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Debt Rattle July 12 2026

Jul 122026
 
 July 12, 2026  Posted by at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Joan Miró Caballo, pipa y flor roja (Horse, Pipe and Red Flower) , 1920


• Iran Rejects US Talks As Mojtaba Calls For ‘Vengeance’ (ZH)
• US Orders Iran To Declare Hormuz Open, Toll-Free…Or Else (ZH)
• Trump Finds a New Way to Enrage Leftists and Jihad Enablers (Robert Spencer)
• Why Trump Is Right to Warn Americans About Communism (ET)
• The Return of Socialism and the GOP’s Golden Opportunity (Josh Hammer)
• From Musk to Truth Social: Critics Say Biden SEC Targeted Trump’s Allies (JTN)
• Why Patriot License Will Be Useless For Ukraine (RT)
• Muhammad Tops Baby Boys’ Names In England And Wales For Third Straight Year (ZH)
• Are the Walls Closing In On Gavin Newsom? (Matt Margolis)
• Who Made Zohran Mamdani Secretary of State? (Silvio Canto, Jr.)
• Mamdani Inadvertently Hands ICE a Target Map To Catch Illegals (ZH)
• Mamdani Vows To Update Immigrant Map After Backlash (JTN)
• Volkswagen Will Slash Half of Models After Losing Market Share to China (CTH)
• Citizen Kane at 85: Still Hiding in Plain Sight (Charlton Allen)

 


 

 


 


Why oh why does even Zero Hedge fall into the trap of putting words in Mojtaba’s mouth, when they can’t prove he actually said them? You’re creating a character while the real Mojtaba could well be dead ssince February. It’s sloppy.

NOTE: Lindsey Graham just died.

• Iran Rejects US Talks As Mojtaba Calls For ‘Vengeance’ (ZH)

Iran has thrown Trump’s ultimatum and Saturday deadline right back at Washington, saying that instead it is the United States that must first meet the agreed-upon conditions in order to normalize shipping and energy transit in the Strait of Hormuz.


Fars news agency reports Saturday that Iranian leadership is demanding that the US implement “agreed-upon understandings” before any talks take place. While the White House has declared the ceasefire to be ‘over’ – it has also indicated ongoing contacts and talks with Iran via mediators. But this appears to have been reduced to simple ultimatums being shuttled between capitals by Qatari mediators. There are no actual sit-down talks on the horizon after two rounds of fresh tit-for-tat attacks broke out this past week.

The memorandum of understanding (MoU) itself is barely alive at this point, also with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Amir-Saeid Iravani, separately announcing that Tehran could stop honoring the MoU if US attacks continue. “Should the United States continue to violate its obligations under the MoU, Iran will no longer be bound to fulfil its obligations under the MoU,” Iravani told reporters at UN headquarters. But he did make clear that Iran is still committed to the agreement “provided that the United States fully and faithfully complies with its own obligations.”

President Trump has meanwhile continued to issue his own warnings and threats. He said Friday that the US military would “completely decimate” Iran if its leaders attempted or carried out his assassination. He took it a step further in an overnight Truth Social Post, saying he has 1,000 missiles “locked and loaded” – aimed at Iran – should he be targeted by Tehran’s agents. Strangely, the US President signed off with his puzzling “praise be to Allah!” reference – perhaps mockingly or sarcastically.

Meanwhile, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei still hasn’t been seen in public after the Feb.28 US-Israeli airstrikes took out his father, killed members of his family, and reportedly badly wounded him. Mojtaba is said to be observing a private memorial for his slain father, and made no known appearance at the week-long funeral processions and burial. But on Saturday he did call for revenge in a rare public message. “It is our certain and undeniable duty that this revenge be carried out,” he said.

“We pledge to avenge your pure blood and the blood of all the martyrs of these two [recent] wars by taking revenge against the criminal, disgraceful murderers,” the Ayatollah also stated. “This vengeance is what our nation is demanding, and this must definitely be done.” He issued a series of statements tinged with Shia Islamic references. His words contain repeat vows to enacting vengeance, including this not so veiled threat to kill Iran’s enemies:

As for the big picture of where things stand, University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, who authors “The Escalation Trap,” has pointed out that that the millions of Iranians who took to the streets last week to attend the late Ayatollah’s funeral demonstrate growing nationalist resolve. He explained that this only makes further escalation more likely later this summer, as public sentiment gets hardened against the US.

“The balance of military capabilities did not change over the weekend,” Pape said. “The balance of political will shifted.” Referencing the now unraveling ceasefire and negotiations process, Pape is predicting: “The pause appears to be another stage in the escalation process rather than the beginning of de-escalation.”

Read more …

Favorite words in Tehran: “US Orders Iran”.

• US Orders Iran To Declare Hormuz Open, Toll-Free…Or Else (ZH)

The US is back to setting deadlines, coupled with new military threats, apparently. Judging by this week, which marked a dangerous return to guns-a-blazing in the Persian Gulf, it seems Trump is ready to back these warnings with new bombing raids. The only question will be the extent to which the Islamic Republic escalates in return. So far it has shown willingness to ‘answer’ US attacks with its own missile and drone launches, against US and allied bases and facilities among the Arab Gulf states.


