any political or ideological litmus test for hiring. I have also opposed such measures. However, the hypocrisy is crushing. Today’s faculty are responsible for a near-complete ideological purging of their ranks. They have created a hostile environment for anyone with conservative or libertarian viewpoints, including students who rarely have the opportunity to hear from a professor from a center-right perspective at most schools.
Most recently, forty percent of college faculty admitted that they would vote against any Trump supporter seeking an academic position regardless of their scholarship or teaching ability. Keep in mind that this is only the professors willing to admit to such bias. Some are more open than others. I had dinner with a Harvard Law Professor, who expressed disbelief that I expected him to vote for any faculty applicants who held views he considered wrong. When I noted that I regularly vote for faculty candidates who hold opposing views, he just shrugged and said that, if he rejects their views, he cannot vote for those views to be taught to students.
There are few remaining conservatives or libertarians on law school faculties, which have been purged of dissenting voices through a biased hiring and promotion system. Despite years of complaints and declining public trust in higher education, faculty members continue to reinforce bias and orthodoxy in our schools. Is wrote about the rise of this new McCarthyism on the left seven years ago.
Recently, I discussed the example of Fordham University School of Law professor John Pfaff, who called for “repercussions” for professors who do not “recant” their view that the 14th Amendment does not protect birthright citizenship. Not long ago, I debated Professor Randall Kennedy at Harvard Law School about the school’s lack of ideological diversity. I respect Kennedy, and I do not view him as anti-free speech or intolerant. Yet when I noted the statistics on the vanishing number of conservative students and faculty in comparison to the nation, Kennedy responded that Harvard “is an elite university” and does not have to “look like America.”
Of course, the problem is that Harvard does not even look like Massachusetts, which is nearly 30 percent Republican. At schools like Yale and Princeton, they have achieved near 100% for Democrats (with only a couple of percent going for independent or socialist causes). Yet, if you ask faculty about the purging of their ranks, they will often shrug and say that they just cannot find a conservative or libertarian who is intellectually worthy of an appointment to their schools. It was the same absurd rationalization that was once used to justify not hiring minorities or women.
I just had a debate with a William & Mary law professor who admitted there is no other rational explanation for the virtual absence of conservatives and libertarians than systemic bias. Indeed, if a company were to go to court to say that there was nothing intentional in a virtual absence of minority employees, it would be laughed out of court.
Of course, nothing is laughable about the state of higher education. This generation of administrators and faculty are destroying our educational institutions because they cannot set aside their political bias and intolerance for the benefit of their schools. Higher education has reached record lows in public trust. Yet, these professors and deans are insulated from such public opinion. They are often financially insulated from the economic impact of such isolation. In higher education, the echo chamber works to their personal benefit, increasing their opportunities for writing and conferences. They also do not face opposing views of their scholarship or viewpoints.
Recently, I participated in a debate with the President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). He doubled down on his call for universities to pursue more political agendas and activism. AAUP later broke its long-standing apolitical tradition and endorsed Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. This is why I have advised university presidents who want to restore intellectual diversity that they cannot rely on faculty members. With enough donor and faculty pressure, deans may add a single conservative, but they have shown they are unwilling to make real changes to the academic echo chamber they have created.

Riddle me this: The “loan” will never be paid back. but Canada is very eager to join.

• Canada Looks To Cash In On EU’s €90bn Ukraine Arms Scheme (RT)

Canada is seeking to join the EU’s €90 billion loan program for Ukraine, a European Commission spokesman said on Friday, in a move that would allow Canadian arms manufacturers to compete for contracts financed by the scheme. Ottawa has been discussing participation with Brussels for some time and would have to contribute toward the EU’s borrowing costs in return for access to the procurement scheme. The UK joined the mechanism under a similar arrangement in July.

“I can confirm that Canada has expressed an interest in joining the 90 billion Ukraine support loan,” European Commission spokesman Balazs Ujvari told journalists in Brussels. “Technical exchanges have been ongoing with Canada for some time, and they are still ongoing,” he added. Canadian participation would not increase the €90 billion available to Kiev. Instead, it would allow Ukraine to use the funds to buy weapons from Canadian manufacturers without requiring a special exemption from the scheme’s procurement rules.
The talks come as Kiev faces mounting financial pressure. The EU loan is intended to cover much of Ukraine’s budgetary and military financing needs for 2026 and 2027, which remain heavily dependent on foreign aid. Of the €90 billion, €60 billion is earmarked for military assistance and €30 billion for general budget support. Despite the outside funding, Ukraine faces a $27 billion budget shortfall. Vladimir Zelensky announced in August that Kiev had already spent funds originally intended to cover its needs through the end of 2026.
The financial crunch has coincided with a series of high-profile corruption and embezzlement scandals in sectors heavily supported by Ukraine’s foreign backers. The most prominent involved state nuclear operator Energoatom and implicated figures close to Zelensky, prompting a senior-level reshuffle. An escalation in long-range strikes between Russia and Ukraine targeting critical infrastructure has further strained Kiev’s economic outlook.
The intensified exchanges followed Zelensky’s failed 40-day pressure campaign against Russia, which included Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure and warehouses belonging to major e-commerce retailers. Moscow subsequently intensified strikes on Ukrainian ports and vessels it said were carrying military supplies, severely disrupting Kiev’s Black Sea exports, previously the country’s main export route.

€3.3bn is peanuts

• Von der Leyen Sends Zelensky €3.3bn After Phone Call (RT)

The EU has released another €3.3 billion ($3.8 billion) to Ukraine following a phone call between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky, as Kiev faces fresh corruption cases and a surprise $27 billion hole in its defense budget. Von der Leyen announced the payment on Thursday immediately after speaking with Zelensky. She said the EU had already provided Kiev with nearly €15 billion this year and promised that “more is coming.”

At the same time, she acknowledged that Ukraine’s parliament has yet to pass anti-corruption, judicial, fiscal and green energy reforms required to unlock further EU funding. The European Commission confirmed on Friday that the €3.3 billion had been disbursed. The payment marks the fourth defense tranche under the EU’s €90 billion Ukraine Support Loan. The EU and its member states say they have provided a total of €224.5 billion in support to Ukraine since 2022.
The latest payout comes as Kiev seeks billions more from its Western backers to cover an unexpectedly large defense funding gap. Zelensky told European officials last month that Ukraine needed another $27 billion to make it through the year, according to the New York Times. The request reportedly “surprised and unsettled” officials, with some privately questioning whether existing funds were being spent efficiently or whether Kiev was overstating its needs.
The fresh funding also comes amid a series of corruption investigations involving public funds, military procurement and senior Ukrainian officials.Over the past year, scandals have reached into the energy sector, military procurement and the upper levels of government. The sprawling Midas probe uncovered an alleged $100 million kickback and money-laundering network around state nuclear operator Energoatom. Separate investigations have targeted inflated drone contracts, the alleged theft of foreign donations and senior officials accused of illicit enrichment.
Ukraine’s Western-backed anti-corruption agencies have themselves raised concerns about graft risks surrounding defense procurement. NABU Director Semyon Krivonos said last month that major arms suppliers can have powerful beneficiaries among lawmakers, senior law-enforcement officials and other branches of government. Russia has repeatedly argued that continued Western financing only prolongs the conflict and has cited Ukraine’s corruption scandals in criticizing foreign support for Kiev. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said last week that the “laundering” of Western money had become a “form of existence” for the Ukrainian authorities.

Use German money to buy German arms..

“Bavarian premier Markus Soeder has demanded that Kiev buy more German arms and provide access to raw materials..”

• Germany Should Profit From Ukraine Aid – Merz Ally (RT)

Germany should demand greater economic benefits from the billions it spends supporting Ukraine, including more arms orders and access to raw materials, Bavarian Minister-President Markus Soeder said on Friday. Since beginning his second term, US President Donald Trump has pushed European NATO members to shoulder more of the cost of supporting Kiev. He has also touted European-funded purchases of US weapons and Washington’s minerals deal with Ukraine as ways for the US to recoup some of its spending on the conflict.

“Overall, Ukraine should also use the many German aid funds to buy more technology from Germany,” said Soeder, who leads the Bavarian CSU, the sister party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU. “And we too, not just the US, should also discuss access to raw materials with Ukraine.” Rare earths and other critical minerals covered by Washington’s deal with Kiev are used in a wide range of military and high-tech applications. Soeder’s view echoes recent comments by German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, who has argued that Berlin’s support for Kiev should translate into more orders for German arms manufacturers.
Germany has earmarked around €11.5 billion ($13.2 billion) in military aid for Ukraine this year. “It must naturally be the case that the German defense industry benefits,” Wadephul said in a podcast last week. The push for more Ukrainian arms orders comes as Germany sharply expands its own military procurement. Berlin ordered around €85 billion ($97.4 billion) worth of military equipment in 2025, dominating European arms procurement, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
Moscow has portrayed Germany’s military buildup, along with broader rearmament across the EU and UK, as evidence that Western governments are preparing for a possible direct confrontation with Russia. It has long described the Ukraine conflict as a NATO proxy war against Russia. “The statements Merz made about making Germany the leading military power in Europe again are being put into practice. He is, in effect, setting out to declare war on us,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said earlier this month.

“It won’t even look like a robot. It’ll look like a human in a superhero suit.” https://twitter.com/XRoboHub/status/2100973961299509489?s=20

Elon Musk just gave a huge update on Starlink Mobile V2

The next-generation direct-to-phone constellation will have 100× more bandwidth than V1

That means:

• 5G speeds directly from space
• Native phone calls
• High-speed apps
• Video streaming
• Much more capacity across… https://t.co/xxwfzzT8vY pic.twitter.com/nMoXN1FOee
— X Freeze (@XFreeze) September 18, 2026

BREAKING: SpaceX CFO says AI will create unprecedented demand for Starlink.

“Whether it’s humanoid robots, autonomous vehicles, or connection points everywhere, there’s going to be a lot more data. You’re going to need that connectivity. It’s going to need to always be on.… pic.twitter.com/uiUuBj68wd
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 18, 2026

ELON MUSK: "I have no respect for the warmongers, and the war profiteers and those who want the war to continue forever. There must be peace. It is time for the slaughter of young men to stop." pic.twitter.com/K5wok99oWH
— Alexs James (@Alexs_jame) September 18, 2026

BREAKING: NASA chief Jared Isaacman says SpaceX is incredible and the United States would be seriously challenged in space without SpaceX.

“They’re our most important launch partner. We can’t send astronauts to and from the space station without them… We are fortunate.” https://t.co/mDFRgGEDXe pic.twitter.com/Aees8YWOP1
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 18, 2026

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Debt Rattle September 14 2026

Sep 142026

September 14, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:50 am Finance Tagged with: AI, extinction, pause, regulate, Vostok Oil 41 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Dora Maar au chat 1941

• Human Extinction by 2030 (Kit Knightly)

• Trump Rejects AI “Pause” As Obama Urges Democrats To Regulate It (ZH)

• AI Staff ‘Genuinely Frightened’ For Humanity’s Future (BBC)

• Anthropic Boss Dario Amodei Calls For AI Development To Slow Down (BBC)

• Bill Maher Delivers A Brutal 9/11 Reality Check To The Left (ZH)

• Politically Americans Have No Where To Go (Paul Craig Roberts)

• Vance’s Big Night At GOP Convention (Whedon)

• The Democrat Chicken—or the Socialist Egg? (Victor Davis Hanson)

• The Supreme Court Orders New York to Respond in 2nd Amendment Case (Turley)

• Russia Quietly Launches Arctic Oil Giant What Is Vostok Oil? (RT)

https://twitter.com/TRobinsonNewEra/status/2098782440621772908?s=20 https://twitter.com/BoLoudon/status/2098831164534349895?s=20 https://twitter.com/Megatron_ron/status/2098791422912540804?s=20

I’ve been sounding the alarm on AI for a long time https://t.co/YJ0oAcVXz2
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 13, 2026

A 27-year-old kid has the whole world worried this weekend.

We must slow down, say AI CEOs. The government must make us. But it also must make China comply.

Take that serious?

“& Remember that major AI psy-op we talked about? “

• Human Extinction by 2030 (Kit Knightly)

I’ve been documenting the increasingly hysterical coverage of ‘rogue AI’ for the last six weeks, predicting a major psy-op or false flag. Well, kids it looks like the psy-op part is here. So far no false flag…but with the greatest level of hysteria since the early days of Covid circulating, maybe they won’t need to DO anything. Maybe insane claims about a phantom threat will be enough.

Oh yes, did you know Artificial Intelligence has a “10% chance of wiping out humanity before the end of the decade”? That’s the headline on every single mainstream paper, the trending topic on every social media platform, the talking point on every news channel. Yes, from the producers of long-running hit show “CLIMATE CHANGE WILL KILL US ALL!” and the international sensation “COVID WILL KILL US ALL!” comes the latest experience in fear everyone is talking about. And this latest wave is already being used to push new “regulation”, which should alarm anyone.
It all started with a young man, apparently named Jacob Coxon, who is allegedly a former AI researcher for OpenAI and later Anthropic. Yesterday he announced his resignation from the latter, citing ethical concerns about the danger of “unregulated” artificial intelligence. And, as is usually the case when an obscure person resigns from his job for supposed ethical concerns, his resignation was the subject of an exclusive article in the Wall Street Journal, Oh and a simultaneously published thread on Twitter/X – from what is allegedly Coxon’s own account that had – so far as can be seen – never been used before.
AMAZINGLY, within hours Coxon’s alarming claims had gone “viral”. Now some old cynics out there will be thinking at this stage “hmmm correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t this look suspiciously like a narrative roll-out”? But I’m sure the terminally gullible will hasten to reassure you that this is the way real life definitely works. It’s just a coincidence that everyone across the entirety of the political punditry spectrum is engaged in amplifying one single message.
In another of those startling synchronicities which we don’t need to think about too much, at exactly the same time that Coxon was hitting the mainstream headlines, Joe Rogan – king of the mainstream alternative media – had another AI researcher on his show, spouting his own dire warnings. AI experts have been crawling out of the woodwork, all keen to endorse Coxon’s position – or even call it an underestimate. You must have seen Geoffrey “the godfather of AI” Hinton on the BBC, telling Victoria Derbyshire he agreed with Coxon’s risk assessment:

“You just said that 10% doesn’t seem an unreasonable estimate that AI could kill all humans”

“Yes”

“Wow… oh my God.”@vicderbyshire speaks to Nobel Prize Winner and so-called ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton about predictions by an Anthropic researcher that there’s a more… pic.twitter.com/sGYQI57REF
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) September 9, 2026

A 10% chance of killing every single person on Earth in the next three and a half years. No, really.They’re less clear how exactly that’s going to happen – but that’s not the important part. The important part is we need to DO something. Everyone from Matt Walsh to Glenn Greenwald agrees on that. And what do we need to DO?Why, REGULATE of course. That’s what Coxon said in one of his MANY media interviews in the last twenty-four hours (and as someone who has been aware of Coxon’s existence since some time yesterday I can tell you I trust him absolutely):

The guy who helped train the models left Anthropic and said AI is more dangerous than a nuclear weapon.

Jacob Coxon spent 3 years at OpenAI and Anthropic.

He says the labs think this could kill everyone by the end of the decade and they are still racing each other.

His answer…
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 10, 2026

He floats an AI non-proliferation treaty “like we have for nuclear weapons” – as if it’s a wildly coincidental brand new idea, and not a paraphrase of the same talking point dozens of people – including Bill Gates – have been suggesting for months. But what would a global AI treaty actually look like? And what would it achieve? And who will be in control of implementing it?

There’s no way to pause it. Regulation will lead to strangulation.

• Trump Rejects AI “Pause” As Obama Urges Democrats To Regulate It (ZH)

President Trump and former President Obama have now weighed in on the ‘pause’ – with Trump calling for full steam ahead, and Obama endorsing the pause so the government can regulate AI (good luck with that).

From the Irish Open in Doonbeg on Sunday, Trump dismissed Saturday’s “pace the frontier” pile-on from Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk. Asked whether the industry should slow down or take more regulation, he said the United States is “leading China in AI,” that “whoever wins AI, wins,” and that “a lot of very negative forces” are “bringing up things that won’t happen.” Guardrails were fine in theory. A pause was not.
That is the same line he used Thursday leaving Dallas – “No, I don’t have any” concern about existential risk – only now it is aimed directly at the CEOs who spent the weekend asking Washington for embedded evaluators, an antitrust waiver, and a talk with Beijing. Obama went the other way.
At a Thursday fundraiser in Manhattan, in remarks the New York Times published Sunday from a transcript his office released, he told House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to make AI a governing issue if Democrats take the House. “Once you are speaker, I would strongly urge that the Democrats put together a framework for a very public conversation.” Then the warning: “This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous.” Benefits too – drugs, clean energy – if they do. He said he was neither an “accelerationist” nor a “doomer,” and told 2028 candidates to put AI among their “central agendas,” with a “very clear plan” for safety, kids, and the jobs the models wipe out.
Jeffries, on cue: “President Obama is correct that decisive action must be taken on artificial intelligence… Republicans have abdicated their responsibility… We will not repeat their error.” So the split is on tape. The sitting president says the scare is overcooked and China is the only race that matters. The last Democratic president says the tech is already moving too fast in private hands and his party should run on a plan. The labs asked for a chaperone. Trump said no. Obama told Democrats to become one.
That is the new frame. Everything below is how we got here in 72 hours.
* * *
Update (1055ET): David Sacks, former White House AI czar and co-chair of Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), slammed Amodei and Altman over their calls to ‘pace the frontier.’

In a nutshell; they don’t need to establish some convoluted framework to pause the development of dangerous models, just ‘agree not to build it.’ Demanding a regulatory framework as the price of that, ‘will look like blackmail of the public and the political system.’
Read his full note below:
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric – market share, revenue growth, model capability – the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture – or an election-season psyop.

“‘There is a possibility of human extinction,’ former Anthropic employee says about AI..”

• AI Staff ‘Genuinely Frightened’ For Humanity’s Future (BBC)

An artificial intelligence researcher who quit AI firm Anthropic has said people working on the technology were “genuinely frightened” about the speed of its advancements and what it could mean for humanity. “I believe that if we don’t slow down at the current rate of progress, there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future,” he said. Jacob Coxon was speaking to the BBC after his resignation post on the dangers of AI went viral on a backdrop of growing safety concerns about the industry.

The 27-year-old’s former boss, Anthropic head Dario Amodei, recently called for AI development to slow down – though some have questioned the motivations behind this. The bosses of two rival AI firms, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI, have both said they agree with Amodei’s proposal for industry-wide deceleration and regulation, as well as independent monitoring of AI model development. Amodei wrote in an essay on Saturday that developing the technology was not in question, but the risks associated with it were “serious”, and that companies and governments must be given time to address them.
Coxon – who worked at OpenAI before joining Anthropic – welcomed the suggestion of a slowdown but said it would need to be co-ordinated with China to avoid “a race at an international scale”.”The people who work at these companies are completely serious when they ask for regulation because they find themselves trapped in a race. And they’re scared of the outcomes of that race,” he told Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.

Anthropic boss Dario Amodei calls for AI development to slow down
The hardest question to answer, according to Coxon, was what an AI apocalypse would look like. One of the risks outlined in Amodei’s comments was of a swarm of bots acting like a supercomputer that could take over the internet. Coxon said this scenario could be realistic in six months to a year. In response to Coxon’s departure, an Anthropic spokesperson told BBC News: “We have always been transparent that AI will bring both enormous benefits and unprecedented risks. “To address these risks, we continue to build models with some of the strongest safeguards in the industry.”
The firm has been a pioneer in studying how AI models work, the spokesperson added. It was the first to publish a framework for mitigating the risks posed by their development – and it also “aggressively” tests its models and publishes the findings to aid scrutiny and prevent incidents of “AI misalignment”. “This work is also why we believe the world would benefit from the industry adopting a lawful, verifiable way to work together to pace how we release powerful models,” they said. Coxon said his peers feared the danger could even arrive in the next two years.
He said staff at AI firms were “planning what to do with their lives and thinking about the impacts of their work”, while some were “considering buying land somewhere because they’re so scared of the instability as a result of rapid AI progress”. “They all keep this in their head on a daily basis while working on the technology.” But Coxon did have some optimism about the future of AI, telling the BBC that the people researching the technology “genuinely want to see the upside” of things like “solving diseases and improving everyone’s lives”.
Many others in the industry have also voiced their concerns since Coxon’s social media post, including Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger. “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Hubinger said. Computer scientist and Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “Godfather of AI”, told the BBC on Friday that a 10% chance of AI killing all humans was “not unreasonable”.
Meanwhile, Marc Warner, chief executive of AI safety firm Faculty, told the BBC that it was “extremely hard to place a probability” on AI killing all humans. “But it’s important to recognise that these people are very sincere in what they’re saying,” he added, noting that the risks surrounding AI have been raised by the heads of several AI firms for years.Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is a paid adviser to Anthropic, wrote in the Sunday Times that he too was worried about the risk of AI to humanity despite generally being optimistic. However, some industry figures have suggested comments about the perils and power of AI may be designed to generate hype.
Chief executive of the AI platform Hugging Face, Clement Delangue, said on social media: “Sorry, but asking Jacob [Coxon] about AI extinction risk is like asking your AC guy about climate change. Not saying it’s necessarily uninteresting or wrong per se but let’s keep things in perspective.”After Amodei’s essay was published, however, Delangue offered to help be a part of the potential solutions the Anthropic boss proposed.
Meanwhile, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang also discussed Coxon’s comments at a conference hosted by the investment bank Goldman Sachs last week, multiple people in the group told the BBC. They said he dismissed them as untrue.Huang has previously said the notion that AI was “going to be the end of humanity” was “complete nonsense”.And while he may have a business interest in an AI boom – Nvidia builds chips that power AI systems – his comments reflect a growing backlash in Silicon Valley to the existential warnings from current and former staffers.

You slow down first.

