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Debt Rattle June 10 2026

Jun 102026
 
 June 10, 2026  Posted by at 9:57 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  48 Responses »


John Koch Conversation 1962


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

 


 

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

 


 


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

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

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


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

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

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Why don’t they attack more Apaches?

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

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

***


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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They play the press.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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They’ll stretch this for six months or more.

Remember, they stretched it all for 47 years.

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

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


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

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

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View from Israel.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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Successfully.

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

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


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

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He jinxed them?

• Trump Makes History at the NBA Finals (Sarah Anderson)

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


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

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

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

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

Even NBA commissioner Adam Silver knows it:

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

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

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


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

Great job President Donald Trump!

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

https://twitter.com/TMZ/status/2057200550060449943?s=20

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Malice.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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Debt Rattle March 30 2026

Mar 302026
 
 March 30, 2026  Posted by at 8:09 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  66 Responses »


Leonardo da Vinci Ginevra de’ Benci c. 1474-78

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• US Prepares for ‘Weeks‘ of Ground Raids in Iran – WaPo (RT)
• Iran Warns US Troops Will Be ‘Set On Fire’ In Ground Invasion (RT)
• CENTCOM Announces 3,500 Marines Arrive in Ready Position (CTH)
• Trump Ready To Take US Arms For Ukraine & Divert Them To Middle East (ZH)
• Democrats Should Be Panicking About This (Matt Margolis)
• The Long And Winding Petro-Gold Road (Pepe Escobar)
• Tensions Surface Between Marco Rubio and EU’s Insufferable Kaja Kallas (CTH)
• Aliens are ‘Demons’ – Vance (RT)
• Vance Says The Clock Is Ticking For Ilhan Omar (MN)
• Republic of Somaliland Asks US to Extradite Ilhan Omar (Catherine Salgado)
• Leading Democrat Calls for Reparations for Illegal Immigrants (Turley)
• Ukraine Needs Nukes As Security Guarantee – Zelensky (RT)
• Slovakia Threatens To Block EU’s Russia Sanctions Over Oil Rift With Kiev (RT)
• Project Hail Mary’ Is a Gut Punch to Woke Hollywood (Matt Margolis)

 


 

https://twitter.com/mitchellvii/status/2037964733052055572?s=20 $200 MILLION? Try BILLION. 1,000 times more.

 


 

 


 


“President Donald Trump has yet to approve any of the Department of War’s invasion plans, according to the Washington Post .. ”

• US Prepares for ‘Weeks‘ of Ground Raids in Iran – WaPo (RT)

The US Department of War is reportedly drafting plans for weeks of potential ground operations in Iran, despite US President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that Tehran has already lost the month-long war and is begging for a deal to surrender. Any ground mission would not be a “full-scale invasion,” but rather limited raids by Special Operations forces and conventional infantry troops, several US officials who spoke with the Washington Post on condition of anonymity have insisted.


Potential objectives could include the seizure of Kharg Island, a key Iranian oil export hub, or raids into coastal areas near the Strait of Hormuz to destroy weapons capable of targeting commercial and military shipping. Trump has yet to approve any of the Department of War’s plans. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it is the Pentagon’s role to make preparations to provide the commander-in-chief with “maximum optionality.”

Earlier on Saturday, the US Central Command said the USS Tripoli amphibious assault ship had joined the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the region. The new reinforcements include around 3,500 US sailors and Marines with transport and strike aircraft, as well as amphibious assault assets. Another US amphibious ready group – comprising the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Boxer, the Whidbey Island-class dock landing ship USS Comstock, and the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ship USS Portland – is also reportedly moving to the region.

In the meantime, the Department of War is also deploying a third aircraft carrier group to the US Central Command’s area of responsibility to potentially join combat operations against Iran, according to CBS and CNN reports on Friday. Two carrier strike groups – led by the USS Gerald R. Ford and the USS Abraham Lincoln – spearheaded the US attack on Iran last month, until the Ford suffered an alleged “non-combat” fire aboard and retreated for repairs to Crete. It is unclear if the Bush will join or replace the Ford.

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“Our men are waiting for American soldiers to set them on fire..”

• Iran Warns US Troops Will Be ‘Set On Fire’ In Ground Invasion (RT)

As the conflict nears the one-month mark, the prospect of a US ground incursion appears increasingly plausible. In response, Iranian officials have issued stark warnings, with parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf saying the country is prepared for the arrival of American troops and vowing fierce retaliation. Ghalibaf has accused US President Donald Trump of duplicity, saying Washington is publicly signaling talks while covertly preparing for an attack. “Our men are waiting for American soldiers to set them on fire,” he said.


Meanwhile, Iran claims it inflicted major damage on US military assets in the region. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said its Air Force carried out a missile-drone strike on Saudi Arabia’s Al-Kharj Air Base, destroying at least one Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS surveillance aircraft.


US media reports and circulating images suggest a $270 million aircraft was destroyed, several others damaged, and at least 12 American troops injured, though the Pentagon has not confirmed the scale of the reported losses.At the same time, The Washington Post reported that the US Department of War is drafting plans for weeks of potential ground operations. Officials cited by the outlet said any mission would likely involve limited raids rather than a full-scale invasion, with possible objectives including seizing Kharg Island, a key Iranian oil export hub.

Here are the latest developments:
The IRGC threatened to target two unnamed US- and Israeli-linked educational facilities unless Washington formally condemns Israel by 12:00 PM Tehran time on Monday, March 30, while Iran’s Foreign Ministry accused the US and Israel of deliberately targeting the country’s scientific and cultural infrastructure, citing strikes on major universities in Isfahan and Tehran.Yemen’s Houthis, who only recently declared their entry into the conflict, said they launched a second wave of missile and drone attacks on Israel and vowed to continue operations until Israeli actions cease. Protests against the war were reported in Tel Aviv and cities across the US and Europe, while in Lebanon crowds gathered in Beirut after three journalists were killed in what was described as a targeted Israeli strike.

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To conquer Kharg?

• CENTCOM Announces 3,500 Marines Arrive in Ready Position (CTH)

As the ongoing Operation Epic Fury military engagement continues, CENTCOM announces the arrival of 3.500 Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit into forward position.


As negotiations with Iranian leadership are reported to be ongoing, it would appear that options are now present for President Trump to make a decision on the potential seizure of Kharg Island, a crucial oil export hub off Iran’s coast. (Via Wall Street Journal) – “The Pentagon is looking at sending up to 10,000 additional ground troops to the Middle East to give President Trump more military options even as he weighs peace talks with Teh ran, Department of Defense officials with knowledge of the planning said.

The force, which would likely include infantry and armored vehicles, would be added to the roughly 5,000 Marines and the thousands of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division who have already been ordered to the region.It is unclear where precisely forces will go in the Middle East, but they will likely be within striking distance of Iran and Kharg Island, a crucial oil export hub off Iran’s coast. Trump has repeatedly said he will open the Strait of Hormuz, with or without the help of U.S. allies. (read more)

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Zelensky is in the way.

• Trump Ready To Take US Arms For Ukraine & Divert Them To Middle East (ZH)

The Iran war has been bad for Ukraine, and President Zelensky knows it. He’s frequently been warning partners not to let the global focus on the latest Middle East war distract from supporting Kiev. But President Trump himself made fresh remarks highlighting just this situation, signaling he’s willing to reroute arms originally tied to Ukraine toward the Middle East theater against Iran, reinforcing the obvious and growing pivot in US priorities.


Pressed on reports that shipments were being redirected on Thursday, Trump shrugged it off as standard practice: “We do that all the time. We have a lot of munitions. Sometimes we take from one and use for another.” He added Washington is no longer directly supplying the Ukrainian government and armed forces, but is instead “selling” weapons to NATO states that then pass them along. This has for many months been the White House’s stated plan.

According to The Washington Post, officials say the Pentagon is weighing whether to divert missile interceptors initially intended for NATO purchase for Ukraine and send them to the Middle East. While a final decision hasn’t been made, or has at least not been publicly declared, this would be reasonable given how much US bases in the region have struggled to intercept Iran’s inbound missiles and drones. On Friday Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia was hit, wounding at least a dozen US troops, with reports of several in serious condition. Expensive US Air Force planes were also hit.

Clearly the US needs more interceptors, and yet Ukraine has for months been raising the alarm over its need for more Patriots and other air defense systems. Russia’s assault on Ukrainian cities has not waned, but has been consistent and devastating. In early March, Zelensky stated that “We understand that a long war–if it is long–and the intensity of the military actions will affect the amount of air defense we receive.” He emphasized: “Everyone understands that, for us, this is a matter of life.”

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“..if they can’t sell this to their own allies in the press..”:

“..This was ABC News, with one of its own anchors walking a Democratic senator through the basic mechanics of the standoff and refusing to accept the spin ..”

• Democrats Should Be Panicking About This (Matt Margolis)

When the liberal media isn’t buying the Democrats’ talking points, you know they’re in trouble. On Sunday’s edition of This Week, host Jonathan Karl walked Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) through the reality of the Democrats blocking funding for the Department of Homeland Security, and things got a little testy when Van Hollen was confronted with some uncomfortable truths “I guess what’s confusing here is you have fought and blocked the funding for the Department of Homeland Security because you object, as you just outlined, to what ICE has been doing, and you wanted to force changes,” Karl said. “And yet, the only thing that has been assured throughout all of this is that ICE already has the money. Because, as you said, $75 billion passed in the budget bill last year.”