Axios newly reports (…just after market-closing on Friday, it should be noted), that if Tehran doesn’t declare the complete opening of the Strait of Hormuz and safe passage to all ships by close of Saturday, then the… or else! “The Trump administration is demanding that Iran publicly acknowledge that the Strait of Hormuz is open and pledge to stop firing on commercial ships,” the report says. The US has also renewed calls for Iran to immediately hand over its “nuclear dust” – amid the warnings. Axios reports the message was conveyed “directly” and “through regional mediators” – citing three officials.

Both sides have already accused the other of severely violating the terms of the MoU. And US Treasury issued fresh sanctions on Tehran Friday, which violates the ‘no new sanctions’ clause of the memorandum. So the MoU is clearly on life support as it is. Diplomacy is still moving on some fronts: “Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr al-Busaidi are expected to meet Saturday in Muscat to discuss the Hormuz crisis,” Axios continues. But here’s the deadline:The U.S. officials said they expect Iran to issue a statement after Saturday’s meeting in Oman.

Iran has not appeared in the mood to ‘compromise’ or admit defeat on any level, and so the world might witness yet more waves of US attacks by Saturday night and into Sunday. A big question remains is whether Israel will continue sitting on the sidelines. Recent reports suggest Washington has been behind the scenes pressuring the Israelis not to act against Iran unilaterally. But the Netanyahu government remains a big wild card in all this.

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“Praise Be to Allah”

• Trump Finds a New Way to Enrage Leftists and Jihad Enablers (Robert Spencer)

If you go open up a window for a minute (assuming you’re running the air conditioner, fellow American), you’ll hear the leftists yet again howling with rage. As he has done so many times in the past, President Donald Trump has driven them up the wall, this time by mocking their favorite religion. He did it late on Friday night, at the end of a message threatening harsh retaliation of the Islamic Republic of Iran succeeded in assassinating him:


“1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands of more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat, pronounced in many corners of the Globe, to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate, the sitting President of the United States of America, in this case, ME! Orders have already been given, and the U.S. Military is ready, willing, and able, for a one year period of time, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran – PRAISE BE TO ALLAH! President DONALD J. TRUMP

This was the second time he said it. Back on April 5, Trump wrote: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F****n’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

This time, professional Trump-hater Aaron Rupar was ready to pull out the 25th Amendment playbook for yet another orgy of self-righteous partisanship dressed up as sober concern for our nation’s welfare: “This is total insanity. Words fail to explain how anyone let alone a plurality of voters thought giving an obviously demented person control of the most powerful government in the world was a good idea. We will be lucky to come out the other side of this alive.”

In its news roundup for Saturday, July 11, the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) huffed that “Trump, repeatedly during the war and its uneasy ceasefire, has invoked the name of God in Arabic, as well as threatened to destroy Iran’s very civilization.” Pompously referring to itself in the third person, the unsavory group continued: “The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a nationwide advocacy group, has in the past criticized Trump’s ‘deranged mocking of Islam.’”

Indeed it did. On April 5, the Hamas cheerleaders at CAIR issued a press release complaining not only about Trump’s alleged “deranged mocking of Islam,” but about his supposed “indifference to human life and contempt for religious beliefs.” They accused him of a “a long pattern of anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies that have dehumanized Muslims at home and abroad,” and added that “the casual use of ‘Praise be to Allah’ in the context of violent threats reflects a disturbing willingness to weaponize religious language while simultaneously denigrating Islam and its followers.”

Now, wait a minute. CAIR has never lacked for chutzpah, but this is really over the top. They’re knocking Trump for issuing violent threats in the context of saying “Praise be to Allah”? Do they expect their audience to be wholly ignorant of the fact that Muslims have screamed “Allahu akbar” (Allah is greater) while in the midst of committing literally hundreds, and possibly even thousands, of violent jihad attacks?

Those jihadis went Trump one better, as they were actually committing acts of violence while praising Allah, not just threatening to do so. CAIR, however, has never deigned to take any notice of that, much less to issue indignant press releases demanding that the jihadis stop “hijacking” their religion. (That’s because, of course, it isn’t hijacked at all, and the jihadis are acting in accord with its violent teachings.)

Instead, CAIR reserves its ire for Trump, and with good reason: the more Trump skewers the Islamic foundation of Iran’s belligerence and aggression, the more people will come to realize that all the hogwash they’ve been fed for twenty-five years about Islam being peaceful is actually false. The more they’ll realize that Islam is actually at the center of global conflicts, and that those conflicts will never be resolved as long as that fact is ignored.

In light of that, it’s clear that CAIR and its leftist comrades are enraged at Trump because with his gentle mockery, he is giving away their whole game. It’s hard to keep up a pose of aggrieved victimhood when everyone knows that the religion to which you loudly proclaim your devotion teaches endless war against those who are outside the fold. Trump has caught on. Others will follow.

