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Debt Rattle February 15 2026

Feb 152026
 
 February 15, 2026  Posted by at 10:46 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  33 Responses »


Ito Shinsui Snowy night 1923


• Newsom Tells EU “Trump Is Temporary,” Doubles Down On Failing Green Agenda (ZH)
• Rubio on Fire! (Sarah Anderson)
• Vast Majority Of Americans Want Voter ID And Democrats Don’t Care (ZH)
• The Least Laid Generation in History: Gen Z Is Ghosting Sex (Pinsker)
• OH BABY! Couples Could Make Big Money on Trump Accounts (DS)
• Americans Could Be Silenced by EU Online Speech Laws (ET)
• More Nations Are Mulling Social Media Bans For Teens (ZH)
• The Unsettling Truths the Epstein Files Reveal About Power and Privilege (ET)
• California Democrats Trigger a Reverse Gold Rush with a Wealth Tax (Turley)
• FBI Opened 1,200 ‘Assessments’ Of Sensitive Figures (JTN)
• US Smuggled Starlinks Into Iran Amid Riots – WSJ (RT)
• Trump Makes A HUGE Promise About Voter ID
• American Workers Have Less Than A $1000 in Retirement Savings (Turley)
• Stolen Land At The Grammys: How Hollywood Groupthink Threatens Democracy (ET)
• “Billion Dollar Movie In One Prompt” (ZH)

 


 

Make sure you take your time today for the Debt Rattle. I know it can seem overwhelming. Watch some videos. Use the time well. Everything goes faster than you think.

Then again, Elon Musk says we are In The Singularity. That means ALL predictions are off. Including Elon’s.

 


 

Miles Deutscher@milesdeutscher

Ok fine – maybe you don’t want to listen to me. I’m just a 25-year-old on the internet.

But maybe you’ll listen to them.

I documented every major warning from the people actually building AI.

Every CEO. Every founder. They’re all saying the same thing.

Read this slowly:

• Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI: “Being a lawyer, an accountant, a project manager, a marketing person – most of those tasks will be fully automated by AI within 12 to 18 months.”

• Elon Musk: “AI and robots will replace all jobs. Working will be optional.” Called AI his “biggest fear.”

• Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic: AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs. Unemployment could hit 20%. Called it “unusually painful.” Then said: “Most lawmakers are unaware this is about to happen.”

• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI: “Some areas, I think just like totally, totally gone.” Said changes that normally take 75 years will be compressed into a short period. Admitted he loses sleep over it.

• Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia: “Every job will be affected, and immediately. It is unquestionable.”

• Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase: “It will eliminate jobs. People should stop sticking their head in the sand.” Warned mass AI layoffs without safeguards could trigger “civil unrest.” Said he’d welcome a government ban on mass-firing for AI.

• Stuart Russell (author of the most-used AI textbook in history): Political leaders are “staring 80% unemployment in the face”.

• Kai-Fu Lee, VC & former head of Google China: Called predictions of 50% job displacement by 2027 “uncannily accurate.”

These aren’t journalists. These aren’t influencers. These aren’t politicians trying to get elected.

These are the people building it. Funding it. Deploying it.
And not one of them is saying your job is safe.

 


 

Elon Musk just gave retirement planning the most radical advice possible:

“Don’t worry about squirreling money away for retirement in 10 or 20 years — it won’t matter.

You won’t need to save for retirement.” His reasoning (from the same conversation):

We’re already in the singularity — “the event horizon” where prediction breaks down.

The accelerating timeline makes long-term saving irrelevant.

Services, homes, healthcare, entertainment — abundance will be so extreme that the old rules vanish.

Peter Diamandis: “The way this unfolds is fundamentally impossible to predict because of self-improvement of the AI and the accelerating timeline.”

Elon: “We’re in this beautiful sweet spot… like being at the top of the roller coaster about to drop. I don’t just have courtside seats — I’m on the court.”

If saving for retirement becomes pointless in the next 10–20 years because we’re already past the event horizon…

what’s the first thing you’d change about how you live right now?

 


 

Software that rewrites itself. https://twitter.com/Khulood_Almani/status/2022315978575483386?s=20 Huang GenZ 4 Hours? 18 hrs

 


 


Two -very- different futures for America, courtesy of Rubio and Newsom.