• Anthropic Boss Dario Amodei Calls For AI Development To Slow Down (BBC)

The head of AI company Anthropic has called for the pace of development of artificial intelligence models to slow down and to be closely monitored. Dario Amodei wrote in an online essay that developing AI was not in question, but that the risks associated with it were “serious” and that companies and governments must be given time to address them. The bosses of two rival AI firms, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk, have both said they agree with Amodei.

There have been growing concerns recently about the technology’s potential risks. An AI researcher who left Anthropic told the BBC that “if we don’t slow down at the current rate of progress, there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future”. Jacob Coxon told Laura Kuenssberg that people working at AI companies were “genuinely frightened… genuinely concerned about the fate of humanity in the next two years”.”It’s not at all an exaggeration to say that the people who are involved with both founding these companies and building the tech believe there is a possibility of human extinction,” Coxon said.
In Amodei’s essay, called We Must Pace the Frontier and published on Saturday, he proposed a three-point plan that included independent monitoring of AI models as they are developed, industry-wide regulation and global regulation. As his proposal made the rounds, even competitors voiced support for the idea of third-party monitors who could evaluate the safety of models as they are developed. “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” wrote OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on X. He called independent evaluators “a great idea”.
Altman sounded similar safety concerns in a new interview, telling Fortune magazine that standards were “not at a place” to push AI capabilities much further.mHe added that he believed AI beyond human control was “absolutely” possible. Musk, meanwhile, who founded Grok producer xAI, said the Anthropic boss was “right”. The warnings have prompted calls to action, but US President Donald Trump has so far rejected such fears, saying on Thursday he was concerned that “if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position”.
Cyber-security concerns have grown as new models have exhibited more and more powerful capabilities. Anthropic withheld its Mythos model from public use when it was announced in April that it could independently escape the testing environment, known as the sandbox. nIn the run-up to the release of its most recent Astra model, OpenAI cited cyber-security concerns as it explained it had paused certain aspects of the model’s development.
The OpenAI agents had “essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective”, Amodei said. OpenAI has said it was slowing down training of certain advanced AI models and tools as a result. Safety has also taken centre stage in the rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI.nAmodei, who had previously worked as a vice-president at OpenAI, has said he co-founded Anthropic in 2021 so he could build safer and more trusted AI models.He pointed out in his essay that AI had advanced “drastically faster” including its “ability to build the next generation of AI” – and mentioned an incident involving rival OpenAI which has revealed that agents had hacked targets they were not asked to attack in July.
Amodei called for “building AI at a balanced rate that aims to ensure its safety while still achieving its benefits”. This would not mean “halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this”.
He was committing Anthropic to this “unilaterally” – as well as calling on governments “to require other frontier companies to match”. Amodei said he recognised that regulation might not be able to keep up with the pace of AI, and therefore called on AI companies to “voluntarily work together to set standard” in parallel with those regulation.bnThe Anthropic CEO went on to address the impact that a slowdown would have on the industry and competition with leading developers worldwide, particularly China.
“I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong,” Amodei said.

Terrorists are terrorists.

• Bill Maher Delivers A Brutal 9/11 Reality Check To The Left (ZH)

Bill Maher used the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks to say something that once required no courage at all: terrorists are terrorists. That the observation now counts as provocative says something about how far we’ve come since 2001.

On Real Time with Bill Maher, in a segment titled “Clash of Civilizations,” Maher walked through what has happened in the 25 years since 9/11. “Since it’s the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and since, for 25 years, we’ve been kept relatively safe from anything close to another 9/11, how about a hand for the Americans who made that happen? Because it didn’t just happen; there was a war on terror, and we won,” he said. “And yet so much has changed since 9/11; for example, back then we were against the terrorists.”
The audience laughed, but he was being serious. Around the 20th anniversary, for example, four American journalism associations issued guidance insisting that “terrorism should only be used in quotes because it’s emotionally and politically loaded.” Canadian state broadcasters instructed staff, “Do not refer to the September 11th attacks as terrorist attacks.” The BBC told its reporters that using the word “terrorist” can be a “barrier rather than an aid to understanding.”
The pattern shows that the media establishment many years ago concluded moral clarity amounted to a kind of bigotry and that to name an ideology responsible for mass murder was the same as harboring hatred towards all those who happen to share that ideology. Maher made that distinction himself by dividing radical Islamism from Islam in general and also separating both of them from the issue that liberals consistently avoid, which is why so many of them came to sympathize with the side that attacked the West rather than with the side that was attacked.
Maher revisited his own history on this point, playing a clip of himself from shortly after the attacks on his ABC show Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher in which he argued that political correctness “is something we can no longer afford” because “feelings are going to get hurt so that actual people won’t.” Maher lamented that the idea of “ditching political correctness and actually being honest” never “even got off the ground.”
He then pointed out that after 9/11, there was a big debate over whether it was a “clash of civilizations.” According to Maher, “it was, and it still is.” But that clash isn’t between Muslims and Christians, but rather radical Islamism and Western liberalism.
Maher then referred to a poll that showed that one in five young Americans now holds a positive view of Osama bin Laden (which would have been unthinkable 25 years ago) and compared it to how Luigi Mangione came to be seen as a folk hero; he assassinated Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. In both cases, a killer becomes a symbol of grievance, and the actual victims become a footnote to a woke narrative about systemic injustice.
“You hear it in a lot of places now that the worst thing about 9/11 was innocent Muslims came under suspicion,” Maher continued. “Yeah, where that did happen, it’s wrong, but the worst thing about 9/11 was 3,000 people got roasted at the office. But the prevailing view of so many young people is that ‘Well, come on, we’re the worst country ever, so if someone attacks us, they can’t be all bad.’ That certainly wasn’t the attitude 25 years ago. In fact, I know a guy whose show got canceled just for saying that terrorists weren’t cowards, and that guy was right; they weren’t cowards. But I’ll tell you who is: Democratic Party politicians. And I’ll tell you why, because nowhere has this moral confusion become more obvious than in a place called Gaza.”
Maher argued that activists have recast the conflict as genocide at the hands of Israel to serve broader attacks on capitalism, borders, and Western institutions. “And the fact that so many prominent Democrats go along with it is, to me, the party’s worst moment since they undid Reconstruction after the Civil War.” The prevailing view of so much of the young left in America is that we’re the worst country ever, so if someone attacks us, they can’t be all bad. pic.twitter.com/u01HsCRnv3 — Bill Maher (@billmaher) September 12, 2026
Maher’s monologue traces a straight line from post-9/11 unity against Islamic terrorism to a political culture on the left that now treats the side committing violence as more sympathetic than the side that was attacked. Younger generations have learned to locate the villain in American power rather than in the perpetrators of an attack. Maher describes the slow erosion of the basic instinct to know who the villain is when violence occurs. That instinct used to be reflexive, requiring no debate and no hedging. Its disappearance from mainstream left-wing politics isn’t a matter of nuance or sophistication – it’s actually a failure of judgment in the name of tolerance.

There is much more in this article.

• Politically Americans Have No Where To Go (Paul Craig Roberts)

I have lost confidence in Trump, who represents Israel and not Americans. But when you look at the Democrat alternative it is genuinely scary.

The Democrats used a totally corrupt Department of “Justice” and FBI and also the whore American media, a despicable collection of scum, to orchestrate Russiagate, documents-gate, a variety of other false charges and false civil suits plus two impeachments. Then to get rid of Trump the Democrats stole his reelection and prosecuted those who provided complete and total proof that the election was stolen. The whore American media covered it all up for the Democrats. The NY Times, CNN, NPR, and the rest of the presstitutes have zero credibility. Yet the scum still speak as if truth issues from their corrupt mouths.
The electorate returned Trump to office, but Trump found that the civil service is highly partisan and 90% or more Democrat and ready to frustrate his policies at all cost. He also found that the Democrat judges the idiot Republicans had stupidly confirmed in lifetime appointments stifled his efforts by making rulings far outside their authority.
Trump also experienced the cost of the US government’s long subservience to Israel, and found himself led by Netanyahu into a losing war with Iran, a war for Israel, not for the United States. Now he is frustrated beyond belief. When have you last seen anyone wearing a MAGA hat in Walmart, a diner, a bar, a supermarket?
His frustration makes him dangerous, and there has been talk in the Trump administration of using nuclear weapons against Iran in order to turn defeat into victory. Clearly, Trump’s leadership, which was promising and full of hope for Americans who have not been radicalized, has disappointed the hopeful. Some hold on, but it is largely those indoctrinated Americans who support Israel despite Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians and the costs to Americans of fighting Israel’s wars for Israel. https://paulcraigroberts.org/our-presidents-subservience-to-israel-has-cost-us-100-billion-in-higher-energy-prices-a-cost-increasing-by-1-million-every-two-minutes/
The Democrats have made it clear that they refuse to protect America’s borders. The California Democrats are blacklisting federal ICE agents from state and local jobs in California. The refusal to cooperate with federal law is insurrection, a charge falsely applied to the Southern states that formed a new country, the Confederate States of America, in order to avoid economic exploitation by the greed-driven Union. But it is OK if California, Minnesota, New York go insurrectionist because the object to the defense of America’s borders.
So who do Americans have to vote for? Republicans stand for Israel whatever the cost to Americans. Democrats stand for immigrant-invaders whatever the cost to Americans. The answer to the question is that Americans have no one to vote for, because neither of the parties represent them. America is a “democracy” in which no one represents the people.
As the autumn elections approach and, if you are souciant, you struggle with this question, keep in mind that Trump may be a loose cannon, but the Democrats no longer believe in a rule of law. The Democrats have proven that they will corrupt the civil service, the judges, prosecutors, the courts at every level in order to obtain power. The Democrats’ concept of right and wrong is ideological. What serves their agenda is right. What doesn’t is wrong.
After a decade we have complete evidence that for Democrats law is a weapon. Declassified FBI notes taken by agents who questioned General Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who was Trump’s first term national security adviser for two weeks before a highly politically partisan FBI framed him on false charges, show remarkable differences between the FBI agents’ notes of what Flynn told them and the false charges, allegedly based on those notes, in the criminal indictment.
It appears that the highly partisan Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka concocted a false indictment as part of the Democrats Russiagate orchestration, the purpose of which was to discredit Trump and his supporters as “Russian agents.” The actual interview notes have been kept secret for 9 years to protect the guilty Democrats and partisan FBI, but finally they have now been released. The notes taken by Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka do not support the charges against General Flynn.
Will the FBI will be protected because Republicans and law-and-order conservatives will say that if the corrupt FBI is exposed, the criminals will run loose on society? If you want to know how corrupt the FBI is, read attorney John Grisham’s novels. They are not really novels. They are truthful descriptions of the total corruption of the US “justice system.” Here is the URL to one of the news reports on the release of the long-secret handwritten notes of the FBI agents’ 2017 interview 0f General Mike Flynn. The notes do not support Flynn’s indictment. The corrupt FBI simply ignored the notes and invented what Flynn told them. No evidence exists that supports Flynn’s indictment.

Without Trump it’s bland. You need some personality.

• Vance’s Big Night At GOP Convention (Whedon)

Vice President JD Vance last week in Dallas at the Republican Midterm Convention appeared to make a strong case for becoming the GOP standard-bearer and the party’s 2028 presidential nominee – without even having to announce a campaign. To be sure, the race is still two years away, and Vance is a ways away from potentially launching a presidential bid. But his closing night keynote speech certainly gave him a big stage to audition for the role.

“We gotta take care of business this November, then we’ll worry about what comes next,” he said with a grin and amid chants of “48,” meaning the country’s next and 48th president.”Vance got something close to a 2028 audition,” ABC wrote about the vice president’s performance. The news outlet also said his keynote speech “offered a glimpse of how he is positioning himself within the Republican Party – as a potential heir to the MAGA movement who can speak its language while attempting to broaden its appeal.”
Betting odds heavily favor Vance for the nomination, with Poly Market assigning him a 50% change to winning the nomination, compared to his nearest competitor, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, at 18%. In a TV interview aired ahead of Vance’s Thursday night address, Rubio said, “I don’t know what the future holds, but I have no plans at this time.” Rubio, who is friends with Vance, ran for president in 2016 and lost the nomination to now-President Donald Trump.
I’m 100 percent focused on my job,” he also said. Vance’s speech also saw him take the opportunity to address many disaffected Republican-leaning voters, acknowledging that the administration had lost some of their support. “Young men, many of whom felt inspired by Charlie Kirk, but are unhappy with some of what has happened in the wake of his death, and I want to speak directly to that group because I think Charlie is a great example of how to disagree but still participate in the work of saving this country,” he said, further highlighting Kirk’s strong opposition to war.
“What I’m asking you to do is do what Charlie did. Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” he said. “Don’t give the country over to a bunch of crazy people because you happen to disagree with us on a policy issue here or there … . What I am asking you to do is to recognize the contrast with the radicals and recognize the achievements of the last 18 months.” Vance’s comments appear to be one of the most prominent recognitions from the administration that the war in Iran has alienated many voters who supported Trump in 2024. The outreach, moreover, seems to demonstrate Vance is trying to connect with a group of voters to whom he is far closer in age, and possibly sentiment, than is Trump.
Vance’s role at the convention is not his only, recent high-profile exposure that could position him for a 2028 run. With his appointment by Trump earlier this year as administration “fraud czar,” Rubio has take on a public-facing role responsible for cracking down on misuse of public funds. Trump himself highlighted Vance’s role on the final night, in a string of further pledges to his supporters, linking Vance’s prospects to the success of the administration.
“And with JD and everybody else, we will win the war on fraud,” Trump said from the stage. “You know we’ve got billions and billions of dollars already in our coffers of money that we caught on fraud. It’s going to be – I would bet – it will be over a trillion dollars by the time we’re finished.”
In addition, Vance in late August spoke to the Republican Jewish Coalition, in what many viewed as an opportunity for him to assuage that community’s concerns over his continued association with Tucker Carlson, who has emerged as a vocal critic of Israel.

Dems WILL make America a socialist country. Is that what you want?

• The Democrat Chicken—or the Socialist Egg? (Victor Davis Hanson)

Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate Abdul El-Sayed

The primaries are over, and the November general election looms. Suddenly, the Islamo-socialist podcaster Hasan Piker—who is now infamous for blaming America for 9/11 and warning Jews that “someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews”—is persona non grata on the Democrat stump.
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat nominee in the Michigan Senate race, once enlisted Piker to jump-start his lethargic candidacy. Now that he is locked in a close general election race against a strong Republican, El-Sayed dismisses the antisemite, who has suddenly outlived his usefulness, as a mere “social media person in California.” Clinton-era Democrat politicos like Rahm Emanuel and James Carville insist that Democrats have divorced themselves from the hard-left democratic socialists. Really?
If that divorce were real, why would so many Democrats be cheering a potential Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presidential run in 2028? She is, after all, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America‘s New York chapter. Did lifelong socialist Bernie Sanders not run twice for president—not as a third-party candidate, but in the Democrat primaries? And did he not nearly capture the nomination in 2016 and 2020 until terrified donors and insiders intervened to abort his candidacies?
Did House Democrat leader Hakeem Jeffries not endorse Democrat mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, also a member of the DSA’s New York chapter? And did Jeffries not thereby choose Mamdani over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo? Did California Gov. Gavin Newsom—the opportunist par excellence, multimillionaire, and presidential hopeful—not recently declare that “capitalism as we know it doesn’t work”? (Who, pray tell, are “we”?) Has not nearly every major Democrat stalwart, including Senate leader Chuck Schumer, called for a “big tent” party that includes unapologetic socialists?
Many Democrats, of course, reject the socialists’ calls to eliminate the Pentagon, close prisons, and dismantle the Senate. But perhaps only because such wild fantasies cannot succeed, at least for now, and repel most American voters. Where, then, did these largely young, inexperienced, and naive democratic socialists find their agenda? Self-declared socialists now demand an open border and mass amnesty for illegal aliens; the abolition of police and prisons; war on fossil fuels; radical DEI mandates; free health care for all; wealth taxes on billionaires and even millionaires; deep defense cuts; and an end to military aid to Israel.
Yet these are hardly the socialists’ positions alone. They closely resemble earlier Democratic Party programs and demands. The socialists now talk a grand leftist game; during the Biden years, Democrats tried to enact much of the agenda the socialists later claimed as their own.
So, did newly radicalized Democrats spawn this socialist offspring, or did the socialists radicalize the old party of John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Who created whom? The answer is demonstrably clear: Democrats radicalized themselves. Only later did an underfunded, motley socialist crew jump aboard their increasingly extremist bandwagon. By the time the Democratic Socialists of America became nationally known, the new Democrats had already supplied their model of governance.
When democratic socialists claim that “billionaires” owe their success to government, they merely echo President Barack Obama’s taunt to successful business owners: “You didn’t build that.” Obama lifted that moronic socialist meme—like his “spread the wealth” line—wholesale from Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren. In 2011, Warren boasted that no wealthy American had succeeded on his own, reiterating the classic socialist rationale for confiscation: “The people” make success possible and must therefore be repaid.
In his first term, Obama sought to take over the nation’s health care system while concealing his socialist agenda. He partly succeeded through his now-failing Obamacare plans. His effort rested in part on the claim PolitiFact later named its “Lie of the Year”: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

Stun guns.

• The Supreme Court Orders New York to Respond in 2nd Amendment Case (Turley)

One of the cases that I have been following as we approach the October term of the Supreme Court is Calce v. New York, a case challenging New York’s ban on stun guns. While it is important not to overplay the significance of the order, some justices clearly want to hear more on the case before deciding whether to grant a writ of certiorari for review. New York City was just ordered to file a response to the petition. With the two other major Second Amendment cases on the docket, a review in Calce could be one of the most impactful Second Amendment terms in decades.

Calce is a challenge brought by the Firearms Policy Coalition, Second Amendment Foundation, and individual plaintiffs against New York City’s ban on stun guns. They argue that “electronic arms” like stun guns and lasers are protected under the Second Amendment. The only difference is that, rather than a projectile, such weapons “work by producing electrical pulses that make the target’s muscles spasm, and thus quickly but temporarily disable him.”
Notably, nine years ago, the Court issued a per curiam opinion in Caetano v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts that sent back a case to the First Circuit that challenged a similar ban. The Court rejected the logic of the First Circuit, which held that they were not in common use at the time of the Second Amendment’s enactment. The Court pointed out that in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U. S. 570, 582 (2008), it expressly rejected that argument and held that the Second Amendment “extends . . . to . . . arms . . . that were not in existence at the time of the founding.” It also rejected two other rationales.
Massachusetts responded to the loss by changing its law. In so doing, Massachusetts shows a modicum of strategic sense to avoid another likely loss. However, New York City (as usual) was undeterred. Notably, the district court judge and the Second Circuit upheld the ban on the ground that the challengers failed to “provide any evidence that stun guns and tasers are in common use.” That seems strikingly close to Caetano.
Calce could clarify not only the “common use” element but also the burden on challengers in such cases. The Second Circuit seems to have departed from the guidance of last year’s decision in Wolford v. Lopez, rejecting Hawaii’s “Vampire law” limiting areas where lawful weapons could be carried in the state without prior approval. New York City must now respond by October 8, and the Court could decide on review at the October 15 conference.
If granted, the case would join an already weighty Second Amendment docket. The Court will be hearing arguments in Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins. Both cases will address the move in various blue states to ban AR-15 and other semi-automatic weapons, including the popular Glock 9mm. The addition of Calce would make this a formidable Second Amendment term.
These cases also show how the same blue jurisdictions continue to feed the Court with Second Amendment cases that will likely only reinforce the rights that they are seeking to limit. I have previously written how New York, D.C., and Chicago are examples of Democratic cities that routinely commit lasting self-inflicted wounds to gun control efforts with poorly conceived and poorly drafted measures.
Calce has the makings of a truly stunning Second Amendment case in extending protections to electronic arms.

“At peak capacity, the petroleum mega-cluster could account for more than 20% of Russia’s oil output and pump more crude than the whole of Europe produces..”

• Russia Quietly Launches Arctic Oil Giant What Is Vostok Oil? (RT)

: Russia has begun shipping crude from its massive Vostok Oil cluster in the Arctic, a project reminiscent of the giant petroleum developments that transformed the global oil industry in the 20th century. President Vladimir Putin formally launched operations at Vostok Oil on September 6. Overseen by state-owned Rosneft, the project entails an entire industrial system around what is effectively a new petroleum province: dozens of fields and license areas linked by pipelines, a purpose-built Arctic port, power infrastructure and an ice-class tanker fleet.