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“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America.”

• Why Trump Is Right to Warn Americans About Communism (ET)

Early this month, U.S. President Donald Trump delivered increasingly forceful warnings about what he sees as a growing communist threat within the United States. During what will be his final years in office, Trump appears more determined than ever to defend the principles of American liberty against the influence of Marxist ideas. Employing rhetoric reminiscent of the Cold War, he declared on July 3: “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land.” On Independence Day, the president reinforced his message, stating: “The communist system is the opposite of the American system, and the communist system has never worked.”


“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America. We’re not going to let it happen. It’s like a cancer—you’ve got to cut it out, you’ve got to cut it out fast.”

Predictably, Trump’s remarks were greeted with widespread cynicism by political opponents and media pundits. For decades, establishment intellectuals have dismissed concerns about communism as misguided rhetoric designed only to gin up a public reaction. Some implied that Trump was stoking ideological division and indiscriminately branding progressives, social democrats and advocates of government intervention as communists. Others argued that there is no significant communist movement in America and that the real threat to democracy is the president himself.

Yet dismissing Trump’s warnings would compel us to ignore some of the most important lessons in modern history.

First, communism has the worst human rights record of any political ideology in the world. From the Soviet Union to the Republic of China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, and elsewhere, communist regimes have imprisoned, tortured, and executed millions of their own citizens. Repression of political opponents was not just an unfortunate side effect of the transition to communism; it became an essential feature of regimes that concentrated absolute power in a single party. Recent episodes of political violence in the United States should remind us that revolutionary transformation is not necessarily a peaceful process.

Second, socialist economic systems have consistently failed to produce prosperity. Karl Marx envisioned a society in which the abolition of private ownership would eliminate exploitation and create abundance.The historical record tells a very different story. Central planning repeatedly produced shortages, inefficiency, and stagnation. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed under the weight of its own economic contradictions. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward contributed to one of history’s worst famines. Even today, North Korea remains among the poorest and most isolated countries on Earth.

Third, Marxist ideology is fundamentally incompatible with the liberties guaranteed by the American Constitution. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, private property, an independent judiciary, and a free press all place limits on state power. Classical communist theory, by contrast, envisions a society in which the state ultimately controls the major institutions of economic and social life. History demonstrates that governments seeking such control rarely tolerate independent churches, schools, universities, newsrooms, enterprises, or political opposition.

Fourth, failed communist ideas are constantly reintroduced wearing attractive new clothes. Few progressives openly advocate establishing a Soviet-style state. But fashionable concepts, such as capitalist exploitation, class struggle, revolutionary transformation, and the unfair division of society between oppressors and oppressed, have enormous influence in American schools and universities. Marxist critical theory should shape intellectual debates in ways that require careful examination rather than automatic assent.

Fifth, experience shows that free societies become most vulnerable when they forget history. As the generation that experienced the Cold War dies away, younger Americans have little knowledge of communist repression. To many students, communism appears to be an interesting philosophical theory rather than a tyranny that governed one-third of humanity throughout the twentieth century.

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“..42% of Democrats have a positive view of capitalism, while a whopping 66% hold a positive view of socialism.”

• The Return of Socialism and the GOP’s Golden Opportunity (Josh Hammer)

The Democratic Party has come a long way since Bill Clinton was president — and not in a good way.


In 1993, the first year of the Clinton presidency, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) introduced legislation to end automatic birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens; today, Democrats routinely call to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and advocate for illegal alien suffrage. Clinton famously called for abortion to be “safe and legal but rare”; today, Democrats prefer to “shout your abortion” as a perverse badge of honor. On marriage, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act to define the union under federal law as one man and one woman; today, Democrats struggle to even tell us what a woman is, and polyamory now lurks as the next frontier in social experimentation.

But of all the issues where the Democratic Party has moved sharply to the left since the Clinton era, perhaps none is more notable than economic policy. During his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton famously declared that “the era of big government is over.” And he acted on that impulse too: Clinton signed the most transformative welfare reform law in a generation, deregulated Wall Street, slashed taxes on capital gains, and ended his presidency by presiding over consecutive balanced federal budgets. Clinton was greatly assisted by the dot-com boom and a fiscally conservative Congress, but facts are still facts.

When it comes to economic policy, today’s Democratic Party looks absolutely nothing like its more moderate 1990s-era forebear.

What began as an incipient Barack Obama-era trend toward big government has now, during the post-Joe Biden era, emerged as a strong majority sentiment. A Gallup poll last September found that 42% of Democrats have a positive view of capitalism, while a whopping 66% hold a positive view of socialism. Leading kingmakers in today’s Democratic Party are (literal) Soviet Union-honeymooning communists, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), or leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). And the singular party top dog right now is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is fond of quoting Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto,” speaks of the “warmth of collectivism,” and is now implementing city-owned grocery stores across the Big Apple.

That is some serious intellectual whiplash.