This isn’t new information; we’ve known for months now that ICE is funded through 2029, which made this standoff completely pointless, not to mention dangerous and reckless. Karl pressed the point further, spelling it out in plain English. “So you’re holding up the entirety of the Department of Homeland Security because you object to ICE, and you want changes to ICE,” he said. “Through it all, ICE continues to have the money it needs.”

That’s when the senator attempted to reframe the situation: “John, we’re not holding up all of the money for all the Department of Homeland Security. That’s just a false statement. We have said …repeatedly… we should fund TSA, we should fund FEMA, we should fund the Coast Guard. We are not prepared to give ICE another $10 billion …. on top of the monies they already have and are using in many of these lawless operations.” Karl cut in again, bringing the conversation back to consequences: “But fighting over that $10 billion … you’re holding up everything else.”

Then Van Hollen had the audacity to claim, “We’re not holding it up.” Karl wasn’t buying the spin. “And fighting over that additional $10 billion … you are holding up the rest of Department of Homeland Security.” Van Hollen just stuck to the script: “We’re not holding it up.” Karl wasn’t letting that slide: “I mean, but, but you’re saying—” “No, no, John, we’re not holding it up,” he insisted, but Karl kept coming back to the same, irrefutable point. “But you’re holding it up unless it doesn’t include money for ICE. That’s just a fact.”

Remember, this wasn’t a partisan hit from a conservative outlet. This was ABC News, with one of its own anchors walking a Democratic senator through the basic mechanics of the standoff and refusing to accept the spin. We’ve been pointing this out for weeks now, but when a left-wing media outlet points it out, it tells you exactly how the Democrats’ messaging is simply failing to fool anyone. And if the liberal media isn’t even buying it, it’s a clear sign the usual media safety net isn’t there to catch Democrats this time. Their messaging isn’t just weak—it’s collapsing under basic scrutiny in front of a national audience. And if they can’t sell this to their own allies in the press, Democrats should be panicking about this.

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Pepe doesn’t like Trump, who must therefore be a loser. I don’t find that strong.

• The Long And Winding Petro-Gold Road (Pepe Escobar)

The 15-point plan that Team Trump presented to Iran is already D.O.A. It’s an imposed capitulation: a surrender document disguised as “negotiation”. The non-plan plan – imposing demands while begging for a one-month ceasefire – includes zero uranium enrichment on Iranian soil; full dismantlement of Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow installations; all enriched uranium out of Iran; the missile program extremely restricted; no funding for Hezbollah, Ansarallah and Iraqi militias; the Strait of Hormuz totally opened. All that in exchange for a vague “cancelling the threat of reimposing sanctions”.


The only realistic Iranian response to this accumulated wishful thinking might be Mr. Khorramshahr-4 showering his business card across selected targets – consistent with leveraging economic and military deterrence to dictate the real terms. And the real terms are harsh: Closure of ALL US military bases in the Gulf; guarantee of no more wars; end of the war on Hezbollah; lifting of ALL sanctions; war damage reparations; a new order in the Strait of Hormuz (already in effect: collecting fees just like Egypt in Suez); missile program intact. Conclusion: the infernal escalation machine keeps rolling.

A Member’s Club With an Entrance Fee in Petroyuan
Meanwhile, oil and gas prices are mired in a kaleidoscope of volatility, affecting currencies, equities, commodities, supply chains, inflation scares. This is already an out-of-control global economic shock with devastating consequences in progress. Before the war, Iran was producing a little less of 1.1 million barrels of oil a day, sold at $65 a barrel with a $18 discount: thus, in practice only $47. Now, Iran has increased production to 1.5 million barrels a day, selling at $110 (and counting), mostly to China, with a maximum $4 discount.

And that does not even include petrochemical sales: on the up and up, and for an array of extra customers. To round it all up, all payments are conducted via alternative mechanisms. Which brings us to a startling fact: for all practical purposes, this is sanctions relief in effect. Now for the Holy Grail in the war: the Strait of Hormuz. It is de facto open, but with a toll booth controlled by the IRGC. A toll booth with a twist: veto power over the guest list. Like entering an exclusive private club. To get the IRGC clearance, a tanker needs to pay the toll: $2 million per vessel. This is how it works.

You contact an IRGC-linked broker. The broker relays to the IRGC the essential info: vessel ownership, national flag, cargo manifest, destination, crew list, and AIS transponder data. The IRGC runs background checks. If you are not US-linked, not shipping any Israel-linked cargo, and your flag is not part of “aggressor states”, you’re in. Japan and South Korea, for instance, still have not been cleared. Then you pay the toll. In cash – whatever currency you have – but preferably in yuan. Or in crypto. It’s a complex mechanism. The IRGC uses multiple addresses; cross-chain bridges to other networks; over-the-counter desks in jurisdictions way beyond American reach; and integration with all sorts of yuan settlement channels.

After the toll is paid, the IRGC issues a VHF radio clearance – complete with a specific time window linked to a narrow 5-mile nautical corridor through Iranian territorial waters, between Qeshm and little Larak island, where the IRGC Navy can visually identify your vessel. You’re free to go. No need for an escort ship. All of the above applies, for now, to tankers from China, India, Pakistan, Turkiye, Malaysia, Iraq, Bangladesh, Russia. Some don’t need to pay the full toll. Some get exemptions – on government-to-government basis (as in Sri Lanka and Thailand, both described as “friendly nations”). And some don’t pay anything.

So welcome to a member’s club with an entrance fee mostly in petroyuan. It took a single move from Iran to achieve what endless global summits could not: establishing an alternative settlement system – under fire, tested under supreme stress, and on top of it applied in the most consequential chokepoint on the planet. Each toll paid in petroyuan bypasses the petrodollar, SWIFT and US sanctions – all in one go. The Iranian parliament will approve legislation institutionalizing the toll booth as “security compensation.” No one saw this coming – and so fast: legalized chokepoint monetization. Without firing a shot. This is what de-dollarization trade is really all about.

The problem is what is not transiting Hormuz: fertilizers. Over 49% of urea for export comes from the Persian Gulf. Ammonia needs natural gas; but Qatar declared Force Majeure after the Epstein Syndicate attack on South Pars and the Iranian counter-strikes. The IRGC is focused on oil because oil finances the tool booth and long term, is at the heart of the post-dollar energy settlement system, fully supported by the Russia-China strategic partnership. So it’s no wonder the Empire of Chaos and Plunder has gone bonkers.

In a flash, in three weeks, we have the petroyuan ruling over the – de facto privatized – most important naval connectivity corridor on the planet. So CENTCOM will go all out Terminator to demolish the tool booth, attempting everything from bombing IRGC installations along the coast and setting up naval escorts for allied tankers to a tsunami of sanctions on toll booth brokers.

“Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying”
-Bob Dylan

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““We are doing the best we can to end the war. If you think you can do it better, go ahead. We will step aside..”

PS; Kallas was selected BECAUSE she’s insufferable -and because she hates Putin-. Her function is she makes Von der Leyen look less bad.

• Tensions Surface Between Marco Rubio and EU’s Insufferable Kaja Kallas (CTH)

If you’ve ever watched the intrapersonal aspects of the EU as a governing body, you have likely noticed that EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, is an annoying person always injecting herself into every discussion. The DEI infected bureaucrats always go along with it. Last month, Kallas came to the USA to meet with members of congress sympathetic to World War Reddit and Zelenskyy. A cashmere dustup was created because Secretary of State Marco Rubio didn’t meet with her on the eve of Operation Epic Fury. Mrs Kallas felt slighted. According to insider reports, during Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent visit to the G7 foreign minister’s assembly in Paris Mrs Kallas took the opportunity to snark at Secretary Rubio.


(Via Axios) – EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio when the U.S. would get tough on Russia during a G7 ministers meeting on Friday, sparking a sharp retort, according to three sources who attended the meeting. She noted that Rubio had said at the same forum a year earlier that if Russia hampered U.S. efforts to end the war, the U.S. would run out of patience and take more steps against the Kremlin. “A year has passed and Russia hasn’t moved,” Kallas told Rubio, according to the sources. “When is your patience going to run out?” Rubio was visibly annoyed, “We are doing the best we can to end the war. If you think you can do it better, go ahead. We will step aside,” he fired back, raising his voice. (read more)

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“The US vice president has vowed to examine the UFO files and “get to the bottom” of the matter with his “tippy top” access..”

• Aliens are ‘Demons’ – Vance (RT)

US Vice President J.D. Vance has said aliens are in fact “demons,” vowing to dig into US government files on UFOs. He made the remarks in an interview with podcaster Benny Johnson released on Friday. Vance discussed the UFO files and government disclosures, saying he is “obsessed” with the topic, but has not had enough time to “get to the bottom of it.” “I’ve already had a couple of times where I’ve said, ‘All right, we’re going to Area 51, we’re going out to New Mexico, we’re going to sort of get to the bottom of this.’ And then the timing of the trip didn’t work out,” he said. “I’m more curious than anybody. And I’ve got three years at the very tippy top of the classification. I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”


Area 51 is a secretive US Air Force facility in southern Nevada that has long been linked to speculation about alien life. Johnson asked Vance about President Donald Trump’s February order directing federal agencies to begin “identifying and releasing” government files related to UFOs and aliens. Trump said he was taking the step “based on the tremendous interest shown,” shortly after former President Barack Obama publicly said that aliens are “real.” Trump later told reporters that Obama “gave classified information, he is not supposed to be doing that.” https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/2037611400223179189?s=20

In the interview, Vance told Johnson, “I don’t think they’re aliens. I think they’re demons,” describing this as a Christian understanding of “celestial beings who fly around who do weird things to people.” Interest in UFOs and related phenomena has grown in recent years, as the US government has investigated numerous reports, including through the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), and established channels for pilots and the public to report sightings. In March 2024, the Pentagon said it had no proof that any unidentified aerial phenomena are in fact alien technology, adding that many cases involved weather balloons, spy planes, satellites, and other routine activity.