• Newsom Tells EU “Trump Is Temporary,” Doubles Down On Failing Green Agenda (ZH)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom spoke at the Munich Security Conference earlier on Friday, telling European elites that President Trump is “temporary” and will be gone within three years. Newsom, noticeably angered by Trump’s push for deregulation and the rollback of climate policy, lashed out at the president, calling him “more destructive” than the current occupant of the White House. The issue for Newsom is that he still operates within the climate crisis framework promoted by globalists, even as the West is moving on from two decades of nation-killing green policy regime that hollowed out parts of the industrial base and fueled inflation.


On Thursday, President Trump rescinded the 2009 Obama-era “Endangerment Finding,” a determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare, which he said has been used by the radical left to justify $1.3 trillion in regulatory costs that have hurt American households and sent consumer prices soaring, especially for automobiles. “The single largest deregulatory action in American history. That’s a big statement in American history, and I think we can add the words by far,” Trump told reporters. Also this week, there was considerable discussion among industry leaders in Europe about Brussels watering down carbon-pricing markets, which have made electricity outrageously expensive and crushed the industrial base (Goldman explained more here).

And it is not just Trump and European industry leaders pushing to unwind green policies that have financially crushed working-class families and hollowed out the industrial base; major companies are also dialing back EV production plans and softening green targets as the net-zero dream collides with reality. Here’s what Newsom said earlier at the MSC (courtesy of Real Clear Politics):

GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM: “Donald Trump is doubling down on stupid. California has been a leader in climate policy going back to Ronald Reagan. In 1967, Governor Ronald Reagan established the first tailpipe emissions standards in the United States of America and created the California Air Resources Board. Three years later, a president by the name of Richard Nixon — another Republican — codified California’s leadership under the Clean Air Act.

Never in the history of the United States of America has there been a more destructive president than the current occupant in the White House in Washington, D.C. He’s trying to recreate the 19th century. He’s a wholly owned subsidiary of big oil, gas, and coal. He’s quite literally reopening coal plants in the United States of America. He’s received close to half a billion dollars in campaign contributions. He asked for $1 billion — look it up — in return for basically eliminating all regulations in the United States of America. De facto, he just did that yesterday with federal regulations and the endangerment finding.

It is code red in terms of American leadership in this space — low-carbon, green growth — and I know a thing or two about this. I represent the fourth-largest economy, from a GDP perspective, in the world, and we ran the fourth-largest economy last year nine out of ten days on 100% clean energy — two-thirds renewable energy. We’ve seen our GDP grow by 81% since 2000, and we’ve reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 21%. Seven times more clean energy jobs than fossil fuel jobs.

We’re proving at scale that we can implement, we can compete, and we can dominate. But Donald Trump is trying to turn back the clock. And so we’re showing up, but we’re also showing what can be accomplished — the power of emulation. We are in the great implementation in my state. Final word. I hope, if there’s nothing else I can communicate today: Donald Trump is temporary. He’ll be gone in three years. California is a stable and reliable partner in this space, and it’s important for folks to understand the temporary nature of this current administration in relationship to the issue of climate change and climate policy.

MODERATOR]: Governor, many have called Joe Biden the climate president, but that didn’t help with his re-election. So how important do you think climate issues will be for the 2028 presidential election?

GAVIN NEWSOM: Well, you may not believe in science, but you’ve got to believe your own eyes. I mean, people are burning up, choking up, heating up. We have simultaneous droughts and floods. Historic wildfires. You may know little about California, but you’ve seen those images of these wildfires. Talk about being as dumb as we want to be — places, lifestyles, traditions being wiped off the map. Greenville. Paradise, California. And so this issue has been brought home in a very personal way, not a political way. Senator Whitehouse is here — he’s also someone who deeply understands that climate risk is financial risk. It’s becoming uninsurable.

This is an economic issue, not just a moral issue. It’s not just a competitiveness issue. And so it’s incredibly important that we talk in those terms to address some of the political dynamics. But it’s again something we’re on the other side of in California. It’s a big blue state, but it also has more Republicans than most Republican states. And we have long moved beyond the partisanship on this issue, because there is no Republican thermometer, there’s no Democratic thermometer — there’s just reality.And people in my state have been mugged by reality. Those that have been in denial understand that we’re on the other side of the debate.