Hold aside that communism is the single deadliest ideology in the history of mankind — responsible, historians estimate, for nearly 100 million deaths. Hold aside, as well, that socialism and communism have resulted in horrific resource scarcity and immeasurable immiseration everywhere they have been attempted. At the most basic level, socialism is simply contrary to human nature. Men have a natural right to the fruits of their labor, provided those fruits do not undermine the common good. And it is natural, contrary to the basic tenets of socialism, to value the flourishing of one’s family and tribe over that of the polity — let alone the whole world. As Dennis Prager has often noted, socialism violates two of the 10 Commandments: do not steal, and do not covet.

Republicans are presently confused about what exactly they should run on, as they begin to make their case to the American people before this fall’s midterm elections. Inflation, while dramatically reduced from its catastrophic Biden-era peak, is still stubbornly higher than it ought to be. The Trump administration is, at least for now, unwilling to finish the campaign it launched against Iran. Republicans have a great story to tell on the issue of crime, but they seem uninterested in telling it. The administration has had tremendous success on stanching illegal immigration, but the GOP’s consultant class frets that a focus on immigration would hemorrhage the gains the party has made with Latino voters.

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“Musk himself warned this would happen after he announced he would no longer vote Democrat.

“Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold,” he said in May 2022.

• From Musk to Truth Social: Critics Say Biden SEC Targeted Trump’s Allies (JTN)

On January 14, 2025, just six days before President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second, non-consecutive term, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk, who was entering the administration with Trump as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).


The allegation? Musk violated securities laws when he purchased Twitter in 2022 because he allegedly filed paperwork about the purchase 11 days too late. The investigation into Musk’s purchase began almost as soon as he announced he was buying Twitter, now X, in 2022, which ended Democrats’ stranglehold on free speech on the platform. After the purchase, Musk’s other companies, SpaceX and Tesla, were also investigated by the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission. Musk himself warned this would happen after he announced he would no longer vote Democrat.

“Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold,” he said in May 2022. The SEC alleged that Musk failed to disclose his stake in Twitter when it surpassed 5% after he purchased stock in early 2022. He disclosed his stake once it reached 9% in April 2022, which the SEC argued allowed the billionaire to underpay for shares by $150 million. Musk eventually purchased Twitter for $44 billion and renamed it X. Earlier this month, it was revealed that a federal judge approved a settlement between Musk and the SEC for $1.5 million, to be paid for by a trust attached to the X owner.

Truth Social: “This inexcusable obstruction”
Musk is not the only political figure to face an SEC investigation. Trump himself has faced the SEC recently – also under the Biden administration – when his Truth Social media platform began a merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC). When the merger was announced, the SEC began investigating, and a federal grand jury in New York issued subpoenas for DWAC’s board of directors, arguably causing the company’s stock price to drop. The merger was slow-walked, alleges Truth Social. “The SEC has stalled its review of our planned merger with DWAC, having failed to act despite DWAC having filed its registration statement more than four months ago,” the company said in a statement in September 2022.

“This inexcusable obstruction, which directly contradicts the SEC’s stated mission, is damaging investors and many others who are simply following the rules and trying to expand a successful business. In light of the obvious conflicts of interest among SEC officials and clear indications of political bias, TMTG is now exploring legal action against the SEC. Despite the increasing weaponization and politicization of government agencies, Truth Social will continue its expansion plans, supported by the unprecedented levels of user engagement on the platform.”

Pattern of SEC hiring under former Clinton CFO raises questions
Republicans pointed to former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s hiring of former Democratic operatives to staff the agency, and his former work as CFO for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, where, according to congressional testimony, he had final approval authority for the campaign’s payments for the discredited Steele Dossier, as evidence the agency was biased against Republicans. Gensler is a former investment banker who served as the chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from 2021 to 2025.

“You seem to have a very troubling pattern of hiring, at an impartial regulatory agency, a lot of people who seem to have a vendetta against the former president, and I fear, and I worry that that has implicated itself and affected the policy of the SEC,” then-Sen. J.D. Vance told Gensler at a Senate hearing in 2023. “You can make a pretty good argument that the SEC was using its enforcement powers to silence the chief political rival of the current president,” Vance added. “It looks more and more like not an impartial regulatory body protecting investors and consumers but a regulatory body that is using its power to silence political rivals of the current President of the United States.”

The merger was eventually cleared by the SEC in February 2024, after members of DWAC were charged with insider trading and the company was fined $18 million for allegedly misleading investors. A year later, Trump’s media company merged with a fusion energy company.

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“The production rollout will likely face nearly impossible technological and security challenges, multiple experts argue..”

Permission from Trump is just one obstacle.

• Why Patriot License Will Be Useless For Ukraine (RT)

President Donald Trump has told Vladimir Zelensky that the US is willing to grant Ukraine a license to produce Patriot missile interceptors – one of the few weapons in Kiev’s foreign-sourced arsenal capable of shooting down state-of-the art Russian missiles. “We’ll give them the right to make Patriots,” Trump said, seated beside Zelensky at the NATO summit in Ankara, Türkiye, on Wednesday. “This way he can’t complain that we’re not giving him enough. I said, ‘Make them yourself,’” Trump added. He called the undertaking complex but voiced hope that Kiev would work it out quickly.