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“… what are the legal remedies now that we know that she’s committed immigration fraud?”

• Vance Says The Clock Is Ticking For Ilhan Omar (MN)

Vice President JD Vance has put Rep. Ilhan Omar squarely in the crosshairs, confirming the White House is actively exploring legal remedies to hold her accountable for immigration fraud. In a direct interview with Benny Johnson, Vance stated the Trump administration believes Omar broke the law to enter and remain in the United States — and they are not letting it slide. “So we actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America,” Vance said. “And I talked to [White House deputy chief of staff] Stephen Miller about this actually recently. We’re trying to look at what the remedies are. That’s the thing that we’re trying to figure out is what are the legal remedies now that we know that she’s committed immigration fraud?”


Vance continued, “How do you go after her? How do you investigate her? How do you actually do the thing? How do you build the case necessary to get some justice for the American people? Vance added that Omar “has been at the center of a lot of the worst fraudsters in the Somali community.” Benny Johnson later reflected on the interview, calling it “the first time on the record that we have absolute and total confirmation that Ilhan Omar did, in fact, commit immigration fraud.”

This latest development builds on years of scrutiny over Omar’s personal and financial dealings. As we reported earlier this year, Omar’s husband’s winery was exposed as a fake shell company allegedly used for money laundering, with revenue exploding from $15,000 in 2024 to $5 million in 2025 despite zero wine production at the listed address. The New York Times reported on a federal investigation into Omar’s finances in January. House Republicans and federal agencies launched a probe.

https://twitter.com/WallStreetApes/status/2035672843485319289

Even Democrat strategist James Carville previously ripped into Omar, calling her attacks on white men “stupid” and urging her to leave the Democratic Party. Omar has long faced accusations of marrying her brother Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009 to help him immigrate, after an earlier marriage to Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi. She later reconciled with Hirsi and divorced Elmi years later. Conservatives, including President Trump, have repeatedly highlighted her ties to massive welfare fraud schemes in Minnesota’s Somali community, where dozens were charged in a $1 billion theft from taxpayer-funded programs.

Vance is leading a new anti-fraud task force aimed at cracking down on such abuses, especially in Minnesota. President Trump has also mocked Omar over the Somali fraud scandals in recent remarks. The message from the White House is clear: no one is above the law — not even a sitting member of Congress who has spent years deflecting scrutiny while her community allegedly drained billions in American taxpayer dollars.

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For real?

BTW, new for me: “Somaliland is a self-declared independent republic separate in all but name from the rest of Somalia..”

• Republic of Somaliland Asks US to Extradite Ilhan Omar (Catherine Salgado)

After official confirmation that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) did, in fact, commit immigration fraud, the Republic of Somaliland — which has good reason to be bitter at the crimes of Omar and her Somali family — offered to be the hammer of justice if the United States would extradite Omar there. The tantalizing offer comes after Vice President JD Vance confirmed on Benny Johnson’s show what many of us have thought of Omar for a long time — there is, in fact, solid evidence that the radical Islamist member of Congress committed immigration fraud. “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America,” Vance stated.


The vice president explained that he has discussed this with a top Trump administration advisor. “I talked to Stephen Miller about this actually recently. We’re trying to look at what the remedies are,” Vance added. “That’s the thing that we’re trying to figure out is what are the legal remedies now that we know that she’s committed immigration fraud? How do you go after her? How do you investigate her? How do you actually do the thing? How do you build a case necessary to get some, some — some justice for the American people?”

he Republic of Somaliland is happy to help Americans see that justice comes to fruition. America is not the only country that has suffered from crimes committed by Omar and her family. In fact, the Republic of Somaliland shared a fascinating X thread recently exposing Omar’s family for war crimes and fraud and illustrating why the government might wish to see her extradited to their country. Did you know Omar’s father participated in the Isaaq Genocide? Why would we ever have let this family come into our country?

https://twitter.com/RepOfSomaliland/status/2034435436874170758

Speaking of which, Vance connected Omar not only to immigration fraud, of which her “marriage” to her brother is a part, but also to fraudulent networks pulling in taxpayer dollars here in America. “She has been at the center of a lot of the worst fraudsters in the Somalian community,” he argued. The Republic of Somaliland wants independence from Somalia precisely because of the sort of violence and corruption that the people who control Somalia and move to the USA from Somalia perpetrate.

In exchange for recognition, the Republic of Somaliland — which argues that historically and politically its independence from Somalia is legitimate — will give the USA a military base, access to a strategic port, and also access to critical minerals. And let’s be honest, that’s a pretty good deal that secures the United States a foothold in the Horn of Africa with a blow to Somalia, which has been sucking up a lot of U.S. taxpayer money through Somali “migrant” fraud.

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Take away here: Anyone who wants to have borders is a dictator.

• Leading Democrat Calls for Reparations for Illegal Immigrants (Turley)

As Chicago and other blue cities move toward reparations for African Americans, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D, Wa.) wants reparations for illegal immigrants for the trauma caused by immigration enforcement. At the same time, various Democrats are making clear that they want to entirely defund and eliminate Immigration and Customs Enforcement. So, after the Biden Administration allowed in millions over an open border, Democrats would eliminate ICE and some like Jayapal would pay illegal immigrants reparations. Rep. Jayapal declared on Friday:


“They need to be brought before us, and they need to be held account [sic] for the trauma that they have created, and we are going to have to have some form of reparation for the kids and the families that have been traumatized through all of this.” While not calling for reparations, other democrats have picked up the theme that someone has to pay for the trauma caused by immigration enforcement. Rep. Maxine Dexter (D, Or.) echoed the mantra of Democratic members that “The administration has terrorized our communities and mine in the Willamette Valley.”

Rep. Christian Menefee (D-TX) told constituents, “I can’t imagine seeing my kid in a jail cell just because of where he was born, just because of what language he speaks at home.” Jayapal fought back tears in her “shadow hearing” on Friday after calling for reparations, stating, “I still cannot believe that we are doing this to our own children.” U.S.-born President Donald Trump is the outsider, Jayapal argued: “When the founders put into the Constitution the idea that Congress would have power, they assumed that the party that was in control of Congress would stand up to a dictatorial, authoritarian president.”

Jayapal did not mention the many American children killed by what she called “our” migrants. The question becomes, if more groups get reparations, when does this become a form of wealth redistribution? Indeed, according to these members, much of the country has been traumatized by the Trump Administration. What is missing in cities like Chicago facing economic meltdowns is any notion of financial limits. Instead, Democrats are pushing tax hikes and wealth taxes to cover bloated budgets and growing deficits.

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Nope. C’mon, we’re going to give the mafia nukes?

• Ukraine Needs Nukes As Security Guarantee – Zelensky (RT)

Vladimir Zelensky has demanded that Kiev’s Western backers either admit Kiev to NATO or supply it with nuclear weapons, arguing that nothing less can protect Ukraine against a nuclear-armed Russia. In an interview with French newspaper Le Monde on Friday, Zelensky lashed out at Ukraine’s critics, who he said did not believe in Kiev’s ultimate victory over Russia due to Moscow’s nuclear arsenal. ”When everyone says that Ukraine will not win this war because Russia is a nuclear power, then tell me, what do you think, what security guarantees should Ukraine have to oppose it? Which? NATO? Nuclear weapons? Well then, people should speak with us in the same way,” he said.


He admitted, though, that “until now, no one has asked us that question,” adding that he found “astonishing” the fact that “no one is talking about Russia, at least in the same terms.”Zelensky’s comments came after he told Reuters earlier this week that Washington’s post-war security guarantees were contingent on Kiev withdrawing from the parts of Russia’s Donbass it still occupies. Donbass, along with two other former Ukrainian regions, overwhelmingly voted to join Russia in 2022, and Moscow has insisted that Kiev’s full withdrawal from the territory was a key condition for a sustainable peace. However, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio pushed back against Zelensky, accusing him of telling a “lie.” “I saw him say that, and it’s unfortunate he would say that, because he knows that’s not true and that’s not what he was told,” Rubio stated.

”What he was told is the obvious: security guarantees are not going to kick in until there’s an end to a war, because otherwise you’re getting yourself involved in the war.” Zelensky has, on numerous occasions, denied that Ukraine was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. However, he told Sky News last month that he would accept nuclear weapons from Britain and France “with pleasure, but I didn’t have propositions,” as he responded to Moscow’s accusation that London and Paris had plans to secretly arm Ukraine with atomic capabilities.Russia has repeatedly said it would not allow Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons under any circumstances. Moscow has also suggested that Zelensky’s openness to getting his hands on nuclear weapons before the escalation of the conflict in 2022 was one of the reasons for the start of the hostilities.

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“.. the bloc has threatened Bratislava with repercussions over its domestic protective measures, including diesel rationing for foreigners..”

• Slovakia Threatens To Block EU’s Russia Sanctions Over Oil Rift With Kiev (RT)

Any attempts to fast-track Ukraine’s bid to join the EU will also be blocked if the issue is not resolved, PM Robert Fico has warned. Bratislava will veto the EU’s proposed 20th package of sanctions against Russia, as well as derail any attempts to simplify the potential accession of Kiev into the bloc, should Brussels continue to favor Ukraine over Slovakia, Prime Minister Robert Fico has warned.