Read more …

“And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.”

We Won’t Be ‘Polite and Orderly Caretakers of the West’s Managed Decline’

• Rubio on Fire! (Sarah Anderson)

“The world is changing very fast right in front of us. The old world is gone… We live in a new era in geopolitics, and it’s going to require all of us to reexamine what that looks like and what our role is going to be.” That’s what Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the press before he boarded a plane to Munich, Germany on Thursday evening. Little did we know that this quote was setting the stage for what turned out to be a momentous speech at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday morning, a speech that framed the end of one major geopolitical era and the beginning of another. We may well look back on this speech in Munich as another defining moment in the secretary’s career.


Rubio told European leaders that the post–Cold War era is over, that the “euphoria of this triumph led us to a dangerous delusion: that we had entered, quote, ‘the end of history;’ that every nation would now be a liberal democracy; that the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood; that the rules-based global order – an overused term – would now replace the national interest; and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world.” He said that this idea was foolish and “ignored both human nature and it ignored the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history.”

While championing the Donald Trump administration’s America-First foreign policy, he also reaffirmed the bond between our nations, saying that the Western Hemisphere may be our home, but we’re a child of Europe, and we share history, culture, and heritage. “We belong together,” he said. But he also made it clear that the world has reached a turning point and course correction is required. Europe must save itself because, “we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.” Rubio called on our European allies to revitalize their nations and reject policies leading to their decline.

That includes the embracing of “a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade” and shuttering our plants, which resulted “in large parts of our societies being deindustrialized, shipping millions of working and middle-class jobs overseas, and handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals.” He continued: “We increasingly outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions while many nations invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves. This, even as other countries have invested in the most rapid military buildup in all of human history and have not hesitated to use hard power to pursue their own interests.

To appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people, even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas and anything else – not just to power their economies, but to use as leverage against our own.”n nAnd in a pursuit of a world without borders, we opened our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people. We made these mistakes together, and now, together, we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward, to rebuild.

Under President Trump, the United States of America will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration, driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilization’s past. And while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe. But it wasn’t just a critique or warning about globalization. Rubio explained that it’s the fundamental part of national security. “The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending, because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life,” he said.

“And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.” Rubio also spoke of how “we can no longer place the so-called global order above the vital interests of our people and our nations,” and how we must reform global institutions. He used the United Nations as an example, explaining that it has potential to be a “tool for good” but right now, it’s basically useless. “But we cannot ignore that today, on the most pressing matters before us, it has no answers and has played virtually no role.”

It could not solve the war in Gaza. Instead, it was American leadership that freed captives from barbarians and brought about a fragile truce. It had not solved the war in Ukraine. It took American leadership and partnership with many of the countries here today just to bring the two sides to the table in search of a still-elusive peace. It was powerless to constrain the nuclear program of radical Shia clerics in Tehran. That required 14 bombs dropped with precision from American B-2 bombers. And it was unable to address the threat to our security from a narco-terrorist dictator in Venezuela. Instead, it took American Special Forces to bring this fugitive to justice.

He concluded: “…America is charting the path for a new century of prosperity, and that once again we want to do it together with you, our cherished allies and our oldest friends. We want to do it together with you, with a Europe that is proud of its heritage and of its history; with a Europe that has the spirit of creation of liberty that sent ships out into uncharted seas and birthed our civilization; with a Europe that has the means to defend itself and the will to survive.”

The speech, which ended with a long standing ovation, was similar to that of Vice President JD Vance’s Munich moment from last year but a bit softer, a bit more diplomatic. Rubio assured the Europeans that the United States is not abandoning them, but the old playbook is shelved. If the alliance is to continue, Europe must adapt and defend the true interests of its people and Western civilization unlike ever before. You could almost hear a sigh of a relief in the room, but how these European leaders will actually respons remains to be seen. I, for one, am not particularly hopeful.

Read more …

Democrats Don’t Care.