While significant on paper, the pledge sparked a lot of skepticism among defense analysts who pointed to numerous technical, legal, and security hurdles, while dismissing it as a mostly symbolic gesture or even a political trap for Zelensky. Here is why a Patriot license offer seems to be dead in the water.


What regulatory approvals does the license require?
While announcing the offer, Trump admitted he had not yet discussed the plan with Lockheed Martin or RTX – the two main companies that actually build the Patriot system. The defense firms haven’t commented on the issue either. However, even if the companies were wholeheartedly willing to help meet Trump’s pledge, any transfer of Patriot production technology falls under strict US export-control laws and congressional oversight. The Pentagon, State Department, and Ukraine would also have to agree on what exactly Kiev would be permitted to build, where, and under what kind of oversight.

US defense security rules further require any foreign facility handling classified missile technology to have vetted personnel and secure information-handling systems in place before production can begin at all. Ukraine would then need to test-run new lines and train technical crews from scratch – steps that typically stretch the process out over years, not months. According to the US-based magazine Responsible Statecraft, the licensing venture “would create substantial risks to US national security by making it easier for competitors to get access to sensitive information.”

What other countries have Patriot licenses?
Of all US allies and partners across the globe, only two – Germany and Japan – are licensed to produce Patriot missiles, and their example serves as a cautionary tale of the hurdles Ukraine faces.Japan, a highly technologically savvy country, was granted the license in 2005, and it took the country three years to test PAC-3 interceptors, which are produced in cooperation between Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. Japan currently churns out an estimated 30 missiles a year – an amount widely deemed completely inadequate to meet the standards of full-scale war – and lacks a full production cycle of its own.

Germany’s example is even more telling: the US granted Berlin the Patriot license in 2022 after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict. Four years later, it still has not built a single missile, while factory construction only started in late 2024.

What industrial issues does Patriot production face?
Even if every legal and political hurdle were cleared overnight, the production setup is incredibly difficult. In a post on Facebook, Ukrainian defense expert and economist Oleg Belinsky said that any plans to start production within a few months “crash into the laws of physics and mathematics.” While a license can be signed in a day, building a factory and procuring all of the equipment would take at least five years, billions of dollars in investment, and integration into the US military supply chain, which relies on hundreds of contractors, he said.

The hardest part of the missile, according to Belinsky, is not its electronics but its solid-fuel engine. Dozens of components have to be blended in exact proportions, then vacuum-treated to remove microscopic air bubbles, before being consolidated for weeks under strict temperature and humidity control. The finished charge is then X-rayed for the smallest internal cracks. mIf even a single parameter is off, the missile is scrapped because even a microscopic crack can make the fuel burn too fast and cause the engine to explode on launch. Producing components pure enough to meet that standard requires an entire chemical industry that Ukraine does not currently have, Belinsky said.

Russian military expert Vasily Dandykin echoed the assessment, telling news.ru that Ukraine does not have the necessary resources for production and that the only viable option is to set up production facilities abroad. While noting the difficulty of creating solid-fuel engines, Bloomberg also pointed to challenges linked to building small steering motors, which enable the Patriot interceptor to maneuver effectively in the thin upper atmosphere.

“Production is already constrained by existing supply-chain bottlenecks,” Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, told Bloomberg. “Even if Ukraine builds a production factory, it still needs to build the network of suppliers. That is a significant defense industrial base challenge.”

Is the Patriot license a political ploy by Trump?
The overture of the US president – who has been reluctant to finance Ukraine – to Zelensky looks like a “cruel offer” that “seems interesting, but is less interesting than it seems,” Tiago Andre Lopes, an assistant professor of International Relations at the Law Faculty at Lusiada University, told CNN Portugal. He argued that Trump’s real purpose was to shift blame onto Kiev: if Ukraine fails to produce missiles despite holding the license, Washington can say the Patriot shortfall is Kiev’s fault, not its own. “In six months or a year, when the Ukrainians say they don’t have Patriots, Trump will respond, ‘no, I gave you the license; why aren’t you producing them?’ Lopes said. “From the point of view of altering the status quo in the war in Ukraine, in the short and medium term, this doesn’t change a thing”: “It’s not money, it’s not defensive capacity, it’s not offensive capacity, it doesn’t change anything.” Agostinho Costa, a military expert at CNN Portugal, also noted that the offer in no way heralds a change in the Trump administration’s stance on the Ukraine conflict: “The European Union pays, the US supplies, Ukraine executes.”

How will Russia respond to a Patriot license?
Western military experts in unison argued that even if Ukraine were to somehow weather all technological challenges, any Patriot facility on Ukrainian soil would become a top priority target for Russian strikes the moment it broke ground. Russia has consistently targeted Ukraine’s defense facilities, including a plant producing elements of the Flamingo cruise missiles.