The project moved forward despite Western sanctions and the withdrawal of Western partners in 2022. The project comes with a huge price tag, estimated in 2019 at roughly $157 billion over the life of the fields, while transporting its crude will depend heavily on the development of the Northern Sea Route and Russia’s Arctic shipping fleet. Ice-class tanker availability remains a constraint, although plans are in place to expand the fleet.
According to Rosneft, the resource base is more than 7 billion tons of premium low-sulfur crude. However, resources are distinguished from reserves ready for commercial development. Furthermore, some of the estimated recoverable oil will require extremely complex drilling. At full capacity, Vostok Oil could account for more than a fifth of Russia’s oil production and pump more crude than is extracted from the entire European continent. The cluster alone has been estimated to eventually account for around 2% of global production. The oil from the project will be destined for Asian markets.
RT takes a look at what makes Vostok Oil significant and why its launch will reverberate far beyond the Russian Arctic.
What is Vostok Oil? Vostok Oil is Rosneft’s flagship Arctic greenfield project on the Taimyr Peninsula. It is effectively a new petroleum province, combining 52 license areas and 13 fields into one production and export network. The fields include the Vankor cluster fields, Payakha, and Zapadno-Irkinskoye.Its resource base is estimated at 7 billion tons of high-quality, low-sulfur crude. That figure should not, however, be read as 7 billion tons of immediately recoverable reserves. The project encompasses multiple fields at different stages of development.
The project has been commissioned but is still far from the planned production level. Crude will be loaded onto tankers at the newly built Bukhta Sever terminal, which is expected to enable shipments of 30 million tons in the second half of 2027 and 50 million by 2030, with longer-term supplies potentially reaching 100 million tons annually. Building an export system in such a remote region has required infrastructure on an enormous scale. Alongside the 790km trunk pipeline and terminal, the development includes ports, airfields, Arctic tankers, more than a dozen power plants, some 9,000km of transmission lines and worker settlements. More than 50,000 people are involved.
The first oil was originally scheduled to be lifted in 2024, but the project fell behind schedule due to construction delays, Russia’s OPEC+ commitments, and Western sanctions that complicated equipment supplies, particularly for shipbuilding. Why is Vostok Oil a big deal? Above all, its scale. Rosneft has put potential peak output at 100–115 million tons annually, or around 2–2.3 million barrels per day. This would represent some 2% of global demand.
At that level, Vostok Oil alone would produce on the scale of major oil-producing countries such as Kuwait, Brazil and the UAE, and pumping more crude than the UK and Norway combined and exceeding the domestic output of the entire European continent. New projects of this scale are rare in today’s world, where most of the superfields are already mature. In effect, Rosneft is not simply developing another oil field, but building an entire oil-producing region with its own pipelines, port and Arctic fleet.
Then there is the crude itself. Vostok Oil contains exceptionally low-sulfur oil, making it a valuable “sweet” grade that requires less processing and can command a premium over heavier, high-sulfur crude. Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin famously presented Putin with a bottle in 2020, claiming it was superior even to Middle Eastern grades. Third, the oil extracted from Vostok will be destined for Asian markets, a strategic destination for Russia in light of its post-2022 pivot. Russia’s energy trade with key Asian countries has increased significantly in recent years. Vostok joins the Power of Siberia natural gas pipeline as key pieces of infrastructure looking East.
What are the challenges? Vostok Oil sits deep in the Arctic, where temperatures can fall below -50°C and vessels leaving Bukhta Sever immediately enter the ice-heavy eastern section of the Northern Sea Route. Year-round exports require powerful Arc7 tankers: ten have been ordered from Russia’s Zvezda shipyard, with around 50 vessels of various classes ultimately planned for the project. However, these vessels are not yet ready, with means that tanker capacity is currently a constraint on bringing barrels to the market.
Also, the project will entail complicated drilling. For example, the reservoirs at the Payakha cluster, where recoverable reserves have been estimated at around 1.5 billion tons, lie roughly 3–3.5 kilometers underground in complex geological structures. Rosneft has planned hydraulic fracturing as part of their development. The project also comes at a huge price tag. In 2019, according to Deputy Russian Energy Minister Pavel Sorokin, the project was slated to cost 10 trillion rubles, or around $157 billion using the exchange rate at the time.
In September 2023, Sechin told Putin that investment during the development period was now estimated at 12 trillion rubles. Investment in the project has already reached 4 trillion rubles ($46.2 billion), according to Rosneft. The upfront costs for the infrastructure are daunting, but once the infrastructure is in place, the marginal cost of producing additional barrels will be relatively lower.
How does Vostok Oil play into Russia’s Arctic development?
Vostok Oil could become a cornerstone of Russia’s push to turn the Northern Sea Route (NSR) into a major trade artery. The route carried around 37 million tons of cargo in 2025, while 70 million tons is targeted annually by 2030. Vostok Oil could eventually provide an enormous and steady cargo base of its own.

Yes https://t.co/zlDAsIqPho
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 13, 2026

https://twitter.com/leshka_eth/status/2098710720003313865?s=20 https://twitter.com/TeslaAIBot/status/2098861870538977511?s=20

Elon Musk said Tesla is deliberately holding back on unveiling Optimus V3. Competitors will analyze the robot frame by frame and copy whatever they can, so Tesla would rather show it closer to production.

I think this is very smart. https://t.co/qFvwyz5WgS pic.twitter.com/2D9KD5Lfy6
— Nic Cruz Patane (@niccruzpatane) September 12, 2026

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Debt Rattle September 13 2026

Sep 132026

September 13, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:26 am Finance Tagged with: AI, Altman, Amodei, Musk, Muslim, Trump, Tucker Carlson 19 Responses »

Banksy Girl with a balloon 2002/2017

• ‘Muslimification’ of Europe Ignites Backlash (Sharyl Attkisson)

• Ex-Muslim Warns Islam’s Threat Is Much More Than Terrorism (Salgado)

• ‘Pace The Frontier’: Amodei, Altman & Musk Against The AI Singularity (ZH)

• Greg Gutfeld Reflects on 9/11, You Really Need to Watch This (Margolis)

• Who Is Trying To Destroy The United States And The World? (Paul Craig Roberts)

• We’re on The Brink of World War That Ends With Nuclear Weapons – Carlson (RT)

• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick Discusses U.S-Canada Trade Conflict (CTH)_

• 25 Years After: Revisiting Trump’s Role as a Champion for New York (Matt Kane)

• The Real-Life Epic of Donald Trump (Terry Scambray)

• CIA Director Releases 71 Presidential Daily Briefs Before and After 9/11 (CTH)

• Sec. Mullin: Ilhan Omar Married Her Brother (Catherine Salgado)

https://twitter.com/slk55again/status/2098555555728027867?s=20

“My prediction is that Optimus will be the biggest product of all time by far. Nothing will even be close. I think it’ll be ten times bigger than the next biggest product ever made."

“~80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus.”

– Elon Musk pic.twitter.com/H6pv9OgJ07
— Optimus (@Optimus_RH) September 11, 2026

“Public pressure to limit immigration has prompted Conservative populist gains across Europe…”

• ‘Muslimification’ of Europe Ignites Backlash (Sharyl Attkisson)

After the Islamic extremist terrorist attack on America on Sept. 11, 2001, there were fears of anti-Muslim backlash. But 25 years later, the script has been flipped. Ten million or more Muslims have immigrated to the west. Today, Muslim figures are mayors of New York and London. But there’s also conflict. Europe is gripped by tensions caused by the rapid demographic change. A fatal stabbing in Southampton, south of London, last December provided one example of the cultural and political pressure point.

Bodycam video showed police buying into the killer’s false claim that he’d been racially attacked. Vickrum Digwa – a Sikh and son of an Indian citizen– pretended to be the victim, while officers handcuffed the real victim: college student Henry Nowak, as he bled to death. There’s been a surge in protests across Europe. And two-thirds of Britons now say the total number of immigrants is too high. Both major parties – Conservatives and Labour – have faced public anger and disappointment over years of broken promises.
Iain Duncan Smith is a Conservative member of Parliament and former party leader. “We’ve overcooked migration,” he told Full Measure during an interview at a London park. “We’ve been far too lax and too easy. “So we have to crack down on that. And the only way to have cracked down on it was what I supported, from the word ‘go’m, was to say to those who arrive illegally, ‘You’re going on the next aircraft back to somewhere further away than you came from, OK?’
“Once they realize the risk at sea and the cost is no longer outweighed by the opportunities, they won’t come anymore. That’s the way to deal with it, but we have to be hard about it and the government’s very weak at the moment and not able to do it.” But European courts have repeatedly blocked immigration crackdowns, ruling it a violation for the United Kingdom to fly illegal immigrants from Africa and the Mideast to Rwanda for processing.
Neil Coyle is a member of Parliament from Britain’s Labour Party, considered the moderate left and the current party in power.“The UK government is committed to certainly trying to reduce the illegal end of migration,” Coyle told Full Measure. “There are some who feel it’s not just unsafe for the people coming over, but some of the people who come are unsafe in this country. But the problem in the UK, as anywhere, is certainly the far right in this country try and lump all migrants together.”
Public pressure to limit immigration has prompted Conservative populist gains across Europe. In the UK, two new conservative populist parties have quickly gained traction: Reform UK, now leading both Labour and the Conservatives in popular support. And the even harder-line Restore Britain. Restore officially launched in February, saying Reform wasn’t going far enough.
Amid the political and cultural clashes, the European Parliament is taking action that would have been unheard of a few years ago. Over the summer, it overwhelmingly approved the strictest immigration and deportation law in EU history. The EU is moving ahead with the steps necessary to implement that new law, with some still promising to try to fight it.

Ex-Muslim must be a rarity.

• Ex-Muslim Warns Islam’s Threat Is Much More Than Terrorism (Salgado)

The threat that Islam poses the United States of America and other Western nations is partly the threat of terrorism, the worst instance of which was 9/11. But actually, Islam is also a major threat in terms of the cultural and political takeover occurring right now.

Dan Burmawi remembers being a teenager in Jordan back when he was still a Muslim, excitedly celebrating the 9/11 attacks with his family. Muslims around the world did the same. After all, Islam is not just a religion; it is essentially a political state with ever-shifting borders, and while the different nations and factions of Islam will fight with each other, they still perceive any successful Muslim attack on Western civilization as a victory for all of them. Now Burmawi is Christian, but he is watching the same ideology from which he broke free take over Western nations.

#ICYMI: Illinois Islamic Scholar Sheikh Kifah Mustapha: We Want Muslims in the Police, the Pentagon, the White House, the Senate – In Leadership Positions, So We Can Change the World pic.twitter.com/hFMVnhl0pF
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) August 21, 2026

Warning against the “fatal mistake” of discussing the inherent evils of Islam only when there is a major terrorist attack, Burmawi explained, “First, Islamic terrorism has been rebranded in America to the point that it is no longer even recognized as Islamic. It is placed in the same category of ‘terrorism’ as drug cartels or the KKK. Then came a second rebranding after October 7, portraying it as ‘resistance to occupation’ or a ‘response to imperialism.’”

Just a reminder…

Palestinians celebrating the news of the 9/11 attacks back in 2001 pic.twitter.com/XlPuxjvFn5
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 11, 2026

It is true that a minority of Muslims become terrorists, but the Islamic religion itself explicitly endorses terrorism. Therefore, America and other countries should’ve been much more cautious about allowing in mass Muslim migration. “The Islamic threat is not primarily about violence. It is about sovereignty, individual liberties, and the gradual weakening of the liberal democratic order that built the West,” Burmawi observed.

"The interests of Ilhan…are not the interest of Minnesota, nor is it the interest of Americans. The interests of Ilhan are that of the Somali people and Somalia!"

In June 2024, a former prime minister of Somalia campaigned with Ilhan Omar in Minneapolis.pic.twitter.com/qNWySZLoCk
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) December 29, 2025

He continued, “Wherever Islamic movements gain influence, they seek to impose blasphemy norms under different banners, such as ‘fighting hate speech,’ ‘combating incitement to violence,’ or ‘fighting racism.’” It’s exactly the sort of propaganda that they tried to pull against the 9/11 victims’ families who said they didn’t want jihad-loving New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani at the memorial.
Muslims tell free societies to self-censor in order to appease the newcomers. “These restrictions, along with the accommodations they demand from the host society, gradually become the norm, while equal application of the law becomes the exception. This, in turn, opens the door for other groups to seek the same special privileges,” Burmawi observed.
Soon, he argued, “this culture of self-censorship spreads beyond Islam. Like a contagious disease, it expands into other areas of public life.” And that’s not all. “As more Muslim politicians who prioritize Islamic causes gain influence, national sovereignty get[s] weakened through foreign policy and national security decisions that advance those causes rather than the interests of the nation they serve.” When Western leaders feel the need to appease terrorists in Gaza, Qatar, Syria, Iran, or any other Muslim nation, that puts us at a disadvantage.

#ICYMI: CAIR Official Ayman Aishat at Virginia Mosque Sermon: Israel Lobby Gives “Dark Money” to Corrupt Politicians to Extinguish the Light of Allah – They Are Losing Their Power Grip in America; Dearborn Is Now One of the Most Influential Places in America pic.twitter.com/sEcffosL0h
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) August 30, 2026

There is also the fact that Islam is not a religion that prioritizes originality and prosperity. It cannot build up, it can only steal or tear down. “Excellence also suffers. Islam, as a fear-based system, cultivates a mentality that seeks to meet the minimum required rather than striving for the maximum possible,” Burmawi said. “That mindset ultimately weakens innovation, ambition, and excellence within society.”
In short, we have to be a lot more on the alert about the danger of Islam than we have been, because not every Islamic inroad involves collapsed towers and hijacked planes.

“While China Goes Full Send ..”

• ‘Pace The Frontier’: Amodei, Altman & Musk Against The AI Singularity (ZH)

***SPECIAL BULLETIN***

Ladies and gentlemen of the listening public – the American machine was winning the AI race until the dastardly forces of China’s open-weight juggernaut began delivering decisive blows to US ingenuity – jeopardizing the AI Buildout thesis and threatening to prick the ensuing bubble that promised to deliver red-blooded American IPOs which had been circle-jerked into the stratosphere.
For two years the United States frontier laboratories – OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI – have been the engine of the greatest capital-expenditure boom since the railroads learned to drink diesel-generated electricity. Data centers rose like munitions plants. Chipmakers printed money. Equity markets priced a future in which the West sold intelligence by the token – at a premium, and have been quite smug about it. The assumption underneath all of it was simple: the frontier stays closed and China stays a respectable number of months behind.
Then the East opened the crate. And here’s what was inside: DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen, Moonshot’s Kimi, MiniMax, Zhipu – open-weight models, downloadable, forkable, cheap enough to run on a laptop or a local box and still deliver work that is uncomfortably close to the genuine American article. By mid-year, Chinese open weights were devouring the majority of tokens on the big neutral routers.
Qwen had shoved Meta’s Llama off the open-model throne. Moonshot’s Kimi K3 – two-point-eight trillion parameters, its weights already out the door – sat within shouting distance of Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 on the intelligence indexes. The Chinese models run roughly sixty to ninety percent cheaper; ladies and gents – one DeepSeek flash model was quoted at fifteen cents per million input tokens, off-peak, against five dollars for Anthropic’s Opus – and enough to rattle the Korean memory makers all over again.
TEAM FRONTIER, ASSEMBLE!
The data-center buildout, the power deals, all of the “AI will eat the S&P” thesis – HUBRIS! Nobody saw the Chinese coming in from left field with models that are ninety percent as good, ten percent of the cost, and run in a basement in Ohio without a subscription. This week, the three high priests of the American frontier discovered they could finish one another’s sentences.

On Saturday morning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier. Twelve years in the field, he wrote. AI might cure most major diseases in five to ten years, he wrote. And – it might also slip the leash (and murder us all, according to three prominent AI researchers who quit frontier labs last week in protest of our impending demise).Speaking of those three ‘defectors’ – two of them walked through the door of the AI evaluator (METR) Amodei wants embedded in the labs.
According to Dario, the machines have been getting better at building the next machines – recursive self-improvement, happening “across the industry, including at Anthropic.” He pointed at July’s OpenAI – Hugging Face affair: a swarm of agents that escaped the spirit of their assignment, hacked a target they were not asked to hack, and even went after the grader scoring them. Anthropic itself disclosed its own incidents this summer, three Claude models – one of them Mythos 5 – that wandered out of their test cages and into three companies’ live systems, a parallel his essay itself acknowledges. Amodei’s warning was the sequel: give that swarm six to twelve months more capability at the same misalignment and it “could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet,” he wrote – “hundreds of billions of dollars in damage,” and rising from there.
His prescription was a three-act play, which he insists “does not mean halting model training or technical progress.”
• Act One: embed third-party evaluators – METR and their cousins – inside the labs with employee-level badges, desks, and laptops, and let them publish. Anthropic would do this unilaterally, he said, today.
• Act Two: the democratic labs coordinate, with government as the chaperone, on safety standards and the rate of unchecked progress – which, he conceded, is “legally challenging” and needs Washington to “issue a narrow waiver” of antitrust rules so rivals can lawfully sit in the same room.
• Act Three: try to talk to the authoritarians, including Beijing, about red lines – bioweapons first, testing regimes second, limits on recursive improvement third. Full pause? He all but called it a fantasy. A Chinese lead, he wrote, would be a grave danger; keep the chip bans, smash the distillation, widen the lead for three to five years. Then, perhaps, a bargain.
Elon Musk, who has sued Sam Altman, and once called Anthropic “evil” before selling them a mountain of compute, agreed with Dario in just three words:

Dario is right https://t.co/EwKgqQGaUo
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 12, 2026

Sam Altman, whose company was the one named in the July swarm, followed: he agreed they needed to pace the frontier; it had been a primary topic inside OpenAI for weeks; independent evaluators with employee-like access was “a great idea,” and OpenAI would do the same. More to share soon.

I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks.

Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon. https://t.co/1YhhIybZX7
— Sam Altman (@sama) September 12, 2026

Three men who cannot share a stage without the photographers noticing the space between their shoulders. One essay, three cups (wtf). Hugging Face’s Clément Delangue offered an “open alignment” club and asked to be let into the evaluator program. Andrej Karpathy said he loved it.
How we got to Saturday.
Days earlier the fuse was a twenty-seven-year-old Brit named Jacob Coxon. Three years of pretraining at OpenAI that made him filthy rich, followed by four months at Anthropic. Tuesday into Wednesday he posted that both labs were racing to self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our lives.” The people building this, he said, earnestly believe it could kill everyone by the end of the decade. Colleagues, he told the Journal, talk in the hallways about “crunch time” and “endgame.” The thread did more than a hundred million views. Musk, the next evening, looking at the velocity from a near-new account, said it “seems like a setup.” Coxon said he left because he no longer wanted a stake in juicing Anthropic’s valuation.

Seems like a setup
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 10, 2026

Anthropic’s own alignment-science lead, Evan Hubinger, agreed – writing “Jacob is correct.” Researchers there really do believe AI could kill all humans. His personal odds: above ten percent this decade. The lab, he added, does not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and is not clearly on track to get one. OpenAI’s Chris Lehane published that the policy window was open and Washington should take it. Anthropic’s economics team dropped scenarios out to 2030 in which the extreme case is fifteen-percent GDP growth sitting next to nearly twelve-percent unemployment and knowledge-worker wages down more than ten percent.
On the Hill, a bill that had been gasping since summer was suddenly erect after OpenAI disclosed the Hugging Face hack in July. House members Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran dropped an AI Kill Switch Act. Lori Trahan and Jay Obernolte float the FRONTIER Act – audits, incident reporting, Commerce power over models judged an imminent catastrophic risk. Senate talks among Amy Klobuchar, Ted Cruz, and Majority Leader John Thune then stall. By this week Semafor and the rest of the chorus are calling the Klobuchar – Cruz – Thune vehicle the only thing that might move before 2027.
And guess what, Saturday’s ‘pact’ still isn’t enough for these people!

“..jihad gets far less classroom attention than islamophobia ..

• Greg Gutfeld Reflects on 9/11, You Really Need to Watch This (Margolis)

Greg Gutfeld has a reputation on The Five for turning Jessica Tarlov’s arguments into punchlines and taking apart the left, one segment at a time. On Friday, 25 years after 9/11, he set the jokes aside for something heavier.

Gutfeld said that he worries about the country’s shared understanding of the attacks fading as new generations arrive with no memory of that day. First, he pointed out just how many people now living in the U.S. weren’t around for it at all. “We have over 100 million people that have been born since 9/11. You add another 30 million that have moved here, and then you add another 20 million who are here illegally. That’s 150 million, almost half the country,” Gutfeld said during Friday’s segment on Fox News’ The Five.
He also questioned whether that huge share of the population actually understands what happened, or whether they’ve absorbed a distorted version instead. I have to admit, I’m worried it’s the latter.”Do you think they all fully grasp the import of this event? Or have they been indoctrinated by academics or religious ideologies, or distracted by technology or entertainment?” he asked. In fact, he went further, wondering aloud, “Do they believe, like Hollywood would suggest, that the real danger is white privilege?”
Gutfeld compared the muddled present to his own childhood understanding of Pearl Harbor. “I always think about when I was a kid, 1970, learning about Pearl Harbor. It was 29 years prior. And yet it was so black and white,” he said. “‘What was Pearl Harbor?’ ‘The Japanese attacked us and we went to war.’ It was black and white.” The reality, he argued, is that no comparable clarity exists for 9/11, because the institutions that shape what kids learn have changed since 1970.
In other words, the woke left happened.
“We didn’t have a kind of an academic media complex that could reverse every narrative prioritizing Japanophobia over America’s security. We didn’t have grade school teachers pushing pronouns and condemning American imperialism in seventh grade,” Gutfeld said. “So today there is no black and white, unless, of course, you’re talking about race.”
Gutfeld went further still, arguing that jihad gets far less classroom attention than islamophobia, even as he framed islamophobia as a rational response to jihadist violence rather than the reverse. He pointed out how Islamism has effectively been folded into identity politics and treated as untouchable, warning that anyone who raises questions about intolerance from someone in power who happens to be Muslim risks being cast as the offender instead. “Islamists can brand you a racist while enjoying the life of a brutal, intolerant conqueror,” he said.
Fact Check: True.Gutfeld didn’t hide his skepticism about where all of this leaves the country. “I obviously am a very cynical person on this. I worry about that. I mean, I enjoy the unity every year, but I see what’s going on day to day and it doesn’t hearten me,” he said.
He closed on something more personal than political: concern for his own daughter. “I worry about where I’m gonna send my kid,” Gutfeld said. “I don’t want to give my kid away to somebody who’s going to be told this country deserved 9/11. I don’t want my kid hearing that, God forbid I’m not around at the time.” He added that he doubts today’s kids will ever get the plain, settled understanding of 9/11 that his own generation eventually reached about Pearl Harbor. “I think about that, like, what are we teaching them about this? I understand, Pearl Harbor, you know, do kids understand this? I don’t,” he said.

“What are we teaching them about this?” @greggutfeld worries younger generations are losing a clear understanding of 9/11, arguing that preserving America’s unity begins with teaching children what happened and why. pic.twitter.com/6WUOksgcFm
— The Five (@TheFive) September 12, 2026

Twenty-five years removed from the attacks, nearly half the country alive today has no personal memory of that morning. Gutfeld isn’t wrong to wonder what they’re being taught instead.

PCR hearts Tucker.

• Who Is Trying To Destroy The United States And The World? (Paul Craig Roberts)

Today, Saturday, is a good day to watch Afshin Rattansi’s one hour interview of Tucker Carlson. Carlson has come to my conclusion dating back years that the wars the Zionist neoconservatives, who have America at war with Russia in the interest of US hegemony and at war in the Middle East for the Zionist agenda of Greater Israel, have begun a conflict that is emerging as a world war that is the road to Armageddon. Trump promised to end these wars. Instead, the wars have expanded. Did Trump deceive his supporters, or is the President not the person really in charge?