• Vast Majority Of Americans Want Voter ID And Democrats Don’t Care (ZH)

Are voter ID requirements considered a controversial idea in the eyes of US citizens? If you watch the establishment media or follow leaders in the Democratic Party then you might think bills like the SAVE Act are the end of freedom as we know it However, outside the echo chambers of DNC propaganda, the vast majority of Americans have no problem whatsoever with people proving their US citizenship before they vote in local and federal elections. The widespread support for voter ID is undeniable. Surveys from the past year including those from Pew and Gallup show that, regardless of party or ethnicity, Americans citizens want elections to be protected from manipulation through mass illegal immigration.


A Pew Research Center survey from August 2025 found that 83% of Americans favor requiring all voters to show government-issued photo ID to vote. This includes:
95% of Republicans
71% of Democrats
Only 16% of people oppose it.

A Gallup poll from 2024 shows 84% support for requiring photo ID to vote, with 98% of Republicans, 84% of independents and 67% of Democrats in approval.A recent CNN segment featuring number cruncher Harry Enten confirms that the backing for the SAVE Act is also dominant regardless of ethnicity: 85% of white voter, 82% of Latino voters and 76% of black voters all want voter ID. It’s difficult to find many issues which the American public universally supports at this level.

Democrat leaders, however, don’t care that the majority of their own base wants voter ID laws. Party officials and the left-wing media have engaged in a shameless propaganda campaign designed to frighten the public into opposing the SAVE Act, despite their previous platforms defending majority rule. They consistently compare the new laws to “Jim Crow” era restrictions, claiming that minorities (and rural Americans) are too dumb to figure out how to get access to state IDs and birth certificates.

In truth, every state that already has some form of election ID laws has seen a spike in voter participation, not a decline. Only 8 states have laws demanding proof of citizenship before voting (half of the states are in legal battles to implement them); the other 42 only require that you check a box that says you are a citizen. When Democrats are asked why they are ignoring their majority of their constituents when it comes to the SAVE Act, they launch into tirades about racism and fascism, but never seem to be able to answer the question.

It’s difficult to reconcile the rhetoric of Democrats from 2024 when they wailed and screamed about conservatives being a “threat to democracy” compared to their rhetoric today. At bottom, the political left only supports majority public decisions when those decisions work in the favor of leftist elites. The majority of Americans continue to support the Trump Administration’s deportations of all illegal migrants (not just migrants with violent criminal records), but Dem leaders and their NGO partners continue trying to thwart the will of the people. By extension, voter ID makes it far more difficult for non-citizens to vote and makes it easier for voting records to be checked for discrepancies.

It’s clear that ID requirements and tighter controls on mail-in ballots will work heavily against Democrats and, if passed, they are likely to see a sharp decline in votes across the board. They are fighting against the SAVE Act because they want oligarchy, not “democracy.” They want minority elitist control over government policy. Voter ID is perhaps the most important legal question of our era; it will determine the course of elections for many years to come. Most western countries have laws in place to prevent illegal migrant voting and foreign manipulation of elections. The US is the only country in which this type of law is treated as “racist”.

Read more …

Ask the one-child Chinese how fast this can get out off hand.

• The Least Laid Generation in History: Gen Z Is Ghosting Sex (Pinsker)

So, barmaid, bring a pitcher, another round of brew
Honey, why don’t we get drunk and screw?
—Jimmy Buffett, Why Don’t We Get Drunk (and Screw)


It’s not just sex: Alcohol consumption has dropped by 54%, with youth (18 to 34) drinking falling ANOTHER 9% just between 2023 and 2025. From TIME magazine’s article, “Why Gen Z is Drinking Less”: “[R]esearch from the National Institute on Drug Abuse shows that lifetime drinking, past month drinking, and past year drinking among young people began to decline around the year 2000. That means that such declines have especially impacted Generation Z, defined as anyone born from 1997 to 2012, and some Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996. […]

“It is becoming clear that, for whatever reasons, today’s younger generations are just less interested in alcohol and are more likely than older generations to see it as risky for their health and to participate in periods of abstinence like Dry January,” said National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism George F. Koob in a statement. Maybe that’s not coincidental. Perhaps there’s a causal link (as famed philosopher Jimmy Buffett suggested). Maybe, just like peanut butter and jelly are complementary products, sex and alcohol are, too. Koob seemed to agree with Buffett:

“Another contributing factor has to do with the changing socialization patterns of younger generations. “Alcohol tends to be a social drug, even for young people, so part of the decline in underage drinking could be related to less in-person socializing,” said Koob. On average, the amount of time people spent with friends in-person decreased from 30 hours a month in 2003 to 10 hours a month in 2020, according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the epidemic of loneliness. That decline was especially marked for people aged 15 to 24.