“If I were doing it, I would have the Ukrainians build the factory in Poland,” William Alberque, a senior fellow at the Pacific Forum, told Bloomberg. “Otherwise, it’s going to be a prime target. They’ll never be able to construct it.”.

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I don’t want to live in acountry where this is the case.

• Muhammad Tops Baby Boys’ Names In England And Wales For Third Straight Year (ZH)

Official Office for National Statistics (ONS) data released today shows Muhammad – including variant spellings – has once again claimed the top spot as the most popular name for newborn boys in England and Wales. This marks the third consecutive year Muhammad has led the boys’ chart, continuing a trend that has drawn significant public attention and debate about demographic changes. The ONS figures for 2025 births confirm Muhammad’s dominant position. In previous years, when spellings are combined, it has frequently outranked traditional English names like Oliver and Noah.


Commentators have linked the sustained popularity to the UK’s growing Muslim population, which now makes up a significant and increasing share of births in many areas. Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe responded strongly to the news, posting: “Muhammad has comfortably topped the list for the most popular boy name for the third year running. You can call me Islamophobic, I really don’t care… This is awful and demonstrates the rapidly changing demographics of our country.”

Lowe, who recently chaired an independent Rape Gang Inquiry Report, has highlighted concerns about integration, cultural shifts, and failures in addressing grooming gangs. His report estimates that at least 250,000 young, mostly white British girls have been victims of systematic abuse by predominantly Pakistani Muslim grooming networks over decades, with institutional cover-ups exacerbating the crisis. The report and Lowe’s comments tie into broader discussions about rapid demographic transformation, with critics arguing that names like Muhammad’s dominance reflect communities that have not fully integrated and, in some cases, parallel issues seen in grooming gang scandals where perpetrators often shared similar names and backgrounds.

While many celebrate Britain’s multiculturalism, others like Lowe warn of parallel societies and strain on social cohesion. The baby name data is often cited alongside grooming gang reports as evidence of deeper cultural challenges.Full ONS rankings for 2025 are expected to provide more context on rising and falling names across both genders.

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“Poor baby”.

• Are the Walls Closing In On Gavin Newsom? (Matt Margolis)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) wants you to believe he’s the victim. Last month, when Newsom announced that the U.S. Department of Justice had him and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, under criminal investigation, he insisted it was lawfare and that President Donald Trump was just going after him because he’s likely to run for president in 2028. And he’s really trying to play the victim here. He told reporters that “federal agents have knocked on the doors of family, friends, and former employees, not because they found a crime, because they’re simply trying to find one.” He claimed agents were “demanding records” and “abusing the grand jury process.” He did not name a single person involved or specify what records agents actually wanted.


Poor baby.

What he doesn’t want people to know is that the investigations originated in Sacramento and began during the Biden administration, with at least one thread reaching into Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s taxes and the nonprofits she runs. Investigators are reportedly digging into the finances and fundraising of those nonprofits and their ties to companies with business pending before the California government. And boy, does it look like the walls are closing in on him. According to Jessica Van Laar at our sister site RedState, Newsom has lawyered up, and despite claiming to be the victim of lawfare with nothing to hide, he’s been stonewalling the investigation.

His legal affairs secretary filed a sweeping Freedom of Information Act request against the DOJ, on the taxpayer’s dime, and Newsom told a Thursday press conference that he and his wife hired private counsel. However, he wouldn’t name the attorney.

Then there are the tax returns Newsom promised and never delivered. On June 19, his spokeswoman said his office was “working to prepare” his 2021 through 2025 returns “for transparency,” insisting “unlike Donald Trump, the Governor has nothing to hide.” When a reporter pressed him at the press conference, Newsom said, “I already have. I’ve given 20 years of my taxes, yes. I know you love taxes. Donald Trump… when’s he releasing his taxes?” Asked whether he was different from Trump, he answered, “I am, because that’s why I’ve released all my taxes for decades, and you will have all those new tax returns, because I have no reason why you haven’t gotten them already, so I have no problem…”

That’s not quite true.

Newsom has released full returns only for 2017 through 2020, and only because state law required them before he could appear on the 2022 primary ballot. He filed an extension on his 2021 taxes just to limit himself to four years of disclosure. California journalists have asked for more ever since and gotten nothing but the state-required Form 700, which has drawn him multiple fines over omissions. His returns from 2010 through 2016 remain largely undocumented.

Gee, I wonder why. It’s almost as if he’s hiding something. As for the “poor and innocent” people Newsom says agents are harassing, he won’t name them, either. Newsom’s office said in mid-June that he expected subpoenas, adding, “The Governor looks forward to it.” None have arrived yet. But the more Newsom postures for cameras instead of releasing his taxes, the more it looks like a man trying to get ahead of bad news, not one with nothing to hide. Has anyone ever told him that it’s not a good look to act guilty?

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“Mamdani gets way too big for his britches and sticks his nose into State Department business.”