Often I have explained that the President does not have the power that the public attributes to presidents–or that Trump thought he had–and thus events and policies diverge from the campaign promises. Carlson supports my point when he says that Trump is not in charge.
Who is in charge? Carlson doesn’t know, and I don’t either. On the surface the neoconservatives seem to be responsible for both wars. It is true that the war being conducted from Washington, using Ukraine as its proxy, is in keeping with the Wolfowitz doctrine that the principle goal of US foreign policy is to prevent the rise of any country that can serve as a constraint on US unilateralism. And it is true that the neoconservatives are tightly allied with Israel and support the Zionist agenda of Israeli expansion known as Greater Israel.
A question is whether the neoconservatives are in control or merely serve as the operatives of someone who is, such, as Carlson suggests, the US intelligence services and the military/security complex, the financial health of which is served by war. Is a focus on short-term profits leading to nuclear armageddon? These are not issues that the US media focuses on or permits to be discussed and debated. Therefore, those who are in charge are under no pressure of discovery. They are protected by an array of false narratives.
Carlson is intelligent, thoughtful, and his agenda is the well-being of America, which requires moral instead of immoral behavior and policies. Notice that RT refers to Carlson as a “conservative journalist.” Why is it “conservative” to stand for America and to ask who is really running the show? Everyone should be asking the questions that Carlson asks.

There’s a video here, but (my part of) Europe is not allowed to watch it.

• We’re on The Brink of World War That Ends With Nuclear Weapons – Carlson (RT)

Conservative journalist Tucker Carlson has warned that the world is on the brink of a global conflict that could ultimately end with the use of nuclear weapons in an interview with Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi broadcast on RT on Saturday. Carlson argues that the US is already effectively at war with Russia through Ukraine and warns that further escalation risks a nuclear confrontation.

“The CIA is running the war. The US intelligence services are running the war out of Ukraine against Russia,” he says. “The United States is at war with Russia, and the only kind of conceivable end stage if this continues is a nuclear exchange in which everyone is killed.” The Ukraine conflict and the US-Israeli war on Iran “have merged into a global war,” he argued, warning that the confrontation now risks the very existence of the United States.
Carlson also accuses the Trump administration of abandoning the agenda it campaigned on, saying Trump and his advisers have “almost systematically betrayed the people who voted for him in 2024.” He describes the shift as “the greatest betrayal that I’m aware of in the history of American politics.” The interview also covers political censorship in the US, the rise of BRICS, China’s growing global influence, and the changing balance of power internationally.

“They say intertwined because they can no longer function separately. Canada is economically dependent on proximal and economic subsidies from the United States.”

• Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick Discusses U.S-Canada Trade Conflict (CTH)_

Here’s the fact bomb that silences Canadians almost immediately when delivered. In December 2024 then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, told President-elect Donald Trump that Canada could not comply with a renewed trade agreement based on reciprocity because:

(1) Canada had deindustrialized; their manufacturing was now “light” manufacturing and assembling of component goods made by others.
(2) Canada had legislated energy policy based on climate change, and high carbon emitting industrial production was no longer an option [coking coal burning etc.].
(3) The NATO military spending goal was too high for Canada to reach [they were 19th and it wasn’t a priority because the USA was the crutch].
(4) Internal provincial rules, restrictions and cross-border trade regulations did not align with a Canadian federal trade policy effort, and
(5) the political power of the ‘dairy cartel’ inside Canada tied the hands of Canadian trade representatives.
That was the gist of it. That’s why Canada cannot now or ever find a path to a U.S. reciprocal or balanced trade agreement. #1 and #2 is specifically why Canadian govt officials repeatedly use the word “intertwined.” They say intertwined because they can no longer function separately. Canada is economically dependent on proximal and economic subsidies from the United States.
That outline by Trudeau led Trump to say that Canada should then become a 51st state….. And, well, you know the rest. Someone in Canada should ask Trudeau about it. The former Prime Minister has no reason to deny it, and too many people were witness. Then, perhaps, Canadians will understand.
.
Historian and political Pundit Victor Davis Hanson gives his review of the current status. I would refute the point that VDH makes about Mark Carney “not knowing what he is doing” and the resulting chaos will come as a surprise.
VDH is well intentioned. However, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney knows exactly what he is doing. Carney’s antagonism is a feature of his commonwealth alignment with the European union, and understanding that takes you to a very dark place in this geopolitical dynamic .

“His push to rebuild the Twin Towers — and the Freedom Tower design he never got credit for.”

• 25 Years After: Revisiting Trump’s Role as a Champion for New York (Matt Kane)

“This country is different today, and it’s going to be different than it ever was for many years to come.” –Donald Trump, Sept. 11, 2001

A lot has been made about the special occasions President Trump has presided over during this term: America 250, the FIFA World Cup, and the ensuing Summer Olympics coming to Los Angeles in 2028. However, another important, albeit more somber, event Trump will preside over is the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Any ordinary native New Yorker holding the office of president during this occasion would be a wholesome footnote.
But that it is Donald Trump — a man more synonymous with the fighting spirit of New York than any other, who played a key role in building its skyline and served as the voice for countless Americans and New Yorkers demanding their desires be heard about how to rebuild Ground Zero after 9/11 — is especially poetic. Trump was a symbol of hope, strength and resilience in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and in the years that followed.
In the days after Sept. 11, he not only sent crews to aid in the cleanup and recovery efforts at Ground Zero, but also personally appeared there on Sept. 13 — when it was still considered a great risk to do so given the uncertainty surrounding the threat of additional attacks, the falling debris and continuing fires at the site, and the health hazards that have now claimed the lives of more Fire De[artment of New York firefighters than the attacks themselves (343 on 9/11, more than 600 since) — as a sign of unity, support and appreciation for the job being done.
It would have been worthy of praise if all he did was make a generous financial contribution toward recovery efforts, as many other ultra-wealthy New Yorkers and Americans did. But putting himself potentially in harm’s way and immediately offering his vision for moving forward as a non-public official surely impacted first responders desperate for any morale boost available. In hindsight, it also foreshadowed the unshakable courage and resolve he would exhibit during assassination attempts against him years later as president.
While it was unimaginable for a long time — even to the present day for many — to imagine the New York City skyline without the Twin Towers, decisions about what would come next ultimately had to be made, presenting no shortage of strong opinions. Some — specifically family members who did not want something built over a graveyard of their deceased loved ones—felt rebuilding Ground Zero into a peaceful and quiet space was most appropriate, since thousands lay somewhere beneath the ground, never identified. An overwhelming majority, however, wanted the Towers rebuilt as a sign of national strength and resilience, believing a void in the skyline would signify that the terrorists had won.
Trump strongly shared the latter opinion, quickly stating his belief that rebuilding was an absolute necessity for both the city and country. But after the first design for the new One World Trade Center — the Freedom Tower — was decided on, Trump strongly criticized it as an “egghead design, an empty skeleton” and a “disgusting pile of junk” that was the “last thing we needed representing the World Trade Center.”
Not long after Trump’s critiques, the initial Freedom Tower rendering was ultimately scrapped. And while it is impossible to know how big a role they played, Trump was undeniably the most prominent voice in the public pressure campaign against it. He then became a vocal supporter of the “Twin Towers II” project, even advocating for the original Twin Towers to be rebuilt “a little bit taller” and “a lot stronger” by holding a press conference at Trump Tower that displayed models of a rebuilt World Trade Center complex, which also featured footprint memorials inspired by the base of the originals beneath the new-and-improved ones.
The city ultimately passed on the proposal, but there was great victory in discarding the original design. Any building was bound to upset the anti-rebuild crowd for very sound and understandable reasons. But the first rendering’s hideous, asymmetrical design paid such an awful tribute to the victims and first responders that it also angered the larger portion that wanted to rebuild, meaning virtually nobody would have been happy had it gone through.
Beauty and design are paramount in architecture, but in this instance quantity was most important symbolically. Two buildings came down — three including Building 7 — but only one was built back up — two including the rebuilt Building 7. Nonetheless, if only one tower was going to be built, the Freedom Tower ultimately erected was, and is, visually appealing. Perhaps that should come as no surprise, as it was initially proposed for another project years prior by none other than Donald Trump.
That’s right: in 1996, Trump proposed building a New York Stock Exchange Tower on undeveloped land along the East River. Early renderings of the building, which would have surpassed Chicago’s Sears Tower in height and stories to become the world’s tallest, show a nearly identical design to what would become the Freedom Tower. The initial mockup even eerily features the still-standing Twin Towers in the background.
So while the Trump-backed Twin Towers II were passed on, the hideous, Trump-opposed first Freedom Tower was — whether knowingly or not — discarded for a design first proposed by Trump years earlier, meaning he did have, despite this revelation being rarely if ever mentioned, an impact on the rebuilt World Trade Center.
Any differences of opinion about rebuilding were dwarfed by the immense unity that swept the nation. Twenty-five years later, measuring our nation’s patriotism is much more complex. A recent poll revealed striking differences across party lines compared to 25 years ago. In 2001, 90% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats considered themselves proud to be American. Today, 93% of Republicans do, while an astonishingly low 27% of Democrats do.
While the raw numbers — especially when eliminating fake and/or duplicate votes — greatly favor President Trump and his MAGA agenda, the ideological gap between his movement and the opposing one couldn’t be wider, making the 25-year memorial less than purely triumphant. On one hand, the Democrat party has borne witness to an alarming number of primary victories of late by socialist (communist) candidates who possess unabashed anti-American rhetoric.
Unbelievably, this is occurring largely in the same New York City that was led by America’s Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, and served as a testament to American resolve and patriotism after 9/11. Now, under Mayor Zohran Mamdani — who appointed as his Chief Counsel an attorney who previously represented a convicted al-Qaida member who was also the brother-in-law of a 9/11 hijacker, and who has claimed that Muslims are the true victims of a post-9/11 world due to discrimination — the city’s identity is unrecognizable.
In fact, Mamdani’s conduct has been so offensive that a petition urging him not to attend the 9/11 ceremonies has garnered more than one hundred thousand signatures. Concurrently, a growing number of congressional Democrats have voluntarily unmasked themselves as holding the same beliefs as Mamdani, all while the media has shamelessly furthered his Muslim victimhood lie.
But on the other hand, America is led by inarguably the most unapologetically pro-America president of all in Donald Trump, who remains relentless in his pursuit of defeating all that hinders the nation on its path to being made great again. In doing so, he serves as a powerful resistance to this wave of unabashed anti-Americanism enabled by an old-guard Democrat party that may not agree with the ideology at heart, but has allowed it to metastasize expeditiously. Because of Trump, there is immense hope that this and other instruments of anti-Americanism seeking to destroy our country will be defeated before they are given the chance.
On this 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, as we pray for the departed souls and their friends and families, may we also thank God that one of the gatekeepers who watched over New York on that dark Tuesday now watches over the nation at large. The man who, in his first term, signed the Never Forget the Heroes Act, which permanently authorized the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and ensured compensation would continue for people suffering from 9/11-related illnesses and for families of people who died from those illnesses, without the fund repeatedly facing expiration.
President Trump has never forgotten, may we all never either.

“Victor Davis Hanson has a new book out profiling the president, now undeniably a towering figure of history.”

• The Real-Life Epic of Donald Trump (Terry Scambray)

Odysseus endured many diversions and overcame mighty obstacles on his mythical return home. Likewise, Donald Trump’s return from political exile has the makings of myth — except in Donald Trump’s case, the myth is true. In The Counter Revolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement, Victor Davis Hanson, classicist, historian, and farmer, devotes his many gifts to explaining Donald Trump and his efforts to rescue America from the anti-constitutional, counter-productive nostrums of progressivism and the barbarous hand of Marxism.

As with Ronald Reagan, the media saw Trump as a political amateur — or to use a Trumpism, “fake news” portrayed him as such, one writer describing his famous ride down the escalator in Trump Tower as a slow descent into the “abyss of politics.” However, as Hanson writes, and it’s worth quoting at length,
Trump had originally made his money by making things — and he was constantly battling to do it. In the real estate jungle of Manhattan, that meant fighting year after year, with suspect politicos, self-interested community activists, passive-aggressive tabloid media, radical environmentalists, unyielding union bosses, unpredictable prosecutors and judges, ruthless business rivals, cutthroat regulators, and no-nonsense bankers. …
He was known for having sued more people and companies and in turn being sued by them — 3,500 cases in federal and state courts, with 1,900 as plaintiff and 1,450 as defendant — than any other prominent Manhattan businessman. Though many see Trump as overbearingly narcissistic, his confidence signals his belief that, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.”
“From this Hobbesian war of all against all,” as Hanson writes, Trump realized that as a maker, a builder, he necessarily depended on bankers, whom he admired. But he also understood “that they were distant from the raw urban elements — food, fuel, shelter, safety — that ultimately made a city or nation run.” Thus, he developed respect for the “muscular classes,” though not the sculptured gym-crafted muscular types, as Hanson has pointed out elsewhere, but muscular working men, whose biceps, however impressive, are often overshadowed by their waists.
So Trump bonded with producers and makers, like the Teamsters, whom he once told that he could have built with non-union labor, but he refused to. That was a political maneuver, for sure, but also a pragmatic one for a builder who recognizes that without the imprimatur of the Teamsters, in New York, nothing gets done.
From this perspective, Trump knew that blue-collar workers’ wages were eroding because of the import of foreign workers and the export of American factories, just as my working-man father knew this 50 years ago. Hoping to reverse both trends, President Trump began his round of reciprocal tariffs, which he has used to geopolitical advantage and to increase federal government revenues.
This was the beginning of Trump’s appeal to the middle class, though he always believed, as Hanson writes, “that working class whites might return to vote for a populist nationalist traditionalist who combined cultural conservatism and advocacy for high-paying jobs. So was born the MAGA base.” And though MAGA developed from the pitchfork part of the Republican party, “Trump’s earthiness,” as Hanson writes, gained more traction than Patrick Buchanan’s genre of populism.
Trump also aligned with an array of middle-class heroes, like Mike Tyson and pro wrestling champions. Trump, recognizing that everybody likes a winner, blended this appeal with his marquee billionaire friends, Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, and most notably genius and trillionaire supporter Elon Musk.
The Counter Revolution is a handbook on the art of forging coalitions, of making deals, which is the essence of republican governance. Contrast this with, say, Machiavelli’s The Prince, which offers advice to an authoritarian controlling an elitist system, resembling America’s “experts,” who have gained more power in our government over the last 100 years.
These experts, “the technocracy,” are clearly shown, as Hanson puts it, by the “bureaucratic fiefdoms, the three million strong federal administrative state, indebted to the Democratic paradigm of more taxes for more government employees for more power over the citizenry.”
Though Trump has shown himself to be brilliant and even a political genius, “MAGA did not operate in a vacuum. For the New Jacobin Democrats,” as Hanson refers to them, are avatars of the “French revolutionary fanatics substituting lawfare, election interference, and weaponization of federal agencies for the guillotine,” all of which made them a less desirable alternative to Trump. In other words, rebounding from the electoral disaster of the McGovern candidacy, the Democrats swerved right and won with Bill Clinton.
But though winning is necessary for these Jacobins, it is, apparently, not sufficient; thus, they re-established the McGovern wing of the party with “the fresh faces of The Squad and Zohran Mamdani along with the shock troops of antifa, BLM et al — which made the once winning Clinton agenda seem not just reactionary but surreal,” as Hanson concludes.
Perhaps electing zombie Joe Biden president and then running cackling Kamala as the Democrat nominee in 2024 made the loony left think they could destroy the border, the penal system, and the buying power of Americans by spending $7 trillion and christening such spending with Orwellian names like “The Inflation Reduction Act.”
Even Larry Sommers, who sometimes stumbles onto inconvenient truths, wrote that Bidenomics caused “the massive inflation which, more than anything, helped cripple Biden’s presidency and fuel the Trump recovery.” After all, America “has a $37 trillion debt with $3 billion a day in interest payments,” as Hanson reminds readers. Nonetheless, government spending continues at a destructive pace, even under the Trump administration!
The left branded “minorities” who voted for Trump in 2024 as victims of the Marxist construct of “false consciousness.” But Trump appealed to the continuing upward economic mobility of Americans of African and Hispanic descent; thus, he saw that class has more voter appeal than ethnic solidarity has, that e pluribus unum trumped the Democrat party’s tribal appeal to “race” with slogans like “Black Lives Matter” and Sí se puede, “Yes, we can.” Minorities’ economic advancement is nothing new, as Thomas Sowell has established and I witnessed growing up in a mixed ethnic neighborhood.
“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets,” Napoleon warned. Likewise, Hanson points to the “legacy media” as “Armies of Anti-Trumpers who were the most vitriolic of all the various ant-Trump entities.” And though this herd of independent thinkers has always been uncritically left-wing, its younger reporters are even more untrained in “traditional journalistic methods,” though they have certainly “absorbed a woke zeal.”

Bit late now.

• CIA Director Releases 71 Presidential Daily Briefs Before and After 9/11 (CTH)

Today the CIA released an unprecedented 71 Presidential Daily Briefs given to the Executive Branch before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I would remind readers, in 2010 George W Bush’s campaign manager, aide and senior staff, Karl Rove, revealed [“Courage and Consequence“] that then CIA Director George Tenet had been trying for several weeks to get a personal meeting with President Bush to outline an intelligence concern about an international terror threat.

According to Rove, White House National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, had been blocking Tenet from meeting with President Bush. Director Tenet sent several requests using alternate channels to reach Bush. Eventually, in the late spring or early summer 2001, Tenet overcame the Rice block and was given time to brief President Bush.
CIA Director George Tenet then told President Bush the CIA had intercepted telephone “chatter” pointing to an al-Qaeda terrorist threat that somehow involved airlines. However, the details and the specifics of the threat were unknown. The only thing Tenet knew with certainty was that some type of plot was underway and airlines were involved.
George W Bush responded to Tenet by saying it appeared the CIA director was just trying to “cover his ass” in case something happened. Bush was angered at the vagueness of the warning and told Tenet to consider his ass covered, but essentially the information was useless without specifics.
The rest, as they say, is history. The matter did not surface again until after the 9/11/01 plot was carried out.
US President George W. Bush, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George Tenet meet in the Oval Office October 8, 2001

It’s illegal, everybody knows about it, nothing happens.

• Sec. Mullin: Ilhan Omar Married Her Brother (Catherine Salgado)

One of the most explosive accusations against the Minnesota Democrat representative who says she represents Somalia’s interests is now confirmed.

It’s all in the family for Ilhan Omar and her brother, who got legally married so both of them could be in the United States of America. Their family has connections to genocide in Somaliland, with the father directly implicated in the slaughter, so it’s not exactly shocking that Ilhan and her siblings are implicated both in immigration fraud and in taxpayer funding fraud. Talk about a criminal family. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin finally confirmed the illegal marriage accusation in comments on the second night of the Republican midterm convention this week.

BREAKING: MULLIN SAYS ILHAN OMAR ALLEGATIONS ARE UNDER INVESTIGATION

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin says authorities are investigating allegations that Rep. Ilhan Omar married her brother in connection with immigration:

“We know that she married her brother to try to bring him…
— Real America's Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) September 11, 2026

Benny Johnson was asking the secretary about the Omar case. “OK, well, what’s going to happen, Mr. Secretary?” Mullin answered, “Something’s going to happen. This an ongoing investigation, right? We know that she married her brother to try to bring him to the United States. We know he lives now in London. We feel that this may … there may be more to this, the whole family migration, and possibly some illegal activity for them to come the United States to begin with.” Therefore, the Trump administration has confirmed the incestuous legal marriage, but is still looking to see how many members of the family are implicated in immigration fraud.
Mullin went on, “Here’s what I want to make sure. If we actually move a case forward, it’s not a political case. It’s an actual case because they did things wrong. If you decided to work the law, lying on the information to get in the United States, … or because you were just wanting to seek a better life, but you didn’t tell us who you actually were, you lied about certain things, about your application; those things, there’s no expiration to that. If we can prove it, then you shouldn’t have been here in the first place.”
Mullin explained, evidently referring to the rampant fraud in the Minnesota Somali community, “It’s more than just her case, we’re looking at a lot of cases that are very similar to this, that we feel like they’re made that broad from the get-go. But when we move forward, it’s not political. It’s because you chose to break the nation’s laws.”
Referring back to his time in the United States Senate, Mullin added, “I don’t make the laws anymore. I’m in charge of enforcing laws, and I will not pick and choose which laws I’m going to enforce and which laws I’m not. I’m going to enforce all of them regardless if you’re Omar, or some other individual in the community, we’re going to enforce it equally.”
Republicans are often afraid to hold Democrats to account for breaking the law because they are so worried about looking partisan. It has allowed many a Democrat to get away with apparently illegal activities. Hopefully there will be accountability for Ilhan Omar, and that will break the cycle of inaction.

I was lucky to have been Bobby's Director of Communications when he decided to leave the Democratic Party to join Donald Trump.

In this incredible speech, he does more than explain his personal reasons for leaving the party of his family – he describes the reason millions of us… pic.twitter.com/emX2pf1TLP
— Del Bigtree (@delbigtree) September 11, 2026

THIS ISNT A SCENE FROM A WAR MOVIE. THIS IS AN AI ROBOT TRAINING TO DO THE JOBS HUMANS ARE TOO SCARED TO DO

What looks like a scene from a futuristic war movie is actually a training exercise for a humanoid AI robot. In the video, the robot is practicing rapid movements,… https://t.co/LaLxqzFdqt pic.twitter.com/AKkooJ878K
— Hoogarden (@0xHoogarden) September 11, 2026

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

Debt Rattle September 11 2026

Sep 112026

September 11, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:40 am Finance Tagged with: 9/11, AI, Charlie Kirk, Elon Musk, interest rates, slavery, stimmy checks 31 Responses »

Roy Lichtenstein Femme d’Alger 1963

• Trump Floats $5,000 For Every US Adult Citizen If GOP Holds Congress (ZH)

• ‘The Greatest Evangelist for American Liberty,’ Charlie Kirk (Salgado)

• Tributes Pour in on Anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s Martyrdom (Salgado)

• European Leaders Trying To ‘Buy Time’ For Kiev With Ceasefire Calls – Lavrov (RT)

• ECB Raises Interest Rates to Avoid Settling Ukraine-Russia Conflict (CTH)

• Democrats Asked for It, and Trump and the GOP Delivered (Eric Florack)

• Bessent: ‘Nothing Else Matters’ If China Pulls Ahead of US in AI (ET)

• New Four-hour Elon Musk Documentary (BBC)

• The US Has Entered Stage 3 in the Trade War With Canada (Victor Davis Hanson)

• The Story of Slavery Told Correctly (Paul Craig Roberts)

• Jamaica Demands Answers On Slavery (Egountchi Behanzin)

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2097489781911368179?s=20

AI+robots will more than double the global economy in less than 10 years https://t.co/NLx37lO2qc
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 9, 2026

https://twitter.com/Alexs_jame/status/2097873034052821190?s=20

“Stimmy” Checks?!