Back in 1991, more than half — 54.1% of all high school students — were sexually active. (The other 45.9% lied about it.) By 2007, the number fell to 47.8%. Four years later, it dropped again to 43%. By 2017, it was just 39.5%. As of 2023, it’s 31.6%. What’s going on with kids today, with their wild, out-of-control abstinence and crazy teetotalling?! It’s one of the strangest, most inexplicable cultural shifts in recent memory. I was certainly blindsided: I figured our sex drive was so biologically ingrained, it would never go away! But it has. And with it, so has the U.S. birthrate: It’s now at a 40-year low.

We need a birthrate of 2.1 babies per woman to maintain our population. We’re currently at 1.6.mnFor decades, our shrinking birthrate was masked by immigration growth. In 1991, the U.S. population was 253 million. By 2025, it grew to 343.6 million. = Since 2020, immigration has been the #1 driver of American population growth. With the new crackdown on illegal immigration, we’re flirting with our first-ever population decline. And it’s not just an American phenomenon — all over the world, birthrates have collapsed. At least one geopolitical strategist and demographic expert predicts it’ll lead to the end of China within the next 10 years:

“And three months ago, the Chinese government updated the data. They’re now reporting a 70% drop in the birthrate since 2017. That’s a faster decline than what was suffered by the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. And the Shanghai Academy of Sciences, which is kind of the Wiseman organization of statisticians in China that interprets all the data, says that this is still wrong. They estimate that the Chinese system has overestimated its population by over 100 million people. With all of the missing millions being people who would’ve been born during the one-child era, which is a rather sterile way of saying that all the missing millions are under age 40 suggesting that these yellow bars don’t even exist. China has, at most, 10 years before it faces national dissolution. They will not be a unified industrialized nation state 10 years from now. ”

—Peter Zeihan

Read more …

Prediction: “The Least Laid Generation in History” will start boinking for cash. Then again, Elon says they won’t need the cash.

• OH BABY! Couples Could Make Big Money on Trump Accounts (DS)

The Trump administration has created an incentive for Americans to have more children within the next three years. Any baby born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028, is eligible for $1,000 of seed money in a tax-advantaged investment account known as a “Trump Account,” though any parent with a child under 18 can open an account for their son or daughter. The account operates similarly to an IRA, and parents, relatives, and friends can contribute up to $5,000 annually, though they do not have to make regular contributions.


“Your child’s funds will automatically be invested in American companies,” according to the Trump Accounts website.mWhen the child turns 18, they can either allow the account to continue to grow, or they can withdraw the funds for education costs or to purchase a home. If the maximum amount is contributed to the account annually from the time the child is born, the account will have grown to over $270,000 by the child’s 18th birthday.

Between the rapid increase in the cost of living over the past 20 years and many young people in debt with student loans, true financial freedom is a distant dream for many in their 20s and 30s, but Trump Accounts could change that for the next generation. If Americans take advantage of the program to its full extent, Generation Alpha, born between 2010 and 2024, and Beta, born between 2025 and 2039, can hope to avoid the financial situation many Millennials and members of Gen Z find themselves in today.

Read more …

Trump will not accept this.

• Americans Could Be Silenced by EU Online Speech Laws (ET)

Europeans who face criminal charges for what they said or wrote warned that Europe’s speech laws can silence Americans as well, regardless of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protections. While testifying before the House Judiciary Committee last week, Paivi Rasanen, a member of parliament in Finland, recounted how she has been prosecuted since 2021 for quoting Bible verses to church members and on social media that questioned her church’s participation in a Gay Pride march. Although she was acquitted, first by a local district court and then by an appellate court, prosecutors appealed the decision to Finland’s supreme court, where the case currently sits.