• Who Made Zohran Mamdani Secretary of State? (Silvio Canto, Jr.)

A senior official in Communist New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration tried to hold an official meeting with the Iranian regime’s ambassador to the United Nations. Commissioner Ana María Archila, head of the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs, had scheduled the meeting for July 7 at 11 a.m. at 2 United Nations Plaza with Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s permanent representative to the UN.Two other senior officials from the office were also set to attend, according to calendar invitation screenshots reviewed by City Journal and confirmed by multiple sources, including a State Department official.


The meeting was called off only after the U.S. State Department, which had not been informed in advance, stepped in and met with the Mamdani administration to “clarify acceptable conduct,” according to City Journal. Archila reportedly did not even tell Mamdani she had arranged the sit-down. She was later reprimanded and ordered to cancel it. A spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs issued the predictable damage-control statement: “This meeting did not and will not take place.”

Well, we are happy to hear that it will not take place. Nevertheless, how arrogant can the mayor’s staff be? Why try to arrange a meeting with Iran anyway? Is that where their loyalties lie? My guess is that we will see more incidents like this in the future, especially when running New York City proves more difficult on the job than during the campaign. The mayor’s policies are already controversial and it’s only a matter of time before people realize that his election was one giant mistake. There won’t be free buses or “bodegas”!

So the mayor needs to find another audience, especially given the anti-Israel sentiments in his party. Also, he will try to become the voice of the Third World, particularly given his views on illegal immigration. Don’t be surprised if he starts attending “migrant conferences” around the world looking for something to do after failing to do the job he was elected to do. Zohran, citizen of the world? Yes, that’s the goal.

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“.. and his band of far-left anti-American clowns..”

• Mamdani Inadvertently Hands ICE a Target Map To Catch Illegals (ZH)

Far-left New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has repeatedly denounced capitalism while promoting a socialist reconstruction of the metro area, sparked uproar this week after releasing a map highlighting 30 migrant enclaves while omitting historic Italian, Irish, and Jewish communities. The map includes areas such as Little Palestine, Little Pakistan, Little Yemen and Little Guyana, but leaves out Little Italy, Irish enclaves including Woodlawn and Sunnyside, and Brooklyn’s heavily Orthodox Jewish Borough Park.

But perhaps the Democratic Socialists of America mayor and his band of far-left anti-American clowns, who spend more time trying to erase and rewrite history in typical Marxist fashion, inadvertently created one of the greatest gifts for President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ryan James Girdusky of the 1776 Project PAC wrote on X, “This is actually a map of where ICE needs to conduct raids.”

[..]Mamdani’s immigrant map appears less like a celebration of New York’s diversity and more like a Marxist ideology that divides residents into competing identity blocs. Before the socialist takeover of City Hall, there was a simpler civic identity: New Yorkers were New Yorkers.

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“The comment comes after the New York City Council’s Italian Caucus accused the Mamdani administration of “erasing” Italian-Americans..”

• Mamdani Vows To Update Immigrant Map After Backlash (JTN)

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Friday he will update a new immigrant community map that failed to include Jewish communities and the iconic Little Italy neighborhood, following backlash over the omission. Mamdani, a Muslin, attributed the omissions to the previous administration and defended the “New York City Immigrant Enclaves” map as not being a definitive list because it identified only 30 immigrant communities across the five boroughs.


“This map was originally created by the prior administration in 2023, and when we inherited it, we added a few additional neighborhoods,” Mamdani, also a democratic-socialist, said at an unrelated press conference. “It’s clearly not an exhaustive list of the more than 200 ethnic enclaves that call our city home,” he continued. “We’re going to be making additional changes in the future to reflect that … including Little Italy.” The comment comes after the New York City Council’s Italian Caucus accused the Mamdani administration of “erasing” Italian-Americans, calling the map “incomplete at best and insulting at worst,” according to the New York Post.

Mamdani’s claim that the map was created by former New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ administration was also inaccurate because it created detailed illustrations for the city’s annual Immigrant Heritage Week, not a map of communities. Criticism of the map also gained traction on social media for also failing to include Jewish and Irish communities, and is part of the city’s Neighborhood Passport campaign tied to the 2026 FIFA World Cup, according to Fox News.

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“The only way to avoid this issue is to protect the domestic market.”

• Volkswagen Will Slash Half of Models After Losing Market Share to China (CTH)

The European auto industry is a case study on how short-sighted trade policy goals, results in consequences. Previously, German auto companies like Volkswagen entered into trade agreements with China and began manufacturing their vehicles with immediate financial success in the market. However, it did not take long for Chinese auto companies to reverse the engineering and begin to deliver the same quality vehicles at much lower prices.The Chinese then stop purchasing the Volkswagen vehicles and purchase the cheaper version, while simultaneously begin exporting those same vehicles into the home market from where the technology originated. Today, with a double-digit decline in production, Volkswagen announces they will cut almost half of their brands due to diminished sales.