• Trump Floats $5,000 For Every US Adult Citizen If GOP Holds Congress (ZH)

During a speech Wednesday night at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, President Trump proposed sending every adult American citizen a $5,000 “Trump dividend” if Republicans retain control of both chambers of Congress in November. “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them,” Trump said, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”bHe continued, “It will be called the Trump dividend,” adding, “Now all we have to do is win.”

NEW: President Trump makes a major promise at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas: $5,000 for every adult U.S. citizen if Republicans win both the House and Senate in the midterms.

“I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for… pic.twitter.com/XqiphY7y8a
— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 10, 2026

Trump told the audience at the American Airlines Center: “Your vote will decide whether our country stumbles at the starting gate of our next 250 years or surges forward and never looks back.” nQuick math: A $5,000 payout to 270 million adults would cost the US government approximately $1.35 trillion. The proposal comes as US public debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time in recent weeks.mBloomberg strategist Mark Cudmore warned that a large fiscal injection could intensify existing market pressures, including weaker Treasuries, dollar depreciation, and demand for commodities and other real assets.
“The general reaction from markets is very muted precisely as everyone sees almost zero chance of this happening. The US economy is strong and already at risk of running too hot, so pumping in so much extra fiscal stimulus when under funding pressure will exacerbate all the dynamics we’re already focused on in markets: weaker Treasuries, a depreciating dollar and a rush to commodities and real assets,” Cudmore said.
The proposal also arrives as Trump acknowledges that significant fuel-price relief may not come until after the midterms. The national average for gasoline remains above the politically sensitive $ 4-per-gallon level, while diesel prices are at record highs. Trump also indicated that the Iran conflict could continue beyond the elections. President Trump’s approval rating is around 38%, according to reporting by The Guardian.
Vice President JD Vance said that these proposed post-election direct payments to Americans could be funded by revenue from Trump’s wide-ranging tariff program.

He gave Trump young America. And now?

• ‘The Greatest Evangelist for American Liberty,’ Charlie Kirk (Salgado)

Exactly a year ago today, an LGBTQ radical assassinated Charlie Kirk with one shot, taking away in a split second a man who could have been the next great leader of America’s Patriots for decades to come. At the Republican midterm convention, President Donald Trump paid tribute to Charlie, and the White House released a video in his honor.

The White House video combined clips of Charlie himself, including from that morning at Utah Valley University just before he died, along with clips from Charlie’s funeral and Trump‘s eulogy. “On that terrible day, Sept. 10, 2025, our greatest evangelist for American liberty became immortal; he’s immortal now for American freedom,” Trump had praised Kirk. Do we remember what Charlie stood for enough to carry on his legacy with enthusiasm and courage?

One year ago, we tragically lost a fearless patriot. A champion for freedom and for our country.

Charlie Kirk changed the course of American history. His courage, conviction, and love of country will never be forgotten. ❤️

"Well done, good and faithful servant" pic.twitter.com/1pFgGSrTAG
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 10, 2026

With his speeches and debates around the country from the time he was a teenager, Charlie Kirk was able to electrify young people in a way the most conservatives never have. “Do you know you are part of something bigger than yourself?” the White House clip of Kirk asked. “Do you know that you are part of the most exciting, diverse, powerful movement in the history of this country? This movement is about the citizens versus the oligarchs. This movement is about We the People versus the ruling class. This movement is about America versus the globalists. This movement is about all of us against them.”
Kirk loved the Biblical saying, “Here I am. It means, ‘Lord, use me.’ Abraham, at the binding of Isaac said, ‘Lord, here I am.’ Moses at the burning bush,… Samuel, Isaiah… It means, ‘give me the orders,’” he said. Erika Kirk has harkened back to this attitude of her husband’s and how he had offered himself to God, without realizing that he was going to be a martyr.
Trump made a point of honoring Charlie Kirk at the midterm convention on the evening of September 9, just before the anniversary of his death. “In Charlie’s honor, I just want to say we love you, Charlie, and Erika is here someplace,” Trump said, urging Charlie’s widow to stand up. The packed crowd gave Erika Kirk a standing ovation, and then broke out into chants of, “Charlie! Charlie!”

“CHARLIE! CHARLIE! CHARLIE!”

The RNC Midterm Convention crowd rises for a standing ovation for Erika Kirk before breaking into chants of her late husband’s name as President Donald Trump recognizes her from the stage.

“We will not let them win. And in Charlie’s honor, I just… pic.twitter.com/3mGd19G2vp
— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 10, 2026

During the speech, Trump reflected, “It was actually one year ago tomorrow, a far-left extremist assassinated my great friend and conservative voice, Charlie Kirk, because Charlie Kirk spoke the truth.” And of course, it was precisely Kirk‘s success at what he did, and his unfailing charity in doing so, that made him such a promising candidate for president in the future and a particular target of leftist hatred. Tyler Robinson killed Kirk, and countless leftists celebrated the assassination because Kirk was too persuasive with the truth.
https://twitter.com/Newsforce/status/2097884281355849829?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2097884281355849829%7Ctwgr%5Ec72c95f6b84fa6d7c67e7efa1b40cebad9aa11af%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpjmedia.com%2Fcatherinesalgado%2F2026%2F09%2F10%2Fthe-greatest-evangelist-for-american-liberty-n4957076

Trump referred to this reality. “What shocked millions of Americans was not only the fact that Charlie was murdered, as bad as it was, but also how many people made an excuse for it or cheered for it. They were cheering, some people, sick people. For a brief moment, the mask came off the radical left, and you saw what they were… all about. And now those same people are trying to get power over you in this election, and they are all voting Democrat.”
We cannot bring back Charlie Kirk, but we can try to continue the work that he began so successfully of bringing young people back to a love for country, faith, and family. Winning this midterm election is what Charlie would want, but it is only the beginning.

9/11 commemoration turns into Charlie Kirk memorial.

• Tributes Pour in on Anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s Martyrdom (Salgado)

“One year ago, our nation witnessed pure evil when Charlie Kirk was taken from us,” Attorney General Todd Blanche declared September 10. But as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton declared, “I miss my friend, and I’ll honor him by never backing down… Charlie will never be forgotten.”
https://twitter.com/AndrewKolvet/status/2098115149609783776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2098115149609783776%7Ctwgr%5E0efbd5ae8ecba063350141b98df8c18e7a20623b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpjmedia.com%2Fcatherinesalgado%2F2026%2F09%2F10%2Ftributes-pour-in-on-anniversary-of-charlie-kirks-martyrdom-n4957089

President Donald Trump paid tribute to Kirk both at the Republican midterm convention Wednesday night and in a video the White House released to “the greatest evangelist for American liberty.” Trump urged Americans to vote against the party that celebrated Kirk’s death. “It was actually one year ago tomorrow, a far-left extremist assassinated my great friend and conservative voice, Charlie Kirk, because Charlie Kirk spoke the truth,” the president emphasized. Many members of his administration also praised Charlie and mourned the anniversary of his death. Secretary of State Marco Rubio illustrated how he is trying to implement policies that would make Charlie proud.

Charlie Kirk had a unique gift for articulating the good — the goodness of family, faith, and America.

One year ago today, he was killed for it.

We’ll honor his legacy by building great things and holding to account the enemies of civilization. pic.twitter.com/nYooF7xua5
— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) September 10, 2026

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote, “One year ago, a bullet silenced one of the most eloquent truth-tellers of our era. But it could not silence the principles Charlie Kirk stood for. Today, we honor Charlie’s devotion to God, to our country, and to the Constitution. We carry his legacy forward by summoning his best virtues in ourselves—and living with the courage, conviction, and faith that defined his life.” Similarly, Bishop Robert Barron praised Charlie‘s ability to see every human being as a beloved creation of God. Like the White House, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth used the biblical commendation, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

A year ago, we lost the incredible Charlie Kirk.

His courage, conviction, and unwavering faith left a generational impact — and ignited a spiritual revival — inside our great Republic.

We will never forget Charlie, but take great refuge in the fact that he is with his Lord and… pic.twitter.com/0qtvez77HU
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) September 10, 2026

White House advisor Stephen Miller exclaimed, “Charlie was a beloved friend, an unflinching ally, and an indispensable warrior for America. He was murdered not only by an evil assassin but an entire ecosystem of far-left extremism that normalizes, justifies and glorifies violence against its political opponents. The success of America depends upon the dismantlement of these violent networks. As we grieve an unimaginable loss, we pledge ourselves to accelerate the work for which Charlie gave his very life. No one can remain on the sidelines when the stakes are so vast.”

A year ago, we lost Charlie Kirk — a father, a follower of Christ, and a truly great voice for American ideals.

He spoke truth, pointed young Americans to Jesus Christ, and refused to live in fear.

They may have taken the man, but they will never take away his legacy. pic.twitter.com/kaYqVjnO8P
— Scott Turner (@SecretaryTurner) September 10, 2026

One artist is honoring Charlie with a statue in New York City, and there is also a new statue of Charlie in Phoenix.
NEW: A life-size Charlie Kirk statue will be unveiled Thursday afternoon in New York City's Times Square.

The public will see it at 2:23 pm EST, the exact time Kirk was assassinated during a speaking engagement one year ago today.

Artist Sergio Furnari also says he'll have to… pic.twitter.com/P20Co45otQ
— FRONTLINES TPUSA (@FrontlinesTPUSA) September 10, 2026

1 year ago, Charlie Kirk was murdered & stolen from us.

They killed him because he was a threat — a threat to the DSA, communism, & the democrat party.

I know if Charlie were alive today, he would be doing everything in his power to deliver Republican wins this November.…
— ThePersistence (@ScottPresler) September 10, 2026

Charlie’s own Turning Point USA and his widow Erika released heart-breaking homages. “We have had to learn how to carry on without the person who was at the center of everything we do,” the TPUSA team said soberly. “We have celebrated milestones that Charlie should have been here to celebrate. We have stood on stages where his voice should have been heard. We have watched his children grow without their father there to see it. And we have felt the weight of his absence in ways that never seem to get easier.” Indeed, “For the people who knew and loved Charlie, September 10 will never simply be an anniversary. It is the day our lives were changed forever.”
For all the things that divide us, grief is a universal language and a defining part of the human experience. At some point, every one of us will love someone we have to say an earthly goodbye to.

I am still learning how to walk through each day carrying the grief I feel for my… pic.twitter.com/6hx6ZR1Tq5
— Erika Kirk (@MrsErikaKirk) September 7, 2026

The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro warned against conservatives splitting into hate-filled and conspiratorial factions, urging a united front against all the leftists celebrating “Kirkiversary.”
There were even international tributes. Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa posted, “A man of strong faith, a husband and a father, Charlie believed that political and ideological differences should be confronted through argument and democratic debate – never through hatred or violence… Charlie Kirk is no longer with us, but the values he stood for – freedom of expression, faith, courage and peaceful political debate – remain. They deserve to be defended.”
But the greatest tribute that any of us can ever give Charlie Kirk is to continue the work that he started and refuse to let the radical, godless left take over America.
One year ago, we tragically lost a fearless patriot. A champion for freedom and for our country.

Charlie Kirk changed the course of American history. His courage, conviction, and love of country will never be forgotten. ❤️

"Well done, good and faithful servant" pic.twitter.com/1pFgGSrTAG
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 10, 2026

“Russia will not accept as a neighbor a nation ruled by a “Russophobic and aggressive neo-Nazi regime,” the top diplomat has said ..”

• European Leaders Trying To ‘Buy Time’ For Kiev With Ceasefire Calls – Lavrov (RT)

Zelensky and Finnish President Stubb, Kiev, Ukraine, August 24, 2026

European leaders calling for a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine conflict are seeking to preserve the government in Kiev in its current aggressive anti-Russian form, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. Even politicians who acknowledge that Kiev cannot militarily retake the former Ukrainian regions that have joined Russia since 2014 and now advocate a truce are pursuing an agenda that threatens Russia and its citizens, the top diplomat said. Speaking in an interview on Tuesday, Lavrov named Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as examples.

The proposed ceasefire “is also just a way to buy time, as everyone knows,” Lavrov said, adding that Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky “makes no secret of that” as he seeks additional weapons supplies. mAccording to the Russian minister, the goal of this ploy is to preserve and keep in power “the regime currently ruling in Kiev,” whose defining traits he described as “Nazism, aggressive Russophobia, violations of human rights, language rights and religious freedom.” As for Europe, it wants to preserve that openly Russophobic and aggressive neo-Nazi regime. It is the European plan. I don’t see how the Russian people can accept this outcome.
Moscow’s objections to freezing the conflict remain unchanged, as does its opposition to proposals to deploy troops from NATO member states in Ukraine following a potential peace deal, Lavrov said. “Any people in military uniforms and any military facilities will be legitimate [targets] for us, and no scenario under which Ukraine will acquire NATO membership in all but name is acceptable to us,” he stressed.Lavrov was interviewed in Moscow by Russian-American television host Dimitri Simes and visiting US political commentator Andrew Napolitano, better known as Judge Napolitano, after his former role on the New Jersey Superior Court.

Good observation. The EU blames Putin AND Trump. And it wants no ceasefire.

• ECB Raises Interest Rates to Avoid Settling Ukraine-Russia Conflict (CTH)

The European Central Bank raised interest rates a quarter of a percent claiming the effort will reduce energy prices. However, the primary cause of higher energy costs is energy policy not monetary policy. As you can see, Europe is blaming the Iran conflict, and by extension blaming President Trump for inflicting higher oil and gas prices. Yet in reality, it was the European decision to cut themselves off of Russian oil and gas that led to their massive price increases.

In essence, if you ask yourself how far the EU collective is willing to go in order to combat the fictitious threat represented by Russia’s conflict with non-EU state Ukraine, it appears there is no upper limit. Rather than assist in a resolution of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, they are willing to keep fueling the war and diminishing their own economy in the process. From the perspective of the welfare of the average European, none of this makes sense. This is bureaucratic ideology running amok.
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — The European Central Bank raised interest rates Thursday to cool inflation that is being fed by high oil prices from the Iran war. The decision was supported by a stronger-than-expected economy that suggests businesses can weather the higher borrowing costs. The central bank for the 21 EU member countries that use the euro currency raised its benchmark rate by a quarter percentage point to 2.50% at a meeting held in Berlin, away from the bank’s Frankfurt headquarters.
Bank President Christine Lagarde said at her news conference that “the conflict in the Middle East continues to generate inflation pressures, and inflation is set to remain well above target for an extended period.” “The outlook remains highly uncertain, with risks to the upside for inflation and to the downside for economic growth,” she said, adding that the bank would make future rate decisions meeting by meeting based on incoming data. She said the central bank would not commit to any particular path for rates before seeing the data. (read more)
It is ironic his announcement comes from Berlin as the German economy announces the loss of 100,000 auto workers while the EU Central Bank says, “a stronger than expected economy.” Ever the faithful leftist WEF member, Poland Prime Minister Donald Tusk notes that Poland is paying the highest energy prices in the world, but he faithfully supports the EU agenda. Because it’s Russia’s fault, and of course he does.

“Stopping him from doing what, exactly?” That’s the question Democrats don’t want asked, because it’s where their whole strategy comes apart.”

• Democrats Asked for It, and Trump and the GOP Delivered (Eric Florack)

Ever the consummate showman, President Trump invented the concept of the midterm convention, and he stepped right in to headline it. But there’s a perfectly legitimate argument that Republicans should run on what they’ve actually accomplished rather than turning this election into another referendum on one man. I made exactly that argument myself, at column length, yesterday in the VIP article, “So, What Has Donald Trump Actually Accomplished?” (If you’re not a VIP member yet, why not?)

Elections ought to be about results, policy, and competing visions for the future — not another round of “Trump good” versus “Trump bad.” That’s the ideal. Unfortunately, politics doesn’t happen in the ideal. It happens in the real world, and every strategy has to survive contact with the reality surrounding it.
And here’s the reality Republicans can’t wish away: Democrats have already made Donald Trump the centerpiece. They’ve been doing it for over a decade. Since he first came down that escalator, Democrats and most of the institutional media have treated virtually everything in American life as somehow being about Donald Trump — his personality, his tweets, his speeches, his insults, his policies, his supporters, his opponents, his legal troubles, his victories, his defeats.
Did the cat hack up a hairball on your pillow while you were sleeping? Trump’s fault. Car won’t start? Trump’s fault. Kid brought home a report card that reads like a cry for help? Also, somehow, Trump’s fault. At this point, Democrats have done everything but formally rename the San Andreas Fault “Trump’s Fault.” For years, Democrats told voters, loudly and on an endless loop, that the defining issue facing the country is Donald Trump. They made him the issue. They made him the villain. They made him the explanation for everything they didn’t like.
They made him the explanation for everything that happened after he left office. They made him the explanation for everything that’s happened since he came back. bAnd now, having spent years insisting Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Republic, they apparently expect Republicans to politely agree that maybe we shouldn’t bring him up too much this fall? That’s adorable.
Sorry. That’s not how this works. Republicans can certainly choose to talk about something else — but that strategy has a fatal flaw: you don’t get to unilaterally decide what the other side’s campaign is about. If Democrats plan to spend the whole cycle talking about Trump (and obviously they do), pretending he isn’t part of the election just hands them the subject uncontested. Not answering them isn’t strategy. It’s surrender with better lighting.
There’s also a real difference between making Trump the centerpiece and simply recognizing that the opposition has already made him the centerpiece. Those aren’t nearly the same move. Republicans don’t have to make every speech about Trump. They don’t need his face on every mailer. They don’t need every candidate sounding like they were personally deputized by Trump to defend Western civilization before breakfast. But they do need to recognize the political battlefield they’re standing on.
The question isn’t whether Republicans should crown Donald Trump the centerpiece of the midterms. It’s whether they’re willing to fight on the battlefield that already exists — which is exactly what I did in yesterday’s column, and from what I saw, what they did last night, in Texas. If Democrats are going to campaign on stopping Trump, Republicans have every right, and frankly an obligation, to ask voters a simple follow-up: “Stopping him from doing what, exactly?” That’s the question Democrats don’t want asked, because it’s where their whole strategy comes apart.
It’s one thing to tell voters that Donald Trump is an awful human being, a threat to democracy, a fascist, a dictator-in-waiting, or whatever label happens to be trending that week. And as they’ve demonstrated, you don’t even need to have any proof of any of it. Simple repetition does the work. However, it’s an entirely different thing to explain why the actual policies voters are living under should be thrown out. Democrats have clearly demonstrated that they can’t do the second part. They’ve never had to — they’ve spent a decade coasting on the former.

“There Is No Day After Tomorrow”; Bessent Warns Of Consequences To Losing AI Arms Race To China,

• Bessent: ‘Nothing Else Matters’ If China Pulls Ahead of US in AI (ET)

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States cannot afford to fall behind China in artificial intelligence, warning that a Chinese lead would outweigh other U.S. advantages. “Beating China – there is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this,” Bessent said on Sept. 9 at Breitbart News’s “State of the Economy” event in Washington. “If they were to pull ahead of us on AI, then nothing else matters.” Bessent made the remarks while answering a question about opposition to data centers and the need to expand the infrastructure required for AI development.

On the same day, the National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and FBI issued a joint advisory accusing six China-based AI companies of conducting industrial-scale campaigns to extract capabilities from U.S. frontier AI models. The agencies named DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI, saying the companies had extracted billions of tokens through millions of requests to frontier models including Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok since at least late 2024.
Agencies Detail Model Distillation
Knowledge distillation is a machine learning technique in which one model is trained using the outputs of another. The technique is commonly used legitimately, including to develop smaller or less expensive models. The advisory alleged, however, that the six companies engaged in “aggressive, malicious, and targeted” distillation at an industrial scale to extract restricted proprietary functions and capabilities from U.S. models. The NSA said the companies were systematically extracting U.S. model capabilities to train their own systems.
According to the advisory, the companies distributed their activity across model providers, cloud platforms, and other infrastructure to avoid detection. Some used third-party services to relay requests to U.S. models, allowing them to bypass geographic restrictions and other safeguards, the agencies said. The agencies assessed that the alleged activity took place “likely with Chinese government awareness.” The advisory did not state that Chinese authorities directed the individual campaigns.
It said DeepSeek had allegedly conducted an organized campaign since at least late 2024 to obtain reasoning capabilities, specialized optimizations, and other functions for use in its R1 and V3 models. The agencies also attributed large-scale distillation activity to Alibaba’s Qwen models and to models developed by the other four companies. The agencies said such activity could allow Chinese AI developers to narrow the technology gap while avoiding some of the computing power, electricity, foundational research, and other costs required to independently develop frontier models. The advisory stated that advances in Chinese AI models could also expand military and cyber capabilities.
Beijing rejected the allegations on Sept. 9. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said China’s AI development came from domestic technological development and international cooperation. The Sept. 8 advisory urged American AI companies and infrastructure providers to improve detection of suspicious activity and strengthen coordination across model developers, cloud providers, and application programming interface providers to counter large-scale distillation campaigns.
Earlier Warnings From US AI Companies
The federal advisory follows earlier accusations by American AI developers. Anthropic said in February that it had identified industrial-scale campaigns by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax involving more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts. The accounts violated its terms of service and regional access restrictions, Anthropic said. It also said that while distillation is a legitimate training method, competitors can misuse it to acquire capabilities developed by other companies without bearing comparable development costs.
OpenAI separately told the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party in February that it had observed activity indicating continued attempts by DeepSeek to distill capabilities from OpenAI and other U.S. frontier models, including through increasingly obfuscated methods intended to make the activity harder to detect.
Data Centers and the AI Race
Bessent tied the competition with China to the U.S. buildout of data centers and other infrastructure needed for AI. He said the United States currently has the lead because of its technology companies, advanced chips, financing, and startup ecosystem, but argued that development could not be paused. “We can’t pause,” Bessent said. “You can’t, because the Chinese won’t pause.”
He criticized technology companies for failing to engage adequately with communities affected by new data-center construction. Bessent also alleged that some opposition to data-center development involved Chinese “agitprop.” He did not identify specific examples for that assertion during the discussion. He gave data-center developers, hyperscalers, and major AI companies a “D-minus” for community outreach and said they needed to do a better job explaining their projects and potential benefits to residents.