Slovakia, as well as its southern neighbor Hungary, has been locked in a bitter row with Ukraine since late January, when the Druzhba pipeline, which used to carry Russian crude into the two countries, went offline. Kiev has claimed it was damaged in Russian strikes, a charge Moscow has denied.Both Slovakia and Hungary have accused Ukraine of deliberately withholding supplies for political blackmail and threatened retaliatory steps should the pipeline remain out of commission. Kiev has claimed the artery was being repaired but has repeatedly shifted the deadline.

Speaking in a video address posted to his Facebook page late on Saturday, Fico lamented the treatment his country has been receiving from EU bureaucrats. Namely, the bloc has threatened Bratislava with repercussions over its domestic protective measures, including diesel rationing for foreigners, the PM said. “The European Commission immediately sent us a threatening letter within two days, wherein it threatened all possible actions. It is strange that the same language is not used in reference to [Vladimir] Zelensky; those are full of love and understanding,” Fico stated.

Should the attitude remain the same and the EU Commission continue to “favor Ukraine over Slovakia,” Bratislava will block the proposed 20th package of anti-Russian sanctions, as well as no longer show “willingness for Ukraine’s rapid accession to the union,” the PM warned. The sanctions package has already ended up in limbo over the Druzhba row, as the initiative was vetoed by another victim of the pipeline shutdown, Hungary. Budapest has also derailed the proposed €90 billion ($104 billion) EU assistance package for Kiev, agreed to by the member states late last year. Without the emergency loan, Ukraine is projected to run out of money by June, according to Bloomberg.

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Hollywood is back to good movies?

• Project Hail Mary’ Is a Gut Punch to Woke Hollywood (Matt Margolis)

Last night, my family saw Project Hail Mary, and it was exactly the kind of movie more studios should be making. It’s smart, clean, entertaining, and it trusts the audience to enjoy a good story without being preached at. I read the novel when it first came out and have reread it a few times since. So, it’s safe to say that I’ve been looking forward to this movie for a long time and, honestly, kind of dreading it. Would Hollywood make this story woke? Would they take this great story and ruin it for the narrative?


The movie follows Ryland Grace, played by Ryan Gosling, a science teacher and biologist who wakes up alone on a mission to save Earth from a sun-dimming threat called astrophage. That setup could easily have turned into another heavy-handed Hollywood lecture, but instead it delivers a genuinely fun, family-friendly sci-fi adventure. And the audience response says plenty. Project Hail Mary has earned a 95% critics score and a 96% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s done some great box office as well. It opened with about $80.6 million domestically and more than $140 million worldwide. That is not the sign of a movie people tolerated because critics told them to. That is a sign of a movie people actually liked.

That matters because Hollywood has been severely lacking in good storytelling for years after forgetting how to make movies people want to see. It’s like they’ve gotten lazy, pushing out endless sequels, remaking a classic with a race swap or a gender swap, or injecting a political lecture into a script and calling it progress. Then they act shocked when audiences roll their eyes and stay home. Heck, even their target audiences don’t seem to want to see the crap they’re churning out. Remember that gay rom-com Bros that tanked? Not even the LGBTQ community bothered to support it.

Project Hail Mary is a reminder that people still show up for original stories when the movie respects them. It also helps that the film appears to have none of the usual baggage that turns a night at the movies into a cause for concern for parents with young kids. There’s no nudity or sexual content, and I don’t even recall there being any profanity. In other words, it’s the rare modern release that parents can actually take seriously as entertainment for a broad audience.

That stands in sharp contrast to the mess Hollywood keeps shoving down our throats. As you know, Disney has made a habit of “updating” classic stories with race-swaps and overt ideological signaling, then pretending that criticism is the problem rather than the execution. Even HBO’s new Harry Potter series has sparked controversy over casting a black actor to portray Severus Snape, a move that fans of the franchise know will create a racial subtext in his backstory, making Harry Potter’s father seem racist.

That’s why the success of Project Hail Mary is so refreshing. It proves that audiences do not need to be lectured, scolded, or re-educated every time they buy a ticket. In the end, we want a good story and great characters. If Hollywood can learn anything from Project Hail Mary, it’s that original movies can still win, family-friendly movies can still draw crowds, and viewers are perfectly capable of rewarding good storytelling without the social-justice sermon attached. Sometimes people just want to be entertained. Imagine that.

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https://twitter.com/ProudofusUK/status/2037890781088829946?s=20 https://twitter.com/iam_smx/status/2038046413615948117?s=20 https://twitter.com/Old_But_Gold50s/status/2038066108314624254?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle March 9 2019

Mar 092019
 
 March 9, 2019  Posted by at 10:56 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  15 Responses »


Juan Gris Portrait of Pablo Picasso 1912

 

• World’s Biggest Debt Slaves: Americans Wimp Out in 11th Place (WS)
• Chelsea Manning Jailed For Refusing To Testify About Wikileaks (ZH)
• On Trump’s Ties To Russia, Americans Have Made Up Their Minds – Poll (R.)
• Trump’s Private Talks With Putin May Contain Clues To His Russia Romance (G.)
• Ilhan Omar Criticizes Obama And Past Presidents’ ‘Really Bad Policies’ (MW)
• EU’s Barnier Sets May On Course For Brexit Defeat (G.)
• Corbyn Tells May Second Defeat For Her Deal Is ‘The End Of The Road’ (Ind.)
• Greenpeace Co-Founder Thrashes Global Warming ‘Brainwashing’ Campaign (RT)
• Italy’s Government On Verge Of Collapse Over A Train (ZH)
• Dutch Pharmacies Join Backlash At Expensive Drugs By Making Their Own (R.)
• A Place of Your Own (Jim Kunstler)

 

 

Wolf Richter has the entire top-11. I picked a few. Note: this is debt-to-GDP. For debt-to-disposable income, graphs are different. Note 2: Switzerland is always an odd one out because of the role of its banking system.

• World’s Biggest Debt Slaves: Americans Wimp Out in 11th Place (WS)

US household debt inched down to 76.4% of GDP in the third quarter 2018, according to the newest batch of global data from the Bank for International Settlements. This was the lowest level since 2002. It put Americans in the inexplicably wimpy, and for the finance sector, insufferable 11th place:

Canadian households have long been making headlines with their top-notch borrowing binge to support their top-notch housing bubble. By other debt measures, such as debt-to-disposable income, Canadian and Australian households have been battling over first place for years. In the debt-to-GDP measure, Canadian households are in a still respectable 6th place: This debt will pose some issues as the majestic housing bubbles in top metros are now deflating:

Households in the Netherlands were track to be undisputed king of the hill, with a debt-to-GDP ratio nearing 120%, in part because GDP plunged during the Financial Crisis, which caused the spike in the debt-to-GDP ratio and the collapse of some banks. During the subsequent euro debt crisis, GDP declined again. But since then, the economy has grown, and households have curtailed their borrowing, edging away from the brink, and in the process getting demoted to 4th place:

Australian households have been caught up in one of the biggest housing bubbles in the world, financed by debt. The household-debt-to-GDP ratio more than doubled between 1997 and 2016. Now that the housing bubble is deflating at an astounding pace, the debt ratio has begun to tick down, but remains in second place:

[..] the #1 debt slaves in the world: Swiss households. This is one of the reasons interest-rate repression remains the rule in Switzerland. The Swiss National Bank has imposed its negative interest rate policy on the country for years, and there have been stories of mortgages with 0% and even negative interest rates. There is simply too much household debt, and no one wants to see it blow up. Hence the negative interest rate policy. But this policy encourages more household borrowing, and the cycle will continue until it can’t:

China is in a category of its own. And so the chart has a different scale. The household-debt-to-GDP ratio is still in the German neighborhood of just above 50%, but it has quintupled in the 12 years since the BIS data began in 2006. The idea that Chinese households are paying cash to sustain their housing bubble or to buy cars has become a bad joke: Chinese consumers have discovered debt, and they are eagerly turning into debt slaves:

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Daniel Ellsberg: “Chelsea Manning is again acting heroically in the name of press freedom, and it’s a travesty that she has been sent back to jail for refusing to testify to a grand jury. An investigation into WikiLeaks for publishing is a grave threat to all journalists’ rights, and Chelsea is doing us all a service for fighting it. She has already been tortured, spent years in jail, and has suffered more than enough. She should be released immediately.”

• Chelsea Manning Jailed For Refusing To Testify About Wikileaks (ZH)

Following a dramatic hearing at a federal district court in Eastern Virginia, activist and former military prisoner Chelsea Manning was jailed by a judge for contempt of court after refusing to testify to a grand jury empaneled in the government’s long running criminal investigation into Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange. The judge, the Hon. Claude H. Hilton, ruled that Manning must remain in civil detention until she testifies, her lawyer Moira Meltzer-Cohen told the New York Times. Manning was subpoeaned in January to testify before the jury. But she vowed not to cooperate even though prosecutors offered immunity for her testimony. “In solidarity with many activists facing the odds, I will stand by my principles,” she said on Thursday. “I will exhaust every legal remedy available. My legal team continues to challenge the secrecy of these proceedings, and I am prepared to face the consequences of my refusal.”

Manning’s jailing offers another glimpse into the government’s secretive investigation into Wikileaks, which was started under the Obama Administration and picked up by the Trump Administration. Manning served seven years in prison for leaking the infamous “collateral murder” tape to Wikileaks, by far the longest prison term ever served for leaking government secrets. Manning, who transitioned to a woman during her time in prison, twice tried to commit suicide before she was pardoned by Obama. Late last year, an accidental leak of some information in the case revealed that Assange had been charged under seal last summer. And while Manning has decided to refuse to cooperate, a Wikileaks volunteer recently agreed to testify against Assange in exchange for immunity. The grand jury has been investigating Assange for nine years.