“My prosecution shows how quickly democratic societies can abandon free expression when the state decides which beliefs are acceptable,” Rasanen told The Epoch Times. “I never imagined that quoting the Bible in a Twitter post would lead to years of criminal charges, yet this is now the reality in Europe,” she said. “Americans should be concerned because once censorship is normalized, it never stays confined to one country.”

The trend among Western countries to restrict religious speech has spread beyond Europe, with the Canadian government currently advancing a bill that would remove a religious exemption from “hate speech” laws in the country’s Criminal Code. Similarly, newly proposed legislation in Queensland, Australia, would criminalize certain symbols and phrases, with penalties of up to two years in prison. While speaking before Congress, Rasanen was joined by Graham Linehan, an Irish writer and comedian who was arrested upon traveling through Heathrow Airport in 2025 for statements he had made in America on transgender issues. “For a decade, the British police have harassed me for expressing views that the majority of the public share,” Linehan stated. “We have simply been punished for objecting to fashionable yet incoherent orthodoxies.”

‘Foreign Censorship Threat’
Their testimony was underscored by the release of a Feb. 3 House report titled “The Foreign Censorship Threat,” which charged that “The European Commission, in a comprehensive decade-long effort, has successfully pressured social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules, thereby directly infringing on Americans’ online speech in the United States.” More specifically, the report states that “though ostensibly meant to combat ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate speech,’ nonpublic documents produced to the Committee show that for the last 10 years, the European Commission has directly pressured platforms to censor lawful, political speech in the European Union and abroad.”

This included regular meetings between U.S. tech companies and European Union regulators to put “content moderation” policies and algorithms in place to conform to European laws regarding “hate speech” and “misinformation,” the report states. The EU claims these initiatives were voluntary, but subpoenaed emails from tech executives stated that “we don’t really have a choice.” Judicial Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told hearing attendees that, based on subpoenas issued to U.S. tech companies regarding their correspondence with EU officials, a pattern of compelled censorship emerged that included U.S. citizens.

“The European Commission successfully pressured social media companies to change their global content moderation rules, directly harming the speech of Americans in the United States,” Jordan stated. He also referenced an incident in which European commissioner Thierry Breton warned X owner Elon Musk that his company may face penalties for posting an interview with Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign. “The European Commission is trying to censor speech and meddle in elections worldwide,” Jordan said. “When the European Commission makes censorship demands, platforms have to listen.”

According to the European Commission’s website, the Digital Services Act (DSA) “empowers citizens by strengthening the protection of their fundamental rights online and giving them greater control and more choices when they navigate online platforms and search engines.” The DSA also requires platforms to “minimise the risks of exposing citizens, including children and young people, to illegal and harmful content.” nCritics of EU speech laws say they have become a tool to punish U.S. tech companies for allowing any content that a European country has deemed to be illegal. In countries such as Germany, that could include insulting government officials.

French member of the European Parliament Virginie Joron called the DSA a “Trojan horse for surveillance and control.” Joron accused government officials of having “seized upon the DSA as a political tool to control speech, particularly targeting platforms like X, Facebook, and Telegram.” And legal analysts say that the reach of the DSA extends beyond Europe. The DSA “creates a pathway for foreign governments to influence public debate inside the United States without ever passing a single American law,” Lorcan Price, an Irish barrister who defended Rasanen and testified at the House hearing, told The Epoch Times.

“The EU’s Digital Services Act gives European regulators unprecedented leverage over American tech companies, which means European speech rules can end up shaping what Americans are allowed to say online,” Price said. “Once U.S. platforms are forced to comply with European censorship demands to avoid massive fines, those restrictions don’t stop at Europe’s borders.”

Read more …

Maybe they should see if they can agree on something. 15, 16, 18, not at all?

• More Nations Are Mulling Social Media Bans For Teens (ZH)

After Australia’s first-of-its-kind social media ban for adolescents under the age of 16 came into effect in December, more countries in Europe and elsewhere are taking steps to implement their own restrictions. As Katharina Buchholz reports, according to Statista research, France and the United Kingdom have gotten furthest, with laws passing in one chamber each of the countries’ bicameral legislatures as of early February. While the latter country is also aiming to ban social media for kids under the age of 16, France’s proposed law targets only those under the age of 15.


