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Debt Rattle September 28 2026

Sep 282026
 
 September 28, 2026  Posted by at 8:32 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  46 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

 

 

 

 


“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.

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“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.


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

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“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.”

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“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”?


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.

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“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.

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“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:


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“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.”


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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.”

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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

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