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This is the worst condemnation of US media to date. And I betcha, no-one sees it that way. Whatever Mueller says, minds are made up. By what then? Can only be unproven accusations.

And it has similarities with the Chelsea Manning disaster: When will the first Republican refuse to testify before Nadler’s committee? In both cases people are looking to confirm pre-established narratives, if need be by force.

• On Trump’s Ties To Russia, Americans Have Made Up Their Minds – Poll (R.)

Only a small number of Americans have not yet made up their minds about whether Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign coordinated with Russian officials, according to new Reuters/Ipsos polling, which also showed deep divisions in the United States in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. Eight out of 10 Americans decided almost immediately about Trump campaign ties to Moscow and only about two in 10 appear to be undecided, the opinion poll released on Friday showed. About half of Americans believe President Trump tried to stop federal investigations into his campaign, the survey found. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is expected to soon wrap up his investigation into U.S. allegations that Moscow interfered in the U.S. political process as well as the Trump campaign links and possible obstruction of justice.

Moscow and Trump deny the allegations. Barring bombshell revelations, the survey results suggest the investigation’s influence on voters in the 2020 campaign may already have run its course. The Reuters/Ipsos poll has tracked public opinion of the investigation since Mueller was appointed in May 2017 following Trump’s firing of FBI chief James Comey, gathering responses from more than 72,000 adults. Public opinion appears to have hardened early, changing little over the past two years despite a string of highly publicized criminal charges against people associated with the Trump campaign. Every time respondents were asked about the investigation, about 8 in 10 Democrats said they thought the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, while 7 in 10 Republicans said they did not.

With so few voters left undecided, the report expected from Mueller looks unlikely to serve as a significant voter turnout tool for Republicans or Democrats in November 2020 and could backfire on Democrats if they overplay it. “We keep waiting for something to happen during the Trump era to vastly change the way people view him,” said Kyle Kondik, a non-partisan analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It hasn’t happened yet,” he said. “Maybe at this point there just aren’t many minds left to change.”

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The media can’t let go of Russiagate, no matter what Mueller says, it would leave them empty handed. So they play into the fact that Americans have their minds made up anyway. Scary when you think about it.

• Trump’s Private Talks With Putin May Contain Clues To His Russia Romance (G.)

Since Donald Trump was sworn in as president he has met his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, five times. The details of their conversations remain unknown to the public, and in most cases even to senior administration officials. Democrats in Congress are now demanding more details of communications between the two leaders. Secrecy around such meetings, they say, raises fresh questions about the nature of Trump’s relationship with Putin at a time when his ties to Russia are the subject of several investigations. The meetings with Putin are not the only subject of such Democratic demands. House leaders left little room for doubt this week that they will utilize their newly minted majority to cast a wide net around the president, his family and their businesses.

The judiciary committee issued document requests to 81 individuals and entities, seeking information on everything from contacts between Trump aides and Moscow to hush money payments to women and possible obstruction of justice. [..] Democrats now say Trump’s reportedly forceful attempts to conceal his communications with Putin raise questions about his motivations in pursuing closer relations with a regime largely regarded as a primary adversary. In a joint letter this week, the chairs of the House intelligence, foreign affairs and oversight committees raised “profound national security, counterintelligence and foreign policy concerns, especially in light of Russia’s ongoing active measures campaign to improperly influence American elections.

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Discussions America should have but refuses. The Dem old guard wants things to stay as they were/are. But the party must change in radical ways.

• Ilhan Omar Criticizes Obama And Past Presidents’ ‘Really Bad Policies’ (MW)

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) says former President Barack Obama’s promise of “hope and change” was just a mirage in a Politico interview that hit on Friday. The magazine profile explains that when she ran for office in 2016, she was fed up with the Democratic Party — not so much Trumpism or politics in general. Omar also reminded the interviewer that there was “caging of kids” at the U.S.-Mexico border under the Obama administration. (Obama was called the “deporter-in-chief” by immigrant rights advocates for the record number of undocumented immigrants deported during his presidency; ICE deportations peaked at 409,849 in 2012. But it dropped to almost half of that by 2017.) mAnd she called out the “droning of countries around the world” under Obama. A 2015 report claimed that nearly 90% of people killed in recent drone strikes in the Middle East “were not the intended targets.”

The interview dropped the day after the House passed a resolution condemning bigotry that included anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim discrimination, which was a response to comments made by Omar, who accused people of having allegiances to foreign countries. (It did not mention Omar by name, however.) Her comments to Politico suggest she doesn’t mind being at the center of controversy. “As much as other people are uncomfortable, I’m excited about the change in tone that has taken place that is extremely positive … and my ability, I think, to agitate our foreign policy discussions in a way that many of my colleagues who have been anti-intervention, antiwar have been unable to do in the past,” she said. “So, I’m OK with taking the blows if it means it will ignite conversations that no one was willing to have before.”

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Is the Guardian finally standing up for May? Bit late, isn’t it?

• EU’s Barnier Sets May On Course For Brexit Defeat (G.)

Theresa May appears set for a second humiliating defeat when she brings her Brexit deal back to parliament next week, after the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, rebuffed her pleas for last-minute concessions. The prime minister urged MPs to “get it done” and back her deal, in an impassioned speech at a dockside warehouse in the leave-voting town of Grimsby. A vote against the deal would mean “not completing Brexit and getting on with all the other important issues people care about, just yet more months and years arguing”, May told MPs. “If we go down that road we might never leave the EU at all.”

Addressing workers from Ørsted, a Danish energy and wind turbine firm, May also urged the EU to make new concessions over the Irish backstop – the issue that caused many of her MPs to vote against the deal the first time – before last-ditch talks in Brussels this weekend. The EU “has to make a choice too”, the prime minister said. “We are both participants in this process. It is in the European interest for the UK to leave with a deal. We are working with them but the decisions that the European Union makes over the next few days will have a big impact on the outcome of the vote. “European leaders tell me they worry that time is running out and that we only have one chance to get it right. My message to them is: now is the moment for us to act.”

But Barnier immediately appeared to rebuff the prime minister, by responding with an offer of reverting to his original plan, the Northern Ireland-only backstop, which May repeatedly said no prime minister could accept, because it risked creating a border in the Irish Sea. The EU’s chief negotiator said in a series of tweets that the EU was committed “to give the UK the option to exit the single customs territory unilaterally, while the other elements of the backstop must be maintained to avoid a hard border. [The] UK will not be forced into a customs union against its will.” The Brexit secretary, Stephen Barclay, immediately replied: “With a very real deadline looming, now is not the time to rerun old arguments. The UK has put forward clear new proposals. We now need to agree a balanced solution that can work for both sides.”

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If a tree falls in a forest….

• Corbyn Tells May Second Defeat For Her Deal Is ‘The End Of The Road’ (Ind.)

Jeremy Corbyn has warned Theresa May not to make a third attempt to ram through her Brexit deal if it crashes to its expected defeat next week, saying it must be “the end of the road”. The prime minister has not ruled out a third “meaningful vote” if MPs reject her agreement next week – even with the scheduled exit day from the EU just three weeks away. But, speaking to Labour activists in Scotland, Mr Corbyn said Ms May must accept that defeat on Tuesday would “represent an unprecedented failure in British political history”. “Having already failed once to get her deal through, I want to make it clear to the prime minister if she fails again it will be the end of the road for her deal,” the Labour leader said.

“There is no coming back from it. There can be no more playing for time.” Mr Corbyn again insisted Labour’s softer Brexit proposals could secure agreement both at Westminster and in Brussels, following his “discussions with Michel Barnier” [the EU negotiator]. However, he also insisted Labour was not “obsessed” by Brexit like other parties – pointing to poverty and climate change as the issues that really matter. “Turn on the news at the moment and you’ll hear endlessly about constitutional issues. Brexit. Independence. It borders on the obsessive,” he told a conference in Dundee. “You don’t hear so much about the children arriving hungry to school or how the teachers at one nursery have had to arrange for Tesco and Greggs to donate their leftovers so they can feed the kids.”

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I think Moore has at least a partial burden of proof here. Just shouting out stuff isn’t good enough at this stage. Suggesting that research is good only if it’s paid by General Electric or Dupont or 3M is quite the stretch. Even if politics and business are indeed eyeing huge profits off of going green and off people’s ignorance about what that means.

• Greenpeace Co-Founder Thrashes Global Warming ‘Brainwashing’ Campaign (RT)

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore had harsh words for the modern environmental movement, calling global warming “the greatest scam in history” and denouncing the use of “fear and guilt” to push the message. “The climate catastrophe is strictly a fear campaign – well, fear and guilt,” Moore told Breitbart radio host Rebecca Mansour. “You’re afraid you’re killing your children because you’re driving them in your SUV and emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and you feel guilty for doing that. There’s no stronger motivation than those two.” “This abomination that is occurring today in the climate issue is the biggest threat to the enlightenment that has occurred since Galileo.”

“Nothing else comes close,” Moore insisted, likening the contemporary environmental movement to “a toxic mix of ideology, of politics and religion.” “CO2 is the food for life! It’s not pollution,” the would-be heretic declared, claiming that the use of fossil fuels had actually “saved life from an early demise” because CO2 had been declining since the last ice age, with barely enough for the earth’s plant life to sustain itself, until humanity stepped into the breach during the Industrial Revolution. Moore, who founded the pioneering environmental activist group almost 50 years ago to protest nuclear war, met with an outpouring of support from conservatives and weary Democrats alike, after tweeting a scathing rebuke earlier this week to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose quixotic Green New Deal has become the standard-bearer of the 21st century environmental movement.