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Six more nations have seen country leaders announce initiatives aiming to ban social media access for adolescents. While Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand and Spain all have more restrictive regulations in mind, excluding those under the age of 16, Greece is aiming to exclude those under the age of 15 and Austria those under the age of 14 from social media.Social media, including personalized algorithms and the possibility to scroll endlessly, is receiving scrutiny for its effect on mental health, especially in younger people.

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Social media addiction can affect any age group, but it is seen as especially harmful in adolescents which are still developing social behaviors, body image and time management skills. Two more planned bans announced in Europe, by Portuguese and Danish leadership, are reportedly willing to leave a back door open for parental consent, putting them in a different category that already exists in several nations like France, Italy and, since recently, Brazil, where children of the applicable ages can access social media sites if their parents are in agreement.

While outright bans like the Australian one often plan implementation via a strict official age-verification mechanism, parental consent regulation can work by linking parents accounts, for example. Instagram has meanwhile already rolled out this feature in Europe, the U.S., Australia and Canada, with teenagers between the ages of 13 to 15 only in the position to disable a special restricted account mode with the consent of their parent’s account. Like other platforms, Instagram accepts users from the age of 13, but this restriction is so far not tied to verification. In the EU, social media sites are since 2018 under further restrictions concerning the use of personalized ads for minors.

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“He functioned as a social broker among financiers, politicians, academics, royalty, and celebrities…”

• The Unsettling Truths the Epstein Files Reveal About Power and Privilege (ET)

The public fixation on the Epstein files has settled, predictably, on the most lurid elements of the story. This is understandable. Sexual exploitation, particularly of the young, is among the most corrosive of crimes, and the scale of Epstein’s abuse, as well as the apparent indifference of powerful institutions to it, demands moral outrage. But to focus exclusively on the sexual scandal is to miss the deeper and more unsettling lesson the affair reveals. What the Epstein files expose, above all, is the social and moral estrangement of American elites from the people they claim to govern.


Epstein was not merely a predator who gained access to power. He was a node within a closed world of wealth, influence, and immunity. The scandal is not that powerful people behaved badly in private—history shows many such examples—but that they did so with a confidence rooted in the belief they were insulated from the consequences of their behavior. They moved through a transnational elite culture that had largely severed itself from ordinary moral constraints, legal accountability, and civic obligation. That culture did not merely tolerate Epstein but normalized him.

This echoes the point Christopher Lasch made decades ago, long before private islands and hedge-fund philanthropy became familiar symbols of elite excess. In his 1994 book “The Revolt of the Elites,” Lasch argued that the modern American ruling classes had stopped seeing themselves as stewards of a shared national project. Instead, they increasingly saw themselves as a mobile, globalized caste, educated in the same institutions, moving through the same cities, governed by the same tastes, and primarily accountable only to each other. Citizenship was seen as a minor inconvenience. Nationhood and patriotism were just sentimental relics from less enlightened times.

The Epstein affair reads like a case study in Lasch’s thesis. Here was an individual whose wealth was opaque, whose sources of income were rarely scrutinized, and whose social standing seemed immune to ordinary reputational risk. He functioned as a social broker among financiers, politicians, academics, royalty, and celebrities, many of whom publicly advocated policies of moral uplift, social justice, and global responsibility. Yet in private, they inhabited a world defined by indulgence, entitlement, and a contempt for limits.

Elite detachment today is not only economic but also existential, and it is hardly confined to Americans. The governing classes of advanced democracies increasingly inhabit a world defined by mobility, abstraction, and insulation from consequence. Their loyalties are professional rather than civic, global rather than national, and managerial rather than moral. They experience society less as a shared inheritance than as a set of problems to be administered at a distance. In such a world, attachment to place, memory, and common fate appears parochial, even suspect, while belonging itself is quietly redefined as an obstacle to progress.

Those who create policies affecting immigration, policing, education, public health, and national security rarely face the consequences themselves. They do not send their children to failing schools, live in high-crime neighborhoods, compete for scarce housing, or navigate broken public institutions. Their lives are shielded by wealth, location, private services, and increasingly by law itself.

The Epstein files sharpen this reality because they reveal not just hypocrisy, but impunity. Despite extensive documentation, repeated warnings, and credible testimony, accountability arrived slowly and incompletely. This is not because the crimes were ambiguous