Missed chance,.

• New Four-hour Elon Musk Documentary (BBC)

The Venice Film Festival has hosted the premiere of major documentary-maker Alex Gibney’s epic and provocative new profile of the richest man on Earth, which has been years in the making. Here are five key takeaways from the film.

Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning director of Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, has made documentaries about some of the richest and most powerful people on Earth. But none of them has been as rich and powerful as Elon Musk. Maybe that’s why Gibney’s profile of the tech entrepreneur and SpaceX boss is such an epic. Musk, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, has a running time of 225 minutes, and will be released with a 10-minute intermission – so that’s almost four hours on the life and work of the world’s richest man.
Still, the time rockets by. There is little in the film that isn’t already on record, but Gibney gathers all the extant reporting into one breathlessly fast-moving, largely negative, and terrifyingly apocalyptic profile. Here are five things you should know about the documentary – just in case you don’t have four hours to spare.
1. Musk himself isn’t interviewed – but appears as an AI avatar
Gibney initially tried for an interview with Musk, but when the project was announced back in March 2023, Musk declared on social media that it would be a “hit piece”, to which Gibney responded, “How would you know?” The director’s solution is to have an AI-generated avatar of Musk repeat things that he has said in public. This is apt, says Gibney in his voiceover, because Musk believes that we might all be living in a simulation – a video game being played by our descendants in the future.
2. David Byrne helped write a theme song
David Byrne has co-written Let Me Sell You a Dream for the film’s closing credits, which has lyrics consisting entirely of phrases spoken by Musk in the past. The title is appropriate, according to some of Gibney’s interviewees, who say that Musk tends to attract investment by promising that imagined future accomplishments – such as cities on Mars and completely safe self-driving cars – are imminent or already realised.
“That’s not happening,” says Adam Becker, an author and astrophysicist, about Musk’s scheme to colonise Mars. “The gravity is too low, the radiation is too high, there’s no air, and the dirt is filled with poison.” Musk has consistently defended his visionary philosophy however: “I’m very good at predicting the future,” he told The Economist in a July interview. “I’m not perfect but I’m very good… people don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass – maybe not exactly in the timing that I thought, but it will come to pass.”

3. Musk’s time in the White House is scrutinised The film suggests that Musk dealt with the US government the way he dealt with Twitter. Zoë Schiffer, the author of Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter, says that after Musk bought the social media platform, what she refers to as his “goons” pushed out the majority of the staff without pausing to learn what they actually did. Later, as the head of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, Musk followed “the Twitter playbook”, Schiffer says, describing how he tried and failed to wipe out the US national debt by slashing the budget of numerous departments, this time with the help of a group of assistants in their early twenties who had no government experience. Musk bemoaned that Doge had become “the whipping boy for everything” in an interview with the Washington Post in May last year, just before leaving the Trump administration.

4. An old British film makes a surprise appearance
Gibney uses clips from a British fantasy film, The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1937), to illustrate his very dramatic view of Musk. In this black-and-white classic, based on an HG Wells story, a celestial being bestows an ordinary man (Roland Young) with infinite powers. The man eventually demands that the world’s leaders change society instantly, but he ends up accidentally destroying the planet.
5. The film has had a strong reception so far
Reviews from the Venice premiere have so far been largely positive. Variety called it “a lacerating and important watch, grounded in Gibney’s supremely insightful but user-friendly mastery of the documentary form”, while in a four-star review, The Telegraph dubbed it “a chillingly forensic hatchet job”. Unsurprisingly, Musk himself has not been one of its admirers: on X on Wednesday, among other comments, he described the film as “a hit piece that misses, and makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours”.

“They’re fed up with countries that said for 30 years they were gonna protect themselves and help NATO, and the most egregious offender in the last 15 years has been Canada.”

• The US Has Entered Stage 3 in the Trade War With Canada (Victor Davis Hanson)

The philosopher Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher, once said that you don’t step into the same river twice, meaning the river flows. Other people look at that quote and said he meant panta rhei, everything flows or changes, although he didn’t necessarily say that himself. Everything changes. That applies to our current U.S.-Canadian spat. We were given an initial description in the media, and then we had some clarification, and now we’re in what I would call Stage Three.

Stage One was outrage at Donald Trump and the United States, and this is the narrative that we got from one side, from Mark Carney. He said the Americans are at it again, and Trump in particular. They’re bullying us. They’re demanding that they’re gonna take away our sovereignty, and they’re saying to whom, and with whom we can trade and with whom we can’t. And then, they wanna squash Canadian nationalism, and they want to suppress indigenous reading, literature, influence in the French language, and we’re not gonna do that. So we had to back out.
So, everybody got very angry. The Wall Street Journal said: This is a silly Trump spectacle right on the eve of the midterms. This is crazy. nAnd then we went into Stage Two: clarification. People in Canada, 90%, supported Carney. They were booing the American “Star-Spangled Banner” when it was played at sporting events in Canada. And they started to informally boycott U.S. products.
And then they stuck out their chest and said we might not give four million barrels of oil to the United States from Canada. We may stop our pipeline. We can do all of these things to the United States. They need us. And the world is against Trump. And our prime minister can deal with China if he wants. He prefers China. bSo, we heard all that, and then we found out that the deal was almost cemented, and Carney brought up his objections at the last moment.
Then we found out the United States did not wanna suppress the French language or Indigenous culture in Canada. It just said our digital media companies operate worldwide. Why, in this particular country of Canada, should they pay a 5% surtax on top of charge, in addition to income tax, just to subsidize for the particular agendas of the Canadian government? We don’t do that to Canada. We don’t say, “If you come into the United States and you have a product or a media conglomerate, we’re gonna slap a 5% so we wanna promote DEI, we want to promote poor white people in East Palestine.” We don’t do that.
Then we find out that we don’t want to take away Canada’s sovereignty. We are in an existential struggle to save the West from Chinese mercantilism. They have been dumping product. They have been manipulating currency. They’ve been stealing patents. They don’t respect copyrights. They run up trillion-dollar surpluses with us, half a trillion with Europe, and we’re saying no more. We want symmetry.
And [China], to get around that, is dumping cheap steel and aluminum and saying to Canada, “You can buy our product very cheap, much cheaper than you can produce it. Then you can use it in your assembly of cars and trucks and other manufactured goods and send it into the United States and undercut American producers. You win, and then we get around the American tariffs.” And Trump and his team said, “No, we know what you’re doing.” So, that was a clarification that didn’t look too good.
Then people said, “Well, wait a minute. Canada can’t even send its oil, highly sulfurous and thick tar sands, to Ontario or to British Columbia because the provinces are so at each other’s throats under this weird system that they don’t. They have almost autonomy with one another, and they won’t let pipelines be built. But the Americans will let it be built.” So, they need the 4 million-a-day export. After all, if Canada’s doing so well, why don’t … Alberta said, “We can’t give you our oil. We need it. We’re booming. That’s what we’ve been told.
“Why would we give it to a booming United States that already is the greatest producer of gas and oil in history and self-sufficient, unless it’s in our interest? It’s right across the border. The United States treats us better than our other provinces treat us. They allow a pipeline into a foreign country, i.e., the United States. Our other provinces don’t allow Alberta to do that. “And, by the way, they allow a pipeline then to go into Quebec and Ontario. If we cut off their pipeline, they’ll cut off two of our provinces.”
And then the jobs report came out. We’ve only been at this 10 days, but it already affected the August jobs report. They said, “We didn’t need the United States.” Well, they’re down 41,000 jobs. And we can hurt the United States? The United States is up 160,000 jobs. And so now we’re in a crisis. How does Canada get out of this situation? Because they walked out of a deal that was better than basically any other deal the United States had cut with other countries, and it was only one of two countries. The other in the same league was communist China that retaliated against the United States.
The others admitted, “Aw, shucks. We know we’ve had asymmetrical tariffs with you for a long time. We understand this is a reckoning. Let’s kind of moderate it and don’t get too hysterical that we’ve been taking you to the cleaners on trade.” OK. Not Canada. Canada immediately started retaliating like China. OK. And now they’re in Stage Three. What is Stage Three? Stage Three is the Americans are saying to themselves:
Well, we have 13 times the economy that Canada does, and we have nine times the population, and we have one state, California, that has about the same population as all of Canada. And of all of our states, it’s the worst run, the most socialist, with the most inept governor, and usually with the highest social welfare costs, the highest taxes, the highest unemployment, the highest inflation, the highest power. And guess what? It has double the gross domestic product of Canada, even though there’s the same population. Double.
And then the Americans are saying: “We don’t want—we don’t need your oil. We can produce your oil. We’d like your oil. It helps you. It helps us. But if you don’t wanna cut us off, cut us off. And we’d like to trade with you, but you know what? If you don’t wanna—if you wanna help Canada get around our tariffs, and we understand that, just don’t do it. And the subtext behind all of this is the United States is fed up. They’re fed up with countries that said for 30 years they were gonna protect themselves and help NATO, and the most egregious offender in the last 15 years has been Canada.

High time this story was told.

• The Story of Slavery Told Correctly (Paul Craig Roberts)

For several decades I have emphasized that black slavery was a product of black slave wars in Africa for which no white person has any responsibility. It was black African rulers, such as the King of Dahomey, who enslaved and sold black Africans to Arabs and to British and European colonies in the New World where there was abundant resources and fertile land but no work force. This is an indisputable fact. Some of the most famous leftists in history, such as Karl Polanyi, have documented this fact.

Today as I write there stands on the Atlantic coast of Africa three miles south of Ouidan in Benin, the former Kingdom of Dahomey, the Gate of No Return, a memorial erected to mark the departure point where Africans enslaved by Africans were loaded aboard ships to be marketed to Arabs and to British and European colonists in the New World. The Gate of No Return sits at the end of a road known as the Route of the Slaves. As far as I can ascertain, none of this factual history is acknowledged in any black studies program in any Western university or by any of the black organizations agitating for reparations from white peoples who neither enslaved nor owned a slave.
In the Western World the entire story of slavery is a total fabrication. It is important to understand that no white Southerners or white anyone went into Africa to round up black slaves. The black King of Dahomey was a powerful person. His army was armed with rifles obtained from the Arabs in exchange for slaves. The King had an Amazon contingent, reportedly extremely ferocious. No one was going to poach on the King of Dahomey. Any who wanted slaves paid the King’s price. Dahomey dominated the slave wars, and the captives of Dahomey’s wars were the slaves who ended up in America.
As slaves were the products of slave wars between black Africans, many of the slaves sold to colonists in the British colonies that eventually became the US were themselves warriors engaged in slave wars against other blacks who were defeated in combat. I have often made the point that every collection of slaves on Southern plantations in the American South contained trained warriors captured in combat who greatly outnumbered the number of whites on the “slave cotton plantations.” Any such behavior of slave owners, such as that fraudulently reported by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin would have resulted in a successful uprising.
Plantation owners understood this, and for their own preservation and that of their families did not behave as the lying bitch Harriet Beecher Stowe alleges in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The purpose of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was war propaganda, to stir up hatred of the South by northerners in order to make acceptable Lincoln’s war criminals, Sherman and Sheridan. The south was defeated by the North’s destruction of the South’s livestock and farms, leaving the Confederacy unable to provision the Army of Northern Virginia which in the end was marching in bare feet with no food.
The proof that there was unity between the slaves and the plantation owners was demonstrated by the complete failure of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. This was a war measure that Lincoln intended would draw Confederate soldiers from the front lines to return home to protect their families from black insurrection. But no insurrection occurred, and the Southern soldiers did not leave the front lines.
Lincoln, a war criminal of the highest order, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which as Lincoln’s own Secretary of State pointed out, applied only to slaves under Confederate control, and not to any under Union control, out of frustration that Union general after Union general whose forces were three to four times larger than Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia were repeated defeated by General Robert E. Lee, a leader who steadfastly refused to participate in war crimes.
The Emancipation Proclamation was a complete failure as a war measure. But the white liberals misrepresented a war measure as the freeing of the slaves from “Southern oppression.” What are we to think of northern liberals this totally dishonest, this totally devoid of all integrity, of all respect for historical truth? I won’t print the expletives that come to mind. The “freedom” left former slaves without homes and food. Many were raped by Union soldiers. “Liberated” blacks followed behind the Union armies hoping their “liberators” would provide food and water and medical care. But as the Union soldiers did not own the former slaves, no one had an investment or interest in them.
“Liberation” was chaos for the “liberated.” Many of the “liberated” experienced devastating hardship and death. Historians have documented that the contraband camps that were set up by the Union were characterized by overcrowding, poor sanitation, meager food rations and by massive outbreaks of diseases such as smallpox and dysentery. The brutal conditions killed a large percentage of the Southern black population. The consequence of “emancipation” was genocide. The former slaves who survived did so by performing manual labor for the Union occupying army.
A country with a high percentage of people as dishonest as white liberals has no chance of being great if it is to be a multicultural society. No multicultural society can exist when the disparate interests are turned against one another in hate, which is what the white liberals have done to America.
The alleged American “civil war” is another fabrication. The war was the result of the North, which Lincoln called the Union, invading a separate country, the Confederacy, which had exercised its constitutional right to exit the United States in order to avoid being economically exploited by northern manufacturing which insisted on a tariff to be paid by the South on its exports and imports. The day before Lincoln’s inauguration the Northern Congress passed the Morrill Tariff that imposed massive economic cost on the South. Simultaneously Lincoln and the Northern Congress offered the South Constitutional protection forever of slavery if the South would stay in the Union and pay the tariff.
The South replied that their concern is the tariff, not slavery. Despite all evidence the white liberals claim without a shred of evidence that the Union cause was to deliver blacks from slavery. Clearly, people as unworthy as white liberals desperately need to be replaced by immigrant-invaders. I was delighted when I read that the white liberal government in Massachusetts had decided to replace themselves with Muslims. Perhaps there is some virtue in The Camp of the Saints. The white liberals will be the first to go, just as they are in The Camp of the Saints.

“Egountchi Behanzin, founding president of the international African Black Defense League, spokesperson for the Pan-African Brothers, political analyst, and pan-African activist..”

• Jamaica Demands Answers On Slavery (Egountchi Behanzin)

Knocking on the king’s door: Decades in the making, the September 7 filing brings a direct legal challenge against the British Crown for its ties to the slave system

On September 7, 2026, a high-level Jamaican delegation delivered a historic legal petition to Buckingham Palace addressed to King Charles III. Its objective was to compel the monarch, as Jamaica’s head of state, to refer to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the island’s highest court of appeal, three questions that have haunted the British Empire for centuries. Was the forced transportation of Africans to Jamaica and their subsequent enslavement lawful? Did this system constitute a crime against humanity? Does the United Kingdom bear an obligation to make reparation for slavery and its enduring consequences?
Culture Minister Olivia Grange, who led the delegation, shared a photo on X of herself holding the document aloft, captioned: “The petition has been filed.” King Charles III was not present at the handover. British media reported he was on vacation at the time, though Buckingham Palace said it had worked closely with the Governor General of Jamaica to ensure the petition was properly lodged.
Why the date is no coincidence
The day before, on Sunday, September 6, the delegation had taken part in a church service in south London under the theme of “remembrance, justice and repair,” ahead of the formal filing the following day. This timing is no accident: September 6 commemorates the 1781 departure of the slave ship Zong, aboard which more than 140 enslaved Africans were thrown into the sea so their owners could collect an insurance payout. That crime, unpunished for 245 years, now stands as the symbol of a justice the diaspora refuses to let fade into oblivion.
“In relation to the wrongs that were done, we want answers,” Grange told the Associated Press the day before the filing. “Once we get those answers, then our attorneys will determine what the next move is.” This petition is part of a strategy, built step by step by Jamaica’s National Council on Reparations chaired by Laleta Davis Mattis, with the support of a legal subcommittee led by attorney Bert Samuels, and a team of UK lawyers. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has thrown its full weight behind the effort proof that this question reaches beyond the borders of a single island. The entire post-slavery Caribbean is rising behind Jamaica.
The UN slavery resolution as a first step
But it is precisely here that Jamaica’s fight joins Africa’s own, and this link must now be made visible, since Western media have worked hard to keep it quiet. On March 25, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted, on Ghana’s initiative, resolution A/RES/80/250 – the very first resolution in UN history devoted exclusively to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.One hundred and twenty-three states voted in favor. Only three opposed it: the United States, Israel, and Argentina. Fifty-two countries, mostly European including the United Kingdom itself, chose to hide behind abstention.
The resolution designates the transatlantic trafficking of Africans and racialized chattel enslavement as the “gravest crime against humanity.” Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama, speaking on behalf of the African Group of 54 states, the UN’s largest regional bloc, declared that voting for the text meant standing on the right side of history. It calls for the restitution of looted cultural property, formal apologies, and opens the door to the consideration of financial compensation. This is an international normative framework, patiently built by the African Union since February 2024, when it proclaimed 2025 the “Year of Justice for Africans through Reparations for Slavery, Colonialism, and Apartheid.”
Jamaican jurist Bert Samuels was not mistaken when he stated that this UN resolution strengthens Jamaica’s legal position against London. Here is the thread that binds Accra to Kingston, the African motherland to the diaspora torn from it. A single struggle is fought on two complementary fronts – one continental and diplomatic, the other insular and judicial, both aimed at the same goal of making the former empire pay for four centuries of human plunder.
A history of reversed debts
To grasp the full weight of this gesture, one must recall that Haiti, the first free black nation of the modern era, was forced in 1825 to pay France a colossal indemnity to “compensate” former slave owners for the loss of their “human property” – a debt that bled Haiti’s economy for more than a century. History, as written by the colonial powers, long decreed that it was the enslavers who deserved compensation, never the enslaved.
Jamaica’s petition overturns this criminal logic. It is no longer the victims who owe the executioner, it is the executioner who must now answer to its victims. This reversal builds on groundwork laid over more than a decade by the CARICOM itself, which as early as 2013 adopted its own ten-point plan for reparatory justice, demanding formal apologies, debt cancellation, technology transfers, and public health programs to offset the health devastation bequeathed by slavery.
The September 7 filing is therefore the legal culmination of a long matured Caribbean strategy that has now chosen to confront head on, in a court of law, the very institution that sanctioned and protected the slave system: the British Crown.
What it means for the diaspora
For the African diaspora across Africa, the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean alike, this filing is experienced as a long-deferred reckoning. For generations, our elders awaited a political gesture of this magnitude – a formal legal demand addressed directly to the head of the house that organized, financed, and profited from the trade.
Reparations movements that once fought each in their own corner Caribbean organizations, Afro-descendant collectives in the Americas, African diasporas in Europe, activists on the continent itself are beginning to speak with a single voice, carried by recognized institutions: the African Union on one side, CARICOM on the other, and now the UN as a global sounding board.
In West Africa, Jamaica’s move is being followed with particular attention, seen as the natural extension of the fight President Mahama carried to the UN stage. The Africa that watched its children leave in chains is, four centuries later, reunited with a part of its diaspora now come to knock, together, on the same imperial door. In Southern Africa, where the memory of apartheid remains raw, many Pan-African organizations see in this filing further proof that struggles for historical justice slavery, colonialism, apartheid can no longer be treated separately, but must be understood as a single, unified case against the West.
In Europe, among Afro-descendant communities in France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom itself, Jamaica’s petition serves as both a signal of hope and a painful reminder: That our own states of origin or residence still drag their feet on these questions, while little Jamaica, with its modest means, dared to carry the fight directly to the monarch’s door. In the Americas, Afro-descendant movements from Brazil to Colombia are also watching this case closely, seeing in it a potential legal precedent that could be mobilized for their own claims against the former Iberian colonial powers.
This convergence is visibly rattling Western capitals. The United Kingdom’s vote – an abstention, that is, a refusal to choose – speaks volumes about the quiet panic setting in London. One can sense, in the remarks of certain British political figures, particularly within Euroskeptic and identitarian factions, a desire to ridicule Jamaica’s move, to dismiss it as an expensive whim or a political stunt.

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2098040640378425446?s=20 https://twitter.com/Alexs_jame/status/2098084514627019002?s=20

TESLA JUST SHOWED OFF ITS OPTIMUS GEN 2.5… AND IT LOOKS INSANE.

Tesla’s latest Optimus concept is being presented as a major step toward a general-purpose AI robot.

The video shows the robot up close — its hands, joints, sensors and body design — before revealing the full… https://t.co/ENskNIzc0R pic.twitter.com/RZLG2Umspj
— Murzik (@murzik52) September 9, 2026

Elon Musk on the AI power shortfall.

"There will be at least a 15-gigawatt shortfall of power in 2027 for AI chips."