“And so you’ve got the green movement creating stories that instill fear in the public. You’ve got the media echo chamber — fake news — repeating it over and over and over again to everybody that they’re killing their children, and then you’ve got the green politicians who are buying scientists with government money to produce fear for them in the form of scientific-looking materials, and then you’ve got the green businesses, the rent-seekers and the crony capitalists who are taking advantage of massive subsidies, huge tax write-offs, and government mandates requiring their technologies to make a fortune on this, and then of course you’ve got the scientists who are willingly, they’re basically hooked on government grants.

When they talk about the 99 percent consensus [among scientists] on climate change, that’s a completely ridiculous and false numbers, but most of the scientists — put it in quotes, scientists — who are pushing this catastrophic theory are getting paid by public money. They are not being paid by General Electric or Dupont or 3M to do this research, where private companies expect to get something useful from their research that might produce a better product and make them a profit in the end because people want it — build a better mousetrap type of idea — but most of what these so-called scientists are doing is simply producing more fear so that politicians can use it control people’s mind and get their votes because some of the people are convinced, ‘Oh, this politician can save my kid from certain doom.’

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The collapse may happen soon, but likely not because of an old topic like this.

• Italy’s Government On Verge Of Collapse Over A Train (ZH)

With the Italian government seemingly on the verge of collapse every few months, and with tensions between the two parties in the ruling coalition – Five Star and the League, especially as the former has been sliding in the polls at the expense of the latter’s rising popularity – escalating in recent weeks, it was only a matter of time before Italian bondholders had a PTSD flashback to May 2018 when the populist government first stormed on the stage, sending Italian bonds plunging. All that was missing was a catalyst. Said catalyst emerged as a lingering dispute within Italy’s ruling coalition over the future of a train, or technically a high-speed rail link with France, escalated suddenly on Thursday, once again raising the risk of a government collapse, with the 5-Star chief accusing his partner of acting irresponsibly.

The Alpine rail line has been backed by the ruling League party but is fiercely opposed by its coalition partner, the 5-Star Movement, which argues Italy’s share of the funding would be better spent upgrading existing roads and bridges. And after League leader, the outspoken Matteo Salvini who continues to enjoy rising popularity with every new poll, said in an evening television interview he would not back down and his party would “never sign” a decree to block the project, 5-Star chief Luigi Di Maio accused him of threatening to bring down the government.

While the tensions between Di Maio and Salvini were for the most part contained before closed doors, the animosity between the two “equal” vice premiers erupted in public when Di Maio said in a statement that Salvini “will bear the responsibility before millions of Italians” adding that he considers “this to be irresponsible behavior” adding that he was “stunned by the threat of a government crisis” coming from Salvini. The TAV project (Treno Alta Velocita) is a joint venture between the Italian and French states to link the cities of Turin and Lyon with a 58-km (36-mile) tunnel through the Alps on which work has already begun. According to Reuters, the EU has pledged to fund up to 40 percent of costs, Italy up to 35 percent and France up to 25 percent.

Earlier on Thursday, Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said that recently updated traffic projections for the line warranted a review of the project’s long-term viability and, if necessary, a renegotiation of the way the funding is split. Conte told reporters he had strong personal doubts about the validity of the venture and he would take responsibility for a final decision based on a cost-benefit analysis already carried out by the government. That analysis, commissioned by Transport Minister Danilo Toninelli, a 5-Star politician, found the TAV was a waste of public money, estimating the economic return would be a negative balance of $7.9-$8.8 billion. Conte, who is technically not a member of either party but is closer to 5-Star, called the funding of the TAV “iniquitous” and said he would speak to France and the EU “to share our doubts and perplexities.”

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Like the part where Big Pharma gets the big subsidies.

• Dutch Pharmacies Join Backlash At Expensive Drugs By Making Their Own (R.)

In a radiation-proof room at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Emar Thomasa sits behind shielded glass as he carefully measures and mixes lutetium octreotate, an intravenous treatment for certain types of cancer. The Dutch hospital has been offering it to patients for more than a decade at 16,000 euros ($18,000) for one course of treatments. Drug firm Novartis, which in 2018 acquired rights to sell it in Europe, is asking more than five times that for its proprietary version, Lutathera. Thomasa is part of a protest against high drug prices launched by an unlikely group of rebels: Dutch pharmacies.

Three – Erasmus, Amsterdam’s University Medical Center (UMC) and the Transvaal Pharmacy in The Hague – have vowed to bypass drug company products and make treatments for a handful of rare diseases themselves, exercising their right to “compound” medicines. The Dutch market is small, with only hundreds of patients for the diseases in question. But the dispute is part of a growing global backlash against high drug prices, from the United States and Canada to Japan, and campaigners said it was being closely watched by health experts elsewhere. “People with rare diseases are dependent on medicines that are so expensive that they can’t afford them, when they could be offered for a much lower price,” said UMC pharmacist Marleen Kemper.

“The pharmaceutical industry plays an important role in developing good products, but we think it’s not fair if these firms make big money off these patients.” Compounding is the ancient practice of preparing medicines for individual patients. Pharmacists are trained to compound, though nowadays most medicines are made by industrial producers. Drug companies have raised concerns about the safety of compounded medicines that have not been approved by European regulators. But the specialized compounding pharmacies, which have on-site laboratories, have been backed by the Dutch government as part of efforts to tame rapidly rising medicine costs.

[..] The first two drugs targeted by Dutch pharmacies are Novartis’s Lutathera and a drug called CDCA, registered in Europe by Leadiant. High prices are not unusual for new rare disease drugs, as companies must recoup development costs from a relatively small group of patients. Novartis charges 92,000 euros for a one-off course of four Lutathera injections. But while the drug is innovative, its development costs were relatively small and cannot justify the price tag, said Erasmus MC Chief Executive Ernst Kuipers. Main development costs amounted to about 40 million euros, including 15 million euros in public funding, according to Erasmus – where most of the testing took place – and a review published in the Dutch Journal of Medicine.

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Jim at his best.

• A Place of Your Own (Jim Kunstler)

I don’t think you can overstate the damage we’ve done to ourselves in the sheer material arrangement of our national life. A decade ago, I sat in on many zoning board meetings called to approve new WalMarts and other chain-stores around my region of upstate New York and southern Vermont. Inevitably, the companies organized a claque of locals in the meeting hall — itself a depressing, low-ceilinged chamber of cinder blocks and fluorescent lighting — to fill the seats and yell in support of “bargain shopping.” That was some bargain they got. The chain-stores got approved and the Main Streets died, but that wasn’t the end of it. This dynamic also destroyed networks that gave local citizens an economic and social place.

Locally owned business people were the caretakers of the town. They took care of two buildings — their place of business and their home. They sat on library, school, and hospital boards and donated money to running local institutions. They employed people who lived in town and there were consequences for treating them well or badly. There was even a time in this country when local business people wouldn’t dare to put up an insultingly ugly building. A lot of this economic behavior has produced the social perversities of our time. Exterminating an entire class of local merchants has eliminated the heart of the American middle-class and grotesquely concentrated the nation’s wealth among corporate leviathans who comprise one percent of the population.

It also eliminated the place where young people learned how to do business, preparing themselves to try ventures of their own, and to make a place for themselves in the world. What is your place now? A cubicle in the marketing department of Old Navy? An aisle in the Home Depot? A desk in the Diversity and Inclusion office of some State University, pushing to sort the student population into racial and sexual categories because all other ways of belonging in society are gone? Or do you occupy ten square feet of sidewalk with a tarp and a shopping cart? None of those places are liable to furnish a personal sense that life is worth living.

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Debt Rattle February 14 2019

Feb 142019
 
 February 14, 2019  Posted by at 10:42 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  14 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Guitar 1925

 

• Australia’s $7 Trillion Question: How Low Will House Prices Go (SMH)
• US Mortgage Applications Drop Despite Lower Rates: Industry is Baffled (WS)
• Surge In Delinquencies Threatens US Auto Loan Bubble (Colombo)
• $1 Trillion Amazon Pays $0 In Income Taxes, Gets $129 Million Rebate (RT)
• EU Officials: UK Only ‘Pretending To Negotiate’ Over Brexit (G.)
• UK Has Rolled Over Just £16bn Out Of £117bn Trade Deals (G.)
• Labour MPs Warn Corbyn: Back A Second Referendum Or We Quit (G.)
• Hardline Brexiters Threaten To Vote Down Theresa May’s Motion (G.)
• Maduro Claims Foes ‘Totally Failed’ To Topple Him As Efforts Falter (G.)
• Venezuela Envoy Elliott Abrams Loses His Cool In Congress (ZH)
• Germany Pulls Rank on Macron and Washington over Nordstream 2 (SCF)
• Bikes Put Spanner In Works Of Dutch Driverless Car Schemes (G.)
• Exposure To Glyphosate Increases Risk Of Cancer By 41% – Study (G.)

 

 

As I said yesterday, after 27 years without a recession, the no. 1 instrument to battle complacency, excesses and zombies, Australia is a fire hazard. At the same time, of course, after 27 years so many people have never seen a recession that nobody expects one anymore.

• Australia’s $7 Trillion Question: How Low Will House Prices Go (SMH)

Industry experts say property prices in Sydney and Melbourne, which have led a slump in Australia’s $7 trillion residential property market, are likely headed lower before they hit rock bottom. The Australian Bureau of Statistics released figures this week showing new lending to owner occupiers fell 6.4% during December last year, outpacing the fall in lending to property investors, which dropped by 4.6%. The total value of new lending to households has now dropped 19.8% in the past year — the biggest annual fall in home loans since the height of the global financial crisis. “The lending numbers are atrocious; it tells us that property markets in Sydney and Melbourne are in a tailspin,” says Louis Christopher, managing director of property researcher SQM Research.