BLOOMBERG – BERLIN — Volkswagen reported weak sales numbers on Friday, a day after the giant German automaker announced plans to slash the number of models by nearly half as sales plunged, particularly in China. The Wolfsburg, Germany-based company said group sales fell 8.6 per cent in the second quarter to just under 2.1 million vehicles, with sales in China alone plummeted by more than one-third. After a board meeting on Thursday, Volkswagen said its “fundamental realignment” over the last three years had reached its next phase, announcing plans to streamline the model lineup by up to half, without providing specifics.

CEO Oliver Blume laid out plans to make VW faster and more competitive through less complexity, focused technologies, better alignment across regional markets and reduction of overcapacities, among other things, citing an “increasingly demanding environment.” Among its main brands, the core Volkswagen unit saw deliveries of slightly over 1 million vehicles in the second quarter, a drop of 14 per cent from a year earlier. Deliveries at Audi declined 8 per cent and those at Porsche fell 18 per cent. (read more)

Maybe Canada will take note, likely they will not. The only way to avoid this issue is to protect the domestic market. As soon as you open your market to this claimed reciprocity (panda face), it will not take long until the mask drops, and you notice the dragon face behind it.

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A Revolutionary Masterpiece.

“Orson Welles’s film may no longer shock us the way it shocked audiences in 1941—but only because so much of modern cinema learned to speak its language.”

• Citizen Kane at 85: Still Hiding in Plain Sight (Charlton Allen)

After the wildly inventive War of the Worlds broadcast took America by storm, Orson Welles and his merry band of theatrical and radio troubadours landed a movie contract. They came to film armed with the habits of another medium: sound, rhythm, atmosphere, narrative fragmentation, and a showman’s instinct for misdirection. A good friend of mine, who shares my love of classic cinema, recently observed that “Rosebud” is about as subtle as Chekhov’s gun. She is right, of course. It is not exactly hidden in the wallpaper.


But if “Rosebud” is obvious, it is also a little misleading. The mystery of Citizen Kane is not really the mystery of Rosebud. It is the mystery of Kane himself. Kane dies in the opening sequence, whispering that famous word. The film then pivots to a reporter trying to reconstruct him by speaking with the people he left behind. Each person provides a piece of the puzzle, but the pieces never quite fit together. And Citizen Kane is a political allegory as well—one that feels strikingly modern. Kane is a particular American archetype: the political liberal—“liberal” being the film’s own word for him—as media baron, the self-appointed tribune of the people who claims to speak for the common man while reserving to himself the right to tell the common man what to think.

Kane makes the point plainly enough: press barons can move from reporting events to shaping them, from shaping them to distorting them, and from distortion to outright fabrication. What begins as journalism can become manipulation with scarcely a pause in between. Charles Foster Kane’s “Declaration of Principles” is full of high-minded promises, almost ostentatiously altruistic in tone. Yet the tragedy of the film is that Kane spends the rest of his life, knowingly or not, eviscerating nearly every principle he once proclaimed. Voters, readers, friends, wives, and employees all become supporting players in the great production of Charles Foster Kane.

And then there is Welles himself. Yes, we know the trajectory did not continue upward in a straight line. Orson Welles never again quite stood on the same summit he reached with Citizen Kane.But then, what exactly should we expect from a man who had already conquered the two great mass-entertainment mediums of his age before, by today’s standards, he was even old enough to rent a car? Once a man has scaled Olympus twice by twenty-five, it seems a little unreasonable to fault him for never doing so again.

As a member of Generation X, my first sustained exposure to Welles was not as the boy wonder of the Mercury Theatre or the auteur of Kane, but as the older, heavier, and at times besotted figure hawking cheap California wine on television. It was difficult, seeing that version of Welles, to imagine that he had once been a singular titan of American entertainment—an artist of swaggering ambition and transformational confidence. But he was.

Perhaps the mistake is expecting a life to continue rising after such an ascent. Most people are fortunate to produce one work of lasting consequence. Welles produced several before many of his contemporaries had fully found their footing. What came afterward may have been uneven, unfinished, compromised, or misunderstood. None of it diminishes what he had already done. My taste in cinema and art has certainly evolved in the decades since I first saw Citizen Kane, especially since that winter of ’96, and perhaps that is one reason the film struck me differently this time.

It is one thing to encounter it young, when one is mostly aware of its reputation and perhaps dimly aware of its daring. It is another thing to see it again after years of watching more movies, reading more history, and thinking more seriously about politics, myth, memory, and ambition. Now Kane no longer appears merely as “the famous old movie everyone says is great.” It appears for what it is: a masterpiece of American art, and a work whose fingerprints are still all over the culture that followed it.

That, in the end, may be the surest measure of Welles’s achievement. He made a film so radical that later generations can watch it and fail, at first, to notice how radical it was—because the rest of the medium spent the next eighty-five years catching up to it. It is time to give the old film its due, along with the never fully resolved architect of the masterpiece. Cinema owes Orson Welles a debt that can never be repaid. American culture—yes, there is such a thing—does too.

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