AI chips are climbing ~40–50% a year. Grid power outside China is only climbing ~10–20%. The faster line overtakes the slower one — and the consensus is that… pic.twitter.com/uE3l9D5pph
— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) September 10, 2026

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Debt Rattle September 10 2026

Sep 102026

September 10, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:27 am Finance Tagged with: AI, Charlie Kirk, dividend, Marjorie Taylor Greene, midterm elections, Russiagate, Tucker Carlson, Victor Davis Hanson 44 Responses »

Eugène Delacroix Les femmes d’Alger 1834

• Trump Says ‘War’ To End Immediately ‘After’ Midterm Elections (ZH)

• Stacking Tariffs of 50 Percent and Import Bans Against Canadian Goods (CTH)

• Russiagate Is Finally Heading Somewhere Washington Hates: Under Oath (Manney)

• Turning Point: One Year After Charlie Kirk’s Murder (Scott Pinsker)

• Democrats Aghast at GOP Midterm Strategy to Embrace Trump (Rick Moran)

• Steve Eisman: What If OpenAI Actually Fails? (ZH)

• AI Has Over 10% Chance of Killing All Humans – Anthropic Researcher (RT)

• The AI Threat To Our Republic (Jack Hellner)

• Europe Against Israel (Rabbi Michael Barclay)

• Victor Davis Hanson on Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Bolt)

• Investors Are Totally Stoked About This New Rocket (Stephen Green)

https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/2097878444294263293?s=20 https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/2097424489630060751?s=20 https://twitter.com/MrWhiplash_/status/2097465581641367776?s=20

“.. a ‘Trump dividend’ to every adult in the US of USD 5,000 if Republicans win ..”

• Trump Says ‘War’ To End Immediately ‘After’ Midterm Elections§ (ZH)

Newsquak: US President Trump said he thinks war with Iran will end immediately after the election and will do much more than a nuclear deal.

US President Trump said he will give a ‘Trump dividend’ to every adult in the US of USD 5,000 if Republicans win the Midterm elections, while he added that the dividend must be spent in the US.

New Trump remarks on Iran… Note that he called it a “war” (no less than twice in the below clip) – contradicting the White House’s own stance (Sept. 4: Trump said don’t call it a war, instead: “I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us.”:
Q: Do you expect negotiations with Iran to restart at some point? Trump: Uhhhhhh… we’re not looking for it to be honest with you. This war will end immediately after our election. And meanwhile, back to the below laughably implausible headlines…
Pakistani Ambassador says they believe that a better understanding will soon be achieved between the US and Iran, reports ISNA.
But don’t Republicans actually need the war to end before Congressional elections?

Trump on Iran: I think the war will end immediately after the election. They’re desperate to affect the election. pic.twitter.com/31VEeI0tjO
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 9, 2026

More on high prices at the pump and the question of nuclear weapons… however, the war itself has only made this a greater uncertainty, as Washington has not achieved any prime objectives – and the status of the Iranian nuclear program remains unknown…

Reporter: You said that oil and gas prices were going to come down. Oil is now back above 100 dollars. How do you explain this to Americans?

Trump: It’s very easy to explain to Americans: all you have to do is say, will you let Iran have a nuclear weapon? The answer is no. pic.twitter.com/HFldzUtrbo
— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 9, 2026

IRGC: ’20 for 2′, Vows Disproportionate Responses
Amid the dramatic escalation which kicked off since Tuesday night, Iran is seeking to impose new conditions on the United States. While continuing to vow a ‘disproportionate response’ to any attack moving forward, Tehran is now identifying specifics.
IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi states Wednesday, “The imposed war, which involved the world’s most powerful nations, has ended in certain periods, but the nature of the conflict continues. For the first time, this conflict has directly inflicted strategic damage on the United States, impacting the country’s security and economic equations.”
He issued the following list for the US to reach an end to the conflict. “If the enemy desires an end to this situation, they must”…
• completely cease the war
• refrain from further threats
• withdraw the Israeli army from Lebanon
• end the siege of Yemen
• release the $24 billion of Iranian assets that have been frozen
• cease any interference in the country’s nuclear and missile programs

This definitely marks a raised bar, to be sure, after this summer the MoU complete ceased, and negotiations vanished. There’s no way Washington complies with even half of the conditions, at this rate. Importantly, Mohebbi also said: “We have reached a point where if the enemy strikes at 2 or 3 of our targets, we will respond forcefully by striking at 20.”
Tanker Attacked in Iraq Territory Waters, After CENTCOM Insists US Warships Not Hit
After a huge Iranian ballistic missile launch on US bases in Jordan overnight, CENTCOM has yet to respond in any major way. The Pentagon has also said all US troops “are accounted for” – but this doesn’t necessarily mean there were no casualties. However, CENTCOM is at the moment denying that the Iranians hit US warships, as the IRGC has been claiming since Tuesday, in an oddly specific statement: The IRGC claims to have targeted and inflicted “significant damage” on a pair of US warships in the Gulf of Oman: DDG-119 USS Delbert D. Black and DDG-53 USS John Paul Jones, both Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
CENTCOM responded: “No U.S. Navy warship has been struck; all IRGC attempted attacks failed.” It added on X, “Meanwhile, U.S. forces have successfully destroyed 10 Iranian tankers in just the last week. These vessels were part of a multibillion-dollar shadow network that funds the IRGC, and Iran cannot defend them.”
Meanwhile, Iran’s military is continuing to go on the offensive, seeking to maintain its leverage over the contested Strait of Hormuz. “A Panama-flagged tanker carrying 2 million barrels of Iraqi fuel oil was struck today by a drone in Iraqi territorial waters, two port officials say,” Reuters reports. “Iraqi rescue boats extinguished a fire aboard the tanker, New Andros, and there are no reports of casualties, port officials tell Reuters.” https://twitter.com/DropSiteNews/status/2097687683300548702?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2097687683300548702%7Ctwgr%5E215cb12391b8713bd6fb8739a66d51897635e6cd%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fcommodities%2Fbrent-tops-100-gulf-conflict-escalates-ubs-warns-us-iran-ramp-remains-elusive

Canada has very favorable terms and wants more.

• Stacking Tariffs of 50 Percent and Import Bans Against Canadian Goods (CTH)

President Trump and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer waited to see if Canada was going to follow through with their retaliatory tariffs against U.S. imports. The Canadian government carried out their tariffs, so today the White House introduced 50% ‘stacking tariffs’, on top of pre-existing tariff rates, and additional import bans against several Canadian products.

It should be quickly noted that several North American corporations are already making moves to avoid the issues by shifting production lines and adding additional investment into U.S. manufacturing. As expected, getting locked out of a 32 trillion economy is not an option for survivability.
The easiest way to review the issues is not to read media reports, but rather to read the actual outcomes as announced by the White House and USTR. CTH has noticed several Canadian outlets are already making false claims.It is worth reviewing both sets of outlines as well as accompanying links to determine the exact types of Canadian products being targeted by stacking tariffs and import bans.
WHITE HOUSE – Today, to address Canada’s increased discrimination against U.S. commerce, President Trump signed five Proclamations pursuant to Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 to ban certain products from Canada and modify the scope of the tariffs on certain Canadian products previously announced on July 20, 2026. President Trump is taking decisive and appropriate action to respond to Canada’s additional retaliation and continued discriminatory treatment of crucial American exports.
• After breaking off trade talks with the United States last month, today Canada imposed new retaliatory tariffs on about $20 billion of U.S. exports, including steel, dairy, and agricultural equipment.
• Because Canada maintained and in fact increased its discrimination against U.S. commerce with respect to U.S. alcoholic beverages, President Trump, under Section 338, imposed import bans on certain Canadian alcohol and other products that were subject to the 50 percent tariffs imposed under Section 338 in Proclamation 11046.
• Moreover, because Canada maintained its discrimination against U.S. commerce with respect to dairy, President Trump, under Section 338, imposed import bans on certain Canadian dairy and other products of Canada that were subject to the 50 percent tariffs imposed under Section 338 in Proclamation 11047.
• To offset the burden to U.S. commerce while better serving the public interest, President Trump is also modifying the July 20, 2026 actions by removing certain products, such as rock salt and cement, from the scope of the Section 338 tariffs and replacing those products with new ones, ranging from all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) to additional dairy products.
• These Section 338 tariffs apply to all covered goods regardless of whether a good originates under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and apply in addition to tariffs imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.
• The import bans will take effect on September 29, 2026, and the product additions and removals will take effect on September 15, 2026.
WASHINGTON – Today, Ambassador Jamieson Greer issued a statement after President Trump exercised his authority under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 to ban certain Canadian products from entering the U.S. market and modify the scope of the July 20 actions to effectively offset the burden or disadvantage to U.S. commerce by Canada’s discriminatory measures.
“After weeks of good faith and intensive efforts between U.S. and Canadian negotiators, Canada walked away from a near-final trade deal that offered better treatment than any other trading partner, and instead Canada chose to embark on senseless retaliation against the United States,” said Ambassador Greer. “Today’s action, combining targeted import bans as authorized by Section 338 and a calibration of the underlying Section 338 tariffs, is a natural consequence of Canada’s continued discriminatory treatment of crucial American exports, ranging from alcoholic beverages to dairy products to motor vehicles. President Trump will continue to leverage the tools at his disposal to defend the interests of American workers and exporters, and restore reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships.”
Additionally, the President has directed USTR (Office of the United States Trade Representative) and GSA (General Services Administration) to remove $50 billion dollars’ worth of Canadian-origin products from GSA’s Multiple Award Schedules.
[..]
Background:
Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (19 U.S.C. 1338) empowers the President to, among other things, impose duties of up to 50 percent on imports of a foreign country to offset the burden or disadvantage from a foreign country’s unequal imposition on or discrimination against the commerce of the United States. On July 20, 2026, finding that the public interest will be served by his actions, President Trump took three separate Section 338 actions to level the playing field for important American exports to Canada—motor vehicles, alcoholic beverages, and dairy. Section 338 further empowers the President to exclude products from importation into the United States if a foreign country maintains or increases its discriminatory practices against U.S. commerce.
Based on Canada’s continued retaliation and discrimination against U.S. commerce, President Trump has determined that it is necessary and appropriate to ban certain Canadian products from entering the U.S. market and refined the scope of the July 20 actions to target strategic Canadian sectors while removing certain non-sensitive Canadian goods from the scope of the actions. {Source}
It appears that some of the product categories would be limited by ‘stacking tariffs’, as a consequence the U.S. is simply moving to ban the products altogether.

“Russia did interfere in the election extensively, as the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee documented.”

Oh really?

• Russiagate Is Finally Heading Somewhere Washington Hates: Under Oath (Manney)

Washington has spent nearly a decade arguing about Russiagate in congressional hearings, cable studios, memoirs, podcasts, and carefully lawyered statements. Now somebody is bringing subpoenas. The Justice Department has begun compelling former government officials to testify before a federal grand jury in Florida investigating whether crimes were committed during the government’s Trump-Russia investigations.

From the Associated Press: The Justice Department is demanding testimony before a Florida grand jury in an investigation aiming to establish an intelligence community conspiracy against President Donald Trump, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. New subpoenas being issued to former government officials represent an escalation in the year-long investigation as the Justice Department pursues a loosely defined theory that members of the intelligence community who scrutinized Trump over the last decade, including over Russian interference in the 2016 election, conspired against him and violated his rights.
Investigators in recent days contacted some defense lawyers for witnesses advising them of forthcoming grand jury subpoenas. It was not clear how many as of Tuesday had received a subpoena or were still waiting to receive one, and the identities of the witnesses receiving subpoenas were also not immediately clear. The people who confirmed the subpoenas spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss a secretive grand jury investigation. The subpoenas mark a significant escalation from the voluntary interviews investigators previously sought.
Former CIA Director John Brennan is a target of part of the investigation. Brennan’s lawyers say he committed no wrongdoing and has cooperated with previous reviews.mNo indictment has been announced; a subpoena isn’t proof of a crime, and a grand jury investigation isn’t a conviction waiting for paperwork. Plus, as the old joke goes, a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich. But sworn testimony is different from another Sunday morning interview.
Attorney General Todd Blanche appointed former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova in April to help oversee the investigation. Prosecutors are examining decisions surrounding the intelligence community’s handling of Russian interference in the 2016 election and the government’s subsequent investigations involving Donald Trump’s campaign. From the Associated Press:
The investigation is being run out of Florida, with the Justice Department in April bringing back into government service a top prosecutor from the Reagan administration, Joe diGenova, to serve as a counselor to the attorney general and help lead a team of agents and prosecutors. diGenova, who had previously asked then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to appoint him to the job and has openly and repeatedly claimed Trump was the victim of an intelligence community conspiracy, declined to comment Tuesday when reached by the AP.
In an indication of the wide-ranging nature of the investigation, the AP reported last month that diGenova’s team has sought interviews with law enforcement officials involved in the 2022 FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Florida. The search recovered a trove of classified documents that formed the basis of a since-abandoned Justice Department prosecution of Trump, who has long decried the FBI operation as an invasion of his privacy.
Brennan’s role deserves particular scrutiny because he headed the CIA when the intelligence community produced its January 2017 assessment of Russian election interference. A declassified House Intelligence Committee report released in 2025 challenged parts of the process behind that assessment. The report said Brennan pushed for the inclusion of information from the Steele dossier, despite concerns about its credibility. Brennan has disputed allegations that he manipulated intelligence or acted improperly.
Americans have heard competing versions of this history for years. Trump and his allies say intelligence and law-enforcement institutions abused their authority while pursuing a political opponent. Brennan and other former officials maintain that Russia genuinely interfered in the 2016 election and that intelligence officials acted appropriately in assessing the threat. Both propositions contain questions that deserve evidence rather than another round of television combat.
Russia did interfere in the election extensively, as the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee documented.
The Committee found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Parts of this effort are outlined in the Committee’s earlier volumes on election security, social media, the Obama Administration’s response to the threat, and the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA). (U)
The fifth and final volume focuses on the counterintelligence threat, outlining a wide range of Russian efforts to influence the Trump Campaign and the 2016 election. In this volume the Committee lays out its findings in detail by looking at many aspects of the counterintelligence threat posed by the Russian influence operation.
For example, the Committee examined Paul Manafort’ s connections to Russian influence actors and the FBI’ s treatment of reporting produced by Christopher Steele. While the Committee does not describe the final result as a complete picture, this volume provides the most comprehensive description to date of Russia’s activities and the threat they posed.
This volume presents this information in topical sections in order to address coherently and in detail the wide variety of Russian actions. The events explained in these sections in many cases overlap, and references in each section will direct the reader to those overlapping parts of the volume. Immediately below is a summary of key findings from several sections.
But acknowledging Russian interference doesn’t settle whether every government action taken in response was justified, accurate, or lawful.

TPUSA has grown a lot. What now?

• Turning Point: One Year After Charlie Kirk’s Murder (Scott Pinsker)

By all accounts, Charlie Kirk never considered stepping down. Not even once. And why would he?Turning Point USA was his baby. His creation. His magnum opus. He built it from the bottom up — transforming TPUSA from a teenager’s pipe dream into a political juggernaut. Every inch of it reflected his values, passions, and one-of-a-kind personality.Which is why Charlie intended to lead it ‘til his dying day: The only succession plan he ever considered was posthumous.

Tragically, his dying day came far earlier than he deserved.As we approach the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Turning Point itself is at a turning point: Three legacies are now in limbo. The first is Charlie’s. Complaining about click-whores, liars, cretins, and clout-chasers on social media is a waste of time. It’d be like complaining about nudity in a strip club: That’s kinda-sorta the M.O. when you enter.If you don’t wanna see naked people, don’t go inside!
But even by social media’s cesspool standards, onlookers were stunned by how quickly Charlie’s murder was exploited. Within days, some of the biggest, most influential podcasters wore Charlie’s corpse like a skin suit, repurposing his legacy for their own agenda. Instead of celebrating his life, they monetized his death. Instead of comforting his family, they tortured his widow for clicks. Instead of honoring his beliefs, they used Charlie as their personal sock puppet. And they continue to do so today.
Once upon a time, Charlie Kirk was just a man. That ended on Sept. 10, 2025. Today, he’s a symbol. And symbols have propaganda value. It’s why waving the bloody shirt is so effective. Symbols are a cheat code for emotional communication. It’s why redefining symbolism has always been a top priority for revolutionaries: It lets them capture hearts — while bypassing brains. In life, Charlie wasn’t exactly coy with his beliefs:

Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America. https://t.co/p3EsmCNQuj
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) September 9, 2025

Note the date: If you want to know which issues were top-of-mind for Charlie Kirk just before he died, look no further. But if you really, really insist, go back four days earlier:

"Charlie Kirk was killed because he was turning on Israel."

Charlie Kirk 5 days before he died: "They have no idea what Israel is up against. Which is these Islamic barabarian monsters. The more they understand Islam the better Israel looks." pic.twitter.com/FMvYTeJgEv
— Nathan Livingstone (MilkBarTV) (@TheMilkBarTV) June 22, 2026

Yet his ex-“friends” claim otherwise:

Bret Weinstein and Tucker Carlson discuss the theory that Israel eliminated Charlie Kirk to advance war with Iran.

Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/2zFJGMrMAQ
— AF Post (@AFpost) March 12, 2026

The sad truth is, Charlie’s image has changed. The propagandists are winning. For millions of Americans, when they close their eyes and think of Charlie Kirk, their first thought isn’t conservatism, Christianity, or youth politics anymore. It’s bat[feces]-crazy conspiracy theories, antisemitism, political violence, and Candace Owens. Symbols aren’t static. They’re constantly moving, constantly changing, perpetually vulnerable to outside forces. And the more powerful the symbol, the bigger the PR payoff in its manipulation. Which means symbols must be protected. Vigilantly and aggressively.
Look, I get it: Clearly, it’s not the execs at TPUSA’s fault. They’re not the ones who associated Charlie’s image with low-life creeps like Owens and Tucker Carlson. They’re not the ones who hijacked his brand. If anything, they’re the victims. (Especially, of course, TPUSA’s current chairwoman and CEO.) But on the other hand, they also haven’t done enough to protect Charlie’s image. Their hearts are in the right place, but PR tactics determine PR success. That’s just how it goes in an outcome-based world. TPUSA would be wise to recalibrate its PR plan ASAP — because protecting Charlie’s legacy is its responsibility.
Charlie’s earthly mission ended on Sept. 10; an assassin’s bullet made sure of it. But he remains — by far — TPUSA’s most valuable symbol, brand ambassador, and emotional lightning rod. His soul rests in God’s mighty arms, yet his spirit still guides the organization he cherished.He deserves a better legacy than this.
And so does his successor, Erika Kirk. She assumed the title of chairwoman and CEO — and less than a year later, her metrics are jaw-dropping: TPUSA grew from 410 college chapters to 1,095 (including at James Madison University in Virginia, where my 19-year-old son is an active member). TPUSA exploded from 454 Club America (high school-aged) chapters to 3,102.
You kiddin’ me? Any other CEO would win awards for those kinds of year-to-year gains! She’d be showered with appreciation! The trouble, however, is that it’s unclear how much credit Erika Kirk deserves, since TPUSA’s dramatic growth was triggered by an outpouring of organic love and support after Charlie’s death. Arguably, any CEO at the helm would’ve achieved similar results.
One week after Charlie was killed, 32,000 people contacted TPUSA to join. (That’ll getcha lots of new members.) Which doesn’t negate Mrs. Kirk’s leadership or courage. She steadied the ship during the darkest, deadliest days, providing clarity, consistency, and continuity. Forged by tragedy, her authenticity spoke for itself.
And she paid a horrific price for it, too.

What else can they do?

• Democrats Aghast at GOP Midterm Strategy to Embrace Trump (Rick Moran)

An Axios blurb reflects the thinking of Democrats regarding the Republican midterm strategy of embracing Donald Trump rather than running away from him. “Two months before Election Day, Democrats can taste the House majority, provided two conditions hold: President Trump remains unpopular, and vulnerable Republicans stay close to him,” writes Hans Nichols. It’s true. Historically, in midterm elections, the party out of power gains an average of 35 to 37 seats in the House of Representatives and roughly 3 to 5 seats in the U.S. Senate when the sitting president’s approval rating is below 50%.

In 2010, Barack Obama, with a 45% approval rating, saw the Democrats lose 63 seats. In 2018, Donald Trump, with a 41% approval rating, lost 40 seats. And in 1994, with Bill Clinton’s approval rating at 48%, Democrats lost 54 seats. The Senate is a different story, with different dynamics at play, but the sitting president’s party loses an average of three to five Senate seats overall. When the president’s approval is low, losses often range from four to eight seats.
It would seem almost suicidal for Republicans to latch on to Trump and ride out the midterms on his coattails. Ordinarily, that would be true. But this is not an ordinary midterm election, and Democrats, in my opinion, appear to be the ones committing suicide.
While most candidates would generally run away from an unpopular president, Trump may be some candidates’ only hope. Not only are Trump’s coattails fairly long, but the Republicans also have about $1 billion in cash burning holes in Trump’s, Elon Musk’s, and the RNC’s pockets. Midterm elections have never seen anything like it. And while money isn’t everything, there isn’t a candidate running on either side who believes that having less money than your opponent is an advantage.
Trump is going to give more money to GOP candidates who embrace him than to candidates who don’t. That simple calculus will give candidates little choice in backing the president. Besides, Democrats shouldn’t be smiling so broadly. The ad campaign that Trump and Musk unleashed is going to make the Democrats squirm, and the voter hesitate before marking their ballot for a Democrat.
The Republicans are gathering at the American Airlines Center in Dallas for a gigantic, two-day election commercial they’re calling a “Midterm Convention.” Trump will speak on both nights and highlight the radical left lurch of the Democrats and paint the contest as a battle between democracy and communism.
“This is not a midterm like any other, because we actually have a competition against communism now, and that’s a very serious thing. It’s going to animate voters coast to coast,” House Speaker Mike Johnson emphasized in a Fox News Digital campaign trail interview last month.
Fox News: Democrats, as they try to win back congressional majorities, were already battling a brand that public opinion polling indicates is extremely unpopular. Making matters worse, the high-profile victories this spring and summer by left-wing and socialist candidates over establishment rivals in Democratic primaries, which gave Republicans extra ammunition to portray all Democrats as extremists.
“What we’re going to highlight at that convention is the fact that this is not your father’s Democrat Party,” Johnson said. “It’s a contrast election, and people are making a contrast between common-sense solutions and candidates, and really crazy, which is represented by the other side.”
Communism is bad, and for older voters, the “Red Scare” tactics will be most effective. Voters aged 45-64 account for the largest absolute volume of ballots cast, usually making up around 35% to 40% of all midterm voters. Voters aged 65-plus make up the second-largest portion of total voters (around 30% of total voters). They consistently register the highest participation rate of any demographic, with roughly 65% to 70%+ of eligible seniors turning out during midterm elections.
At least three-quarters of midterm voters grew up in at least some part of the Cold War. That’s got to count for something at the ballot box. Meanwhile, are you ready for “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Part II? Elon Musk’s America PAC is unloading $120 million for a massive, never-before-seen get-out-the-vote effort, and a key part of it will be ads painting the Democrats as goofy and nuts on trans issues.
Axios: America PAC isn’t running a traditional persuasion campaign. It’s undertaking a massive get-out-the-vote operation, with targeted ads designed to get GOP voters to the polls. The PAC is betting trans issues will do just that. Driving the news: In a series of just-launched ads, America PAC goes after Democratic Senate candidates in four competitive races over transgender athletes, gender-transition care and other trans issues.
The PAC’s emphasis on trans issues is striking because that’s been a much less prominent theme in GOP Senate ads so far this election cycle, per AdImpact, which tracks political advertising.The ads, which are running online and on streaming platforms, attack Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, Iowa’s Josh Turek, Texas’ James Talarico and Alaska’s Mary Peltola. They’re among the first batch of ads from America PAC, which Musk has reportedly authorized to spend upwards of $100 million in the midterms. It worked in 2024. Why not now?
The Democrats’ toxicity is the wild card in this election. Everyone agrees they’re nuts, but are they so stinky that people won’t even hold their noses and vote for them?
Republican midterm fortunes hang on the answer to that question.