The issue is mostly access to credit and, for at least for past six months, banks have been scrutinising the spending of borrowers more closely when assessing their loans, Christopher says. Doron Peleg, chief executive of RiskWise Property Research, says the weak lending figures also show how those who would normally be entering the property market are now shying away in anticipation of lower prices. The Westpac-Melbourne Institute Index out this week showed consumers in Sydney and Melbourne have poor property price expectations. “Buyer sentiment has been hit as residential property, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, is seen as a depreciating asset,” Peleg says.

[..] Many property experts are expecting a peak-to-trough drop in property prices of between 15% and 20%. “Without an interest-rate cut or regulatory changes there will be tough times ahead for the property market,” RiskWise’s Peleg says. [..] Tim Lawless, the head of research at property researcher CoreLogic, is expecting a peak-to-trough fall of up to 20% for both Sydney and Melbourne before prices start to level out in 2020. However, Lawless says the price declines should be kept in perspective. Sydney house and apartment prices have risen by more than 70% in the past decade, while Melbourne prices have gained even more, he says. This is despite recent price falls of more than 12% from their peak in Sydney in mid-2017 and 8% in Melbourne from a top in late 2017, he says.

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The Omen.

• US Mortgage Applications Drop Despite Lower Rates: Industry is Baffled (WS)

A month ago, mortgages reappeared in the housing-hype circus, when it was widely reported that mortgage applications “soared” and “jumped.” Both types of mortgage applications did so: those used to purchase a home (purchase mortgages) and those used to refinance an existing mortgage (refinance mortgages). The jump in mortgage applications was ascribed to “plunging” mortgage interest rates. It was seen as a big sign that the weakening housing market was about to turn around. But that hope has gotten unwound.

Today, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) reported that its purchase mortgage index – which tracks applications (not approvals) for conventional and government mortgages to purchase a single-family house – fell 6% from the prior week and was down 5% from the same week last year – despite falling mortgage rates, which should have cranked up home buying and mortgage activity. It was the fourth week in a row of drops:

The Purchase Mortgage Index is considered a reliable indicator of impending home sales, and so this decline, given the lower mortgage rates, mystifies the industry.“Application activity fell last week – even with rates decreasing – as renewed uncertainty about the domestic and global economy likely held potential homebuyers off the market,” said MBA Associate VP of Industry Surveys and Forecasts, Joel Kan, in the report. “The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage dropped to its lowest level since last March, and was 52 basis points lower than its recent high last November,” he said.

You can practically hear between the lines, so to speak, the bafflement in his voice about this decline in purchase mortgage applications in light of the decline in mortgage rates. The MBA also reported today that the average interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances inched down to 4.65%, back where it had been last April (chart via Investing.com):

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AKA the Thelma and Louise economy.

• Surge In Delinquencies Threatens US Auto Loan Bubble (Colombo)

My concerns about the U.S. automobile bubble are being confirmed. As Bloomberg reports: “More Americans than ever are at least three months behind on their auto loans, a sign that the U.S. economy may have little growth left in the tank. The number of loans at least 90 days late exceeded 7 million at the end of last year, the highest total in the two decades the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has kept track. Expressed as a percentage of total debt, the delinquency rate is the highest since 2012, as overall borrowing has also increased.

The data show not all Americans are benefiting from the strong labor market, New York Fed economists say. Consumers with the weakest credit have driven deteriorating performance of auto debt: The share of subprime borrowers who fell well behind on car payments the last three months of the year was the highest since the second quarter of 2010.

As I’ve been warning for the past couple years, the U.S. automobile sales boom is a byproduct of a bubble in auto loans:

The auto sales and auto loan bubble is a byproduct of ultra-cheap credit conditions in the past decade since the Great Recession. Interest rates are now rising, which threatens the auto bubble: It’s only a matter of time before the U.S. auto sales and loan bubble experiences a serious bust. Rising delinquencies are just the start, I’m afraid. Booms fueled by cheap credit always end the same way – in a terrible bust. Ignore the voices that say “this time will be different!”

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And the people who lost their retail jobs don’t pay income taxes either anymore.

• $1 Trillion Amazon Pays $0 In Income Taxes, Gets $129 Million Rebate (RT)

Trillion-dollar-company Amazon skated through 2018’s tax filings without paying a cent for the second year in a row. The e-commerce behemoth, which made $11 billion last year, will pay no taxes at all, thanks to 2017’s tax reform. Rather than pay the standard 21% corporate income tax rate, Amazon is actually claiming a tax rebate of $129 million, which works out to a logic-defying rate of -1%. Aside from the nebulous “tax credits,” which the company does not have to spell out in its public filings, Amazon is also claiming a tax break for executive stock options, according to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy – a longstanding loophole that permits profitable corporations to dodge federal and state income taxes on almost half their profits.

While President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax reform legislation lowered corporate tax rates from 35% to 21%, it was sold as an incentive for companies to keep their money in the US, instead of stashing it overseas where the IRS couldn’t touch it. Now that Amazon and Netflix have both made headlines for using the new regulations to avoid paying anything at all, it remains to be seen whether the legislation’s failure to close corporate loopholes will leave the US holding the bag for fiscal year 2018 as the country’s national debt inches past $22 trillion – a record high.

Amazon’s tax windfall doesn’t even take into account the billions in tax breaks the state governments of Virginia and New York offered the company to open a second (and third) headquarters in their states, though there are rumors that New York is getting cold feet about the unprecedented corporate giveaway. Amazon didn’t pay any taxes in 2017 either, though it raked in a comparatively paltry $5.6 billion in profits and extracted a slightly larger $137 million refund.

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“Verhofstadt asked Lidington four times what the British proposal was and “four times didn’t get an answer”, according to the EU official, who described the encounter as “very surreal”.”

• EU Officials: UK Only ‘Pretending To Negotiate’ Over Brexit (G.)

The British government is “pretending to negotiate” with the European Union and has not presented any new proposals to break the Brexit deadlock, according to EU officials. Theresa May’s de-facto deputy, David Lidington, and the Brexit secretary, Stephen Barclay, met senior EU officials and MEPs in Brussels and Strasbourg this week, but the talks yielded no obvious results. The British side thinks a crucial process has begun and hopes progress will have been made by 27 February when MPs are expected to have another crunch Brexit vote. However, on Wednesday night European council president Donald Tusk said the EU27 was still waiting for proposals. “No news is not always good news,” he tweeted, after meeting with the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier.

“EU27 still waiting for concrete, realistic proposals from London on how to break Brexit impasse,” Tusk said. Barnier, has said current talks with the UK do not even qualify as negotiations. In a call on Tuesday morning with Guy Verhofstadt, chief Brexit representative for the European parliament, Barnier said there were “no negotiations” with the British. “These are courtesy calls at best and we have nothing new to say,” Barnier was reported to have said, by a source familiar with the conversation. Verhofstadt had asked the EU negotiator for an update, following Barnier’s meeting with Barclay over dinner at the British ambassador’s residence in Brussels, where they dined on North Sea sole, roast duck and British cheese, washed down with sancerre and saint-émilion wines.

“They are pretending to negotiate while they still don’t know what they want and how they want it,” the source said, who described this week’s meetings as “kicking up dust” and a series of “photo opportunities and pictures”. “We are willing to negotiate, but there is nothing on the table from the British side.” Verhofstadt asked Lidington four times what the British proposal was and “four times didn’t get an answer”, according to the EU official, who described the encounter as “very surreal”.

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Don’t be so negative: they got a hard-fought deal with the Seychelles!

• UK Has Rolled Over Just £16bn Out Of £117bn Trade Deals (G.)

The government’s push to roll over EU trade deals from which the UK currently benefits has yielded agreements covering only £16bn of the near-£117bn of British trade with the countries involved. Despite frenetic efforts by ministers to ensure the continuity of international trade after the UK leaves the EU on 29 March, the international trade secretary, Liam Fox, has so far only managed to secure deals with seven of the 69 countries that the UK currently trades with under preferential EU free trade agreements, which will end after Brexit.

Fox’s department has yet to sign agreements with several major UK trading partners – including Canada, Japan, South Korea and Turkey – while sources have said that sufficient progress is unlikely to be made before the Brexit deadline in less than 50 days’ time. Canada, Japan, South Korea and Turkey alone accounted for goods exports worth £25bn in 2017 and imports of merchandise worth £28.6bn, with the UK currently able to access these markets on preferential terms as part of membership of the EU. Fox sought to downplay the significance of the deals in parliament on Wednesday, saying all of the countries involved only accounted for about 11% of total UK trade in 2018, with the smallest 20 nations worth less than 0.8%.

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I’ve been wondering why any politician in Britain is still in their jobs.

• Labour MPs Warn Corbyn: Back A Second Referendum Or We Quit (G.)

Jeremy Corbyn faces up to 10 resignations from the Labour frontbench if he fails to throw his party’s weight behind a fresh attempt to force Theresa May to submit her Brexit deal to a referendum in a fortnight’s time, frustrated MPs are warning. With tension mounting among anti-Brexit Labour MPs and grassroots members, several junior shadow ministers have told the Guardian they are prepared to resign their posts if Corbyn doesn’t whip his MPs to vote for a pro-referendum amendment at the end of the month. Corbyn has been struggling to balance the conflicting forces in his party over Brexit, as the clock ticks down towards exit day on 29 March..

Many party members and MPs would like him to take a lead in seeking to block Brexit before time runs out – but some frontbenchers are equally adamant they could never support a referendum. Len McCluskey, the general secretary of the Unite union and a close ally of Corbyn, risked stoking the conflict in the party on Wednesday when he argued that stopping Brexit was “not the best option for our nation”. “My view is that, having had a 2016 referendum where the people have voted to come out of the EU, to try and deflect away from that threatens the whole democratic fabric on which we operate,” he told Peston on ITV. “I’m saying that in reality it is not the best option for our nation.”

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43 days. Both extremities, hard brexit and 2nd referendum, think they have a chance of winning it all.

• Hardline Brexiters Threaten To Vote Down Theresa May’s Motion (G.)

Hardline Brexit supporters are threatening to inflict yet another Commons defeat on Theresa May because they fear the government is effectively ruling out leaving the EU with no deal. Members of the Tory European Research Group are unhappy with the wording of a No 10 motion because it endorses parliament’s vote against any Brexit without a withdrawal agreement. The motion for debate on Thursday simply affirms “the approach to leaving the EU” backed by the Commons on 29 January, when an amendment was passed in favour of an attempt to replace the Northern Ireland backstop with “alternative arrangements”.

The motion was thought to be fairly uncontroversial until pro-Brexit supporters realised it also encompassed a second amendment passed on that day, which ruled out a no-deal Brexit. The amendment, tabled by Dame Caroline Spelman, “rejects the United Kingdom leaving the European Union without a withdrawal agreement and a framework for the future relationship”. The ERG group, led by arch-Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg, is planning either to vote against or abstain on Thursday’s government motion, potentially causing another embarrassing parliamentary loss for the prime minister. However, talks with government whips will continue on Thursday in an attempt to find a compromise.

An ERG MP said many of its members were “not minded to support such a clumsily worded motion” that effectively ruled out a no-deal Brexit. Another said the group would not trust verbal assurances from No 10 that no deal was still on the table as such promises from the dispatch box had not been honoured many times in the past.

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How far away is a false flag?

• Maduro Claims Foes ‘Totally Failed’ To Topple Him As Efforts Falter (G.)

Venezuela’s embattled leader, Nicolás Maduro, has claimed he has seen off a dramatic opposition challenge to his rule, as those efforts appeared to falter and the United States conceded it was “impossible to predict” how long he might remain in power. In an interview with Euronews, Maduro boasted that his political foes had “failed totally” in their quest to topple him. Opponents “could march every single day of their lives” and achieve nothing, Maduro said. Venezuela’s newly emboldened opposition continues to insist Maduro’s days are numbered, with about 50 governments now recognizing its leader, Juan Guaidó, as the country’s legitimate president.

Tens of thousands of supporters poured back on to the streets of Caracas and other major cities on Tuesday to demand the resignation of a politician they accuse of leading their oil-rich country into economic ruin. But three weeks after Guaidó electrified the previously rudderless opposition movement by declaring himself interim leader, there are signs his campaign risks losing steam. An anticipated mass defection of military chiefs – which opposition leaders admit is a prerequisite to Maduro’s departure – has not materialized, and Maduro’s inner-circle has begun claiming it has weathered the political storm. “In the end, nothing will come of [this challenge]. We will prevail,” Maduro’s second-in-command, Diosdado Cabello, tweeted on Wednesday.

[..] Opposition leaders have spent recent days trying to dampen expectations that Maduro’s exit is imminent. Juan Andrés Mejía, an opposition leader and Guaidó ally, admitted that goal “could take some time”. “We want it to end very soon because we know that every day that passes by people are suffering. But Maduro still has control of the military and basically that is the reason we haven’t been able to move things forward,” he told the Guardian.

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Shaking up US politics since 2016. And c’mon, Abrams is a war criminal, he should be facing a court, not Congress.

• Venezuela Envoy Elliott Abrams Loses His Cool In Congress (ZH)

Rep. Ilhan Omar clashed with newly minted Venezuela Envoy Elliott Abrams during a Wednesday hearing in front of the House Foreign Relations Committee discussing the role of the US military in Central America. “Mr. Abrams, in 1991 you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding your involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later pardoned by president George H.W. Bush,” began Omar. “I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful.” “If I could respond to that…” interjected Abrams. “It was not a question,” shot back Omar.

After a brief exchange in which Abrams protested “It was not right!” Omar cut Abrams off, saying “Thank you for your participation.” Omar: “On February 8, 1982, you testified before the Senate foreign relations committee about US policy in El Salvador. In that hearing you dismissed as communist propaganda, a report about the massacre of El Mozote in which more than 800 civilians – including children as young as two-years old – were brutally murdered by US-trained troops. During that massacre, some of those troops bragged about raping 12-year-old girls before they killed them. You later said that the US policy in El Salvador was a “fabulous achievement.” “Yes or no – do you still think so?” asked Omar.

Abrams replied: “From, the day that Duarte was elected in a free election, to this day, El Salvador has been a democracy. That’s a fabulous achievement.” Omar shot back: “Yes or no, do you think that massacre was a fabulous achievement that happened under our watch?” Abrams protested: “That is a ridiculous question- to which Omar shot back, “Yes or no,” cutting him off. “Yes or no, would you support an armed faction within Venezuela that engages in war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide, if you believe they were serving US interests as you did in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua?” “I am not going to respond to that question, I’m sorry. I don’t think this entire line of questioning is meant to be real questions, and so I will not reply.” said Abrams.

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US accuses Russia of energy blackmail, tries to blackmail Germany. Germans will never accept not being independent when it comes to energy. Moreover, their economy is teetering.

• Germany Pulls Rank on Macron and Washington over Nordstream 2 (SCF)

It was billed politely as a Franco-German “compromise” when the EU balked at adopting a Gas Directive which would have undermined the Nord Stream 2 project with Russia. Nevertheless, diplomatic rhetoric aside, Berlin’s blocking last week of a bid by French President Emmanuel Macron to impose tougher regulations on the Nord Stream 2 gas project was without doubt a firm rebuff to Paris. Macron wanted to give the EU administration in Brussels greater control over the new pipeline running from Russia to Germany. But in the end the so-called “compromise” was a rejection of Macron’s proposal, reaffirming Germany in the lead role of implementing the Nord Stream 2 route, along with Russia. The $11-billion, 1,200 kilometer pipeline is due to become operational at the end of this year.

Stretching from Russian mainland under the Baltic Sea, it will double the natural gas supply from Russia to Germany. The Berlin government and German industry view the project as a vital boost to the country’s ever-robust economy. Gas supplies will also be distributed from Germany to other European states. Consumers stand to gain from lower prices for heating homes and businesses. Thus Macron’s belated bizarre meddling was rebuffed by Berlin. A rebuff was given too to the stepped-up pressure from Washington for the Nord Stream 2 project to be cancelled. Last week, US ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell and two other American envoys wrote an op-ed for Deutsche Welle in which they accused Russia of trying to use “energy blackmail” over Europe’s geopolitics.

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Why on earth is that government pushing driverless cars?

• Bikes Put Spanner In Works Of Dutch Driverless Car Schemes (G.)

The Dutch government is working with Germany and Belgium on establishing “truck platooning” – where one human-driven vehicle leads a convoy of autonomous ones — on major roads. Under the plans, about 100 driverless trucks would drive the “Tulip corridors” at night – from Amsterdam to Antwerp, and from Rotterdam to the Ruhr valley – fully maximising the routes through which the Netherlands distributes its goods using 5G technology and 1,200 smart traffic lights. The Dutch infrastructure minister, Cora van Nieuwenhuizen, has announced a “driving licence” for self-driving cars, through which it would certify new autonomous models, and a framework of legislation – known as the Experimenteerwet zelfrijdende auto’s – is being prepared.

But a report by the professional service company KPMG highlights a major problem for Dutch ministers in introducing the technology to urban centres, where the bicycle is increasingly king. Driverless cars detect other road users using a variety of cameras or laser-sensing systems to ensure that they stop if an object is detected in their path. But the varying sizes and agility of cyclists, with their sudden changes in speed and loose adherence to the rules of the road, present a major challenge to the existing technology. That challenge is particularly stark in the Netherlands, where 17 million people own 22.5m bicycles. More than a quarter of all trips made by Dutch residents are by bike. Of all trips of a distance of up to five miles, a third are made by bicycle, with the rate only dropping to 15% for trips up to 10 miles in length.

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Is it that hard to understand that pesticides and herbicides are the worst idea ever? Poison kills, cut it out.

• Exposure To Glyphosate Increases Risk Of Cancer By 41% – Study (G.)

A broad new scientific analysis of the cancer-causing potential of glyphosate herbicides, the most widely used weed killing products in the world, has found that people with high exposures to the popular pesticides have a 41% increased risk of developing a type of cancer called non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The evidence “supports a compelling link” between exposures to glyphosate-based herbicides and increased risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), the authors concluded, though they said the specific numerical risk estimates should be interpreted with caution. The findings by five US scientists contradict the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) assurances of safety over the weed killer and come as regulators in several countries consider limiting the use of glyphosate-based products in farming.

Monsanto and its German owner Bayer face more than 9,000 lawsuits in the US brought by people suffering from NHL who blame Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides for their diseases. The first plaintiff to go to trial won a unanimous jury verdict against Monsanto in August, a verdict the company is appealing. The next trial, involving a separate plaintiff, is set to begin on 25 February , and several more trials are set for this year and into 2020. Monsanto maintains there is no legitimate scientific research showing a definitive association between glyphosate and NHL or any type of cancer. Company officials say the EPA’s finding that glyphosate is “not likely” to cause cancer is backed by hundreds of studies finding no such connection.

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