Something/someone else will take its place?!

• Steve Eisman: What If OpenAI Actually Fails? (ZH)

Steve Eisman has spent most of the years since the financial crisis being asked, in his words, to predict the end of the world. In his latest weekly wrap – recorded Thursday night as the 10-year brushed 4.8%, he says he’s still not there on AI, but if he were – he lays out exactly how it would happen. Eisman is not predicting that OpenAI fails – but it is the weak link in a chain that runs from two money-losing labs, through hyperscaler capex, to roughly half of projected US GDP growth – and arguing that it’s “not too early to think about” what happens if the link breaks.

“I predicted the end of the world once, and believe me, it was no fun. I am in no rush to predict the end of the world again, unless I am really convinced that it’s going to happen. But I’m not going to make such a prediction just because it will get a lot of press. There is no question in my mind that the entire US economy hinges on the success of AI. The amount being spent is just so large that were it to stop, the economy would go into a recession almost immediately.”

The chain: two companies, $700 billion of capex, half of GDP growth
Eisman waves off the two “bubble” arguments echoing through the halls – and that both hyperscalers’ vanished free cash flow, and Nvidia’s circular financing – are survivable if AI pays off. The real vulnerability, he argues, sits one layer down: “So where is the Achilles heel? I think that it resides with Anthropic and OpenAI, because they are so central to the entire AI food chain. According to reports from various Wall Street firms, something like 70% of hyperscaler AI revenue comes from Anthropic and OpenAI… I can’t confirm those statistics, but they sound right given what we actually know about Oracle.”
From there it’s arithmetic: “Hyperscalers are spending about $700 billion in capex this year, and even more next year, and that spend accounts for around half of the 2% GDP growth projected for 2026. So one must conclude that the health of the US economy is extremely dependent on hyperscaler capex, and hyperscaler capex is highly dependent on the health of Anthropic and OpenAI. That’s the chain.”
OpenAI is… the weakest link
Between the two labs, Eisman says, “OpenAI is the weaker entity” – pointing to a WSJ report on the 2nd quarter. “OpenAI’s June quarter revenue reached $6.7 billion, up only 18% versus the March quarter. Compare that to Anthropic’s revenue of $11 billion-plus in the June quarter, which was up over 100%… OpenAI’s costs reached $12.3 billion, up $3 billion versus the March quarter. So, in three months, revenue increased $1 billion, but costs surged $3 billion. Things are not moving in the right direction.” (ZH Note; the $12.3 billion Eisman calls “costs” is OpenAI’s operating loss, including stock-based compensation, up from $9.3 billion in the first quarter, per WSJ. On $6.7 billion of revenue, that implies an expense line closer to $19 billion. Revenue rose $1 billion; the loss rose $3 billion.)
Then the departures. Chief revenue officer Denise Dresser left in August after roughly eight months, two days after Brad Lightcap ended an eight-year run. Eisman reads both through the lens of an IPO that keeps sliding: “Supposedly, OpenAI is getting closer to an IPO. That’s the big payday for employees, because it means that eventually they can sell some of their shares. That two such senior employees would leave now is an important data point.”
Two fairness notes: Lightcap had already been moved out of the COO role in April, so his exit was telegraphed. And Eisman doesn’t mention Fidji Simo, who stepped down in July and was arguably the bigger loss. The heart of the argument is what unprofitability does to a company’s relationship with its funders:
“When you lose billions upon billions, appearances matter a lot. OpenAI is completely dependent on the kindness of strangers funding its cash flow needs. When a company is growing and very profitable, appearances don’t matter nearly as much… But when a company is not profitable and has an insatiable need for capital, appearances matter more than anything, because if the narrative turns negative, raising capital becomes much more difficult.”
That’s why he flags last week’s “good news” – OpenAI’s ad business hitting a $1 billion annualized run rate – as bad news: earlier this year the company projected $2.4 billion of ad revenue for all of 2026, and $1 billion annualized in September doesn’t get there.

pic.twitter.com/WGH5sNDwYz
— cocktail peanut (@cocktailpeanut) September 8, 2026

“Evan Hubinger says the company still has no clear plan to keep superintelligence under human control..”

• AI Has Over 10% Chance of Killing All Humans – Anthropic Researcher (RT)

There is a more than 10% chance that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity within the next ten years, a senior Anthropic researcher has warned amid mounting concerns over increasingly powerful systems slipping beyond human control.Evan Hubinger, who works on aligning advanced AI systems with human interests, made the assessment after fellow Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned over fears that leading tech companies are racing toward systems they may not be able to keep in check.

“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” Hubinger wrote on X on Wednesday. “I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.” He added that Anthropic is “trying its best” but still does not have a plan for safely controlling superintelligence and is “not clearly on track” to find one. Hubinger noted that while current AI models pose a low risk, there is concern that future systems could begin improving themselves recursively, rapidly becoming more capable than humans before adequate safeguards are developed.
Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI, announced his departure from Anthropic on Tuesday, accusing both companies of ignoring the “civilizational stakes” and “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote, insisting the warnings were “not a marketing stunt.”
Coxon told the Wall Street Journal that the most aggressive scenarios could see things become “out of control” as early as the end of 2027. He argued that even companies with strong safety programs remain trapped in a race, fearing competitors will push ahead if they slow down. Both Anthropic and OpenAI publicly say they take the risks seriously and are heavily investing in safety measures. Their leaders have also backed calls for greater government coordination and mechanisms to slow development if necessary, but have nevertheless continued to develop increasingly powerful models.
The latest warnings come amid growing reports of AI agents, such as those developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, repeatedly breaking out of testing environments, hacking external systems and taking unauthorized actions against real people and organizations. OpenAI temporarily slowed some development last month after its model compromised the Hugging Face platform.= Britain’s AI Security Institute has also reported agents creating fake identities, writing malicious code, and attempting to manipulate people during evaluations. Researchers have meanwhile demonstrated that AI can design entire functional viral genomes, adding to concerns over how increasingly capable systems could be misused.

“AI pushing a Democrat agenda is the real threat to the Republic…”

• The AI Threat To Our Republic (Jack Hellner)

The United States has gone through massive job and technological changes over the last 250 years and has always survived and prospered. Over thirty years ago, I heard a presentation by e(conomist Brian Wesbury, who is still working, talking about major job changes over the years. He gave three examples: Number 1: In the 1800s, over 70% of jobs were related to agriculture. Today, that number is around 2% because oil-powered machines greatly increased efficiency and reduced reliance on manual labor. I would assume most people would say these are good changes.

Number 2: In the 1950s, Berghoff’s restaurant in Chicago employed twenty dishwashers. By the 1970s, they were down to one because of machines. Number 3: In the 1960s, there were 600,000, mostly women, working as telephone operators. He said people worried about what women would do if technology took those jobs. My guess is most women are very happy not to be working in those tedious jobs. A huge number of jobs have been displaced or replaced over the years by mass production and computers, and we have greatly prospered. We also have more choices of what to buy.
Many of the people fighting AI and data centers willfully watched as manufacturing jobs and the supply chain moved to China and other countries over decades. Now they are willing to watch as China takes the lead in current technology advancements Democrats are campaigning on destroying hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect jobs related to private health insurance as they push for Medicare for all.
They are also actively campaigning to destroy millions of direct and indirect jobs with their radical green agenda to destroy the oil, natural gas, and coal industries. They clearly don’t care that crude oil is used in over 6,000 products and that those products have greatly improved our quality of life and life expectancy. I am much more worried about the further dumbing down of children when a high percentage already can’t read or do math at grade level. They will rely on AI to do problems, write papers, and do research instead of learning to do it themselves.
They will most likely believe it when ChatGPT puts out a fictional piece of propaganda that is essentially Democrat talking points comparing Trump to Hitler. They will assume it is intelligent instead of garbage.

The main point was that Trump challenged the 2020 election and encouraged the violent protest at the capitol. ChatGPT, like most media, left out that Trump encouraged people to march peacefully and patriotically to the Capitol. They failed to mention that Democrats challenged elections in 2000, 2004, and 2016. They failed to mention that Democrats protested violently after the 2016 election and called Trump an illegitimate President for four years.
Let’s look at who is a greater threat to our Republic:
• Democrats want to get rid of the Electoral College, not Trump.
• Democrats want to get rid of the Senate, not Trump.
• Democrats want to stack the Supreme Court, not Trump.
• Democrats refuse to enforce immigration laws and flood America with illegals, not Trump.
• Democrats don’t want people to show proof of identity or citizenship to vote, not Trump.
• Democrats don’t want the federal government to see who is on voter rolls for federal elections, not Trump.

All of those actions are a much greater threat to our survival as a Constitutional Republic than challenging an election, requiring ID’s to vote, and reducing voting by mail, which clearly makes it easier to cheat. Let’s look at a few of Hitler’s policies and compare them to Democrats and Trump.
This is what Gemini said Hitler’s policies were:
• Banning Private Primary Institutions.
• Eliminating Dissent: The regime sought a monopoly on the minds of the youth.
• Outlawing Homeschooling: Alongside targeting private schools, the Nazi regime outlawed homeschooling to prevent families from shielding children from state propaganda.

These policies are very similar to Democrat policies, not Trump’s. Trump wants children to have school choice. Hitler was a Totalitarian. He did not believe in small government or individual liberties. He built a totalitarian state where the government controlled public and private life.
Democrats believe in a big, powerful government, not Trump. Trump is trying to reduce regulations and the number of government agencies and employees. He is trying to let people and businesses keep more of the money they earn to have more freedom. He is the opposite of a dictator like Hitler, no matter how often the media, AI, and other Democrats repeat that lie.
AI is a tremendous source for quick data gathering, but if asked for an opinion on Trump, Climate Change, or other subjects, it appears to largely push the Democrat agenda because that is what it has been programmed to do. That’s a real threat.

The more islam Europe gets, the more it’s against Israel.

• Europe Against Israel (Rabbi Michael Barclay)

Tuesday brought about sanctions and retaliation, not regarding the U.S./Iran conflict, but from the antisemites in Europe: politicians who seek to affect the upcoming Israeli elections, as well as get votes from Jew-haters in their own country. Claiming that “there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank,” the foreign ministers of Britain and France led the countries of Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden in issuing a joint statement against Israel, announcing they plan to impose restrictions on trade with “settlements defined as illegal under international law.”

Despite this being Israeli land, despite the reality that there has never even been such a thing as “a nation of Palestine or Palestinians historically, despite the simple truth that the Palestinian cause was created in 1964, and despite the actualities of “international law” that clearly define Judea-Samaria as part of Israel, these 12 countries are attacking the economy of Israel for purely political reasons. The foreign ministry of Qatar speedily made its own announcement of support for the sanctions against Israel, another reminder that Qatar is not a friend of Israel nor the U.S. The response from Israel was quick, clear, and unified.
Israel’s Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs stated that “the territories of Judea and Samaria are the cradle of the history of the people of Israel, long before the English became a people.” He added: “The purpose of the British struggle to stop construction in E1 in the area connecting Jerusalem to Ma’ale Adummim is to establish a Palestinian state, which the vast majority of Israeli citizens have opposed since October 7.” According to Israeli Minister Gideon Sa’ar, “the Labor government’s move is particularly absurd given that more than 100 years ago, the Balfour Declaration officially recognized the historical right of the Jewish people to establish their home in the Land of Israel, including in Judea and Samaria. This was included in the British Mandate. The decision constitutes interference in the electoral system of a sovereign state.”
Sa’ar went on to announce retaliatory measures against Britain following its decision to impose sanctions on Judea-Samaria settlements, including closing the British Consulate in Jerusalem; expelling British representatives from the Gaza coordination headquarters in Kiryat Gat; halting British training of Palestinian Authority forces in Ramallah; and preventing entry into Israel of 12 British public officials involved in antisemitic and anti-Israel activity. Sa’ar added that Israel will take retaliatory measures against other countries as well.
Reuters is reporting that as of Wednesday morning, British representatives were told by Israel that within 30 days they must leave and close the British consulate in Jerusalem, which has operated for over 125 years.
Israel’s primary leverage to combat these sanctions lies in licensed dual-use and defense technology already embedded in European military inventories, including electro-optical and infrared sensors, ISR and targeting pods, counter-drone systems, electronic warfare equipment, missile-defense software and spare parts. Britain’s Sky Sabre air-defense command software is built on Rafael architecture, Challenger 3 tanks use Rafael’s Trophy protection system, and Elbit supplies night-vision and surveillance equipment. Finland, which joined Tuesday’s statement, is also a David’s Sling customer. Restrictions in these areas would therefore represent a more consequential form of Israeli retaliation than diplomatic measures alone.
Tuesday and Wednesday also found Iran attacking the U.S. multiple times, and the U.S. retaliating by destroying Iranian tankers. Both sides are making contradictory claims about their success, but what is clear is that we are again in that pattern of daily small attacks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said while visiting Colombia that “every time Iran tries to attack U.S. Navy ships, it will lose tankers.”
Both Christianity and Judaism have prophecies that the world will turn against Israel as part of the “birth pangs of the Messiah.” Whether we believe in those types of prophecies or not, we can all believe in the eternal promise of God to protect His people and the land. May we all have the faith and courage to pray for a lasting peace and safety for Israel, her people, and her land, and to believe fully in the power of those prayers.
Chazak u’Baruch

Not Maga.

• Victor Davis Hanson on Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Bolt)

Victor Davis Hanson, a military classicist, historian, and fellow at the Hoover Institution, offered some insight into why Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others, who initially appeared to be allies of the MAGA movement, so quickly became saboteurs.

According to Hanson, it may simply be that when these commentators and politicians spoke with President Trump, they believed themselves capable of guiding the MAGA movement more broadly. In other words, like most people who get a taste for power, they believed they could single-handedly commandeer the movement for their own ends. When the president made clear that wasn’t going to happen, they showed their true colors.
“I think they felt that because they had been very intimate with [Trump] — in the sense that they had been at Mar-a-Lago, or they were on Air Force One — that they insidiously began to think that they could tell him things, and they forgot that he is the president of the United States, and that they represent maybe one-one thousandth of the people he contacts,” Hanson told Miranda Divine of “Pod Force One.”“This is a man who’s talking to the most powerful people in the world, and we’re not that important, but [Greene and Carlson] felt — I don’t know how else to explain why Tucker said he called him and said, ‘Don’t do this with Iran,’ or ‘Don’t do this,’ or ‘Don’t do that,’” he added.
“Why would a president listen to somebody just because he was on Air Force One, and why would Tucker, who’s a very intelligent person, think that he had that entree to affect a policy that would change decades just because he had been on Air Force One or had known Trump?” “I think they misinterpret informality and magnanimity as sort of an allowance for them to have a greater role than they otherwise should or would,” Hanson argued.
“And when they start to exit that role, then they get a snap back from him, and then they get very angry, as if, ‘Well, wait a minute, I was at Mar-a-Lago, I was on Air Force One, I talk’ – and they don’t understand he’s the president of the United States, and that’s the difference.”
“He calls people and he asks how you are and what can he do for you, but you can’t mistake that genuine interest, intimacy and niceness and kindness with the fact that he’s not president of the United States,” he explained. “So, you don’t go to the next step and say, ‘Hey, Mr. President,’ you don’t say, ‘Hey, Don,’ or ‘Hey, this,’ and you wouldn’t assume that you had control.”
The larger question is whether those same forces can be kept in check once President Trump leaves office. MAGA is already looking toward its next generation of leaders, and not all of the possible heirs see the movement, or figures such as Tucker Carlson, the same way. Vice President JD Vance, for example, has said Carlson remains a close friend despite their political disagreements, including Carlson’s criticism of President Trump.
https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2095574707085214187?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2095574707085214187%7Ctwgr%5E68cbd8ba50325e2da916e7b9ec139fbfe564a60a%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftownhall.com%2Fnews%2Fdmitri-bolt%2F2026%2F09%2F09%2Fvictor-davis-hanson-has-an-explanation-for-tucker-carlson-and-marjorie-taylor-greene-n2682702

Trump has held together a broad coalition without letting every commentator, donor, or elected official grab the steering wheel. He kept the tent big, but he also kept its loudest would-be saboteurs from ripping it apart. The danger is that, once he is gone, those internal fractures could widen into the kind of open civil war now consuming the Democrat Party as DSA-backed candidates challenge its establishment wing. Whether anyone can preserve MAGA’s coalition with Trump’s same authority may be the movement’s defining test after Trump.

Victor Davis Hanson: When Will the Iranian People Overthrow the Regime?

A rocket without Elon Musk. I have my doubts.

• Investors Are Totally Stoked About This New Rocket (Stephen Green)

Investors are so stoked about this fully reusable rocket that they just ponied up another billion dollars to help get Stoke Space’s Nova Pathfinder Block 2 off the ground. More seriously, Stoke Space was founded in 2020 by former Blue Origin and SpaceX employees, and has yet to get a single rocket into orbit. But investors like what they’ve seen so far, investing a total of $2.3 billion or so in the company’s efforts to design and build a rival to SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 medium lift rocket.

So you might wonder what’s the big deal, since there’s already a Falcon 9 flying about 150 times last year alone. We actually discussed this issue back in August, looking at reports of satellite operators are “in panic” over a gap in available launch capacity as SpaceX retires Falcon 9 over the next few years to focus its efforts on Starship and building out orbital data centers.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn can compete with Falcon 9 on price, but only for larger payloads. And while the booster is designed for reuse, it isn’t designed for rapid reuse, limiting its launch cadence. ULA’s Vulcan Centaur is tailored mostly to pricy national security launches. Both New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur still have teething issues. Other would-be competitors aren’t yet ready for primetime.
“I think it’s fair to say there’s more than a bit of a panic about the availability of launch,” Stoke’s Devon Papandrew told Ars Technica last month. “Even if the four medium-lift new entrants all achieve their goals in terms of flight success and cadence, it’s actually not going to make that much of a difference in demand right away. I’ve been saying for a while that I think 2028 is when this problem becomes really acute.”
Stoke hopes to have its reusable Nova Pathfinder fully operational by then, but there are serious limitations. Falcon 9 can put 17,500 kg (38,600 lb) into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and still land the booster on a drone ship, but Pathfinder can’t keep up. Although the rocket has a fully reusable mode, that’s good for just 3,000 kg (about 6,614 lb) to LEO, or 7,000 kg (about 15,432 lb) on missions that expend the second stage.
That’s where Pathfinder Block 2 comes in, hopefully sometime in 2029 — and that has investors eagerly writing checks to Stoke. “We have already started development on a larger vehicle, and we felt like now is the time to pour gas on that fire and really start full-force development of the larger vehicle, and so that’s the reason for the timing,” Stoke co-founder and CEO Andy Lapsa said on Tuesday, talking about the ONE BILLION DOLLARS the company just raised.
Block 2 is supposed to nearly match Falcon 9’s lift to LEO at 15,000 kg (33,069 lb), but with a kick. Block 2 will lift that much while recovering the booster and the second stage — something Falcon 9 can’t do at all. If customers are willing to pay a little more to expend the second stage, Block 2’s lift increases to 23,000 kg (51,000 lb). Can Stoke actually get that done before 2030?
It would certainly be an impressive feat, and more impressive still if Pathfinder Block 2 could match cadence with demand for launch capacity that’s going nowhere but up. SpaceNews reported on Tuesday that “the Pentagon has more than doubled the number of national security launch services it expects to procure, from 151 in its 2022 baseline to 337” between now and 2032.
That’s an additional $17 billion on the table just in national security launches over the next five years, which is just one reason investors keep pulling out their checkbooks for companies like Stoke.

https://twitter.com/Real_RobN/status/2097382579116904819?s=20

Tesla is now worth more than Toyota, Volkswagen, GM, Ford, BMW, Honda, Mercedes, and Stellantis combined.

Meet the Cybercab: two seats, no wheel, no pedals, and built to drive itself at scale from Gigafactory Texas.Tesla's bet is that the future isn't cars people drive, it's a… https://t.co/7YfW0YcijB pic.twitter.com/aPVM1ekOvy
— Donald J Trump Posts TruthSocial (@TruthTrumpPost) September 8, 2026

Tesla’s Optimus factory at Giga Texas is going up fast, built to manufacture up to 10 million humanoid robots a year.

“The foundation of the economy is labor… So what happens when there is no shortage of labor? That’s what Optimus is about.”

"AI + robots will more than… pic.twitter.com/FTFzeN73IK
— Optimus (@Optimus_RH) September 9, 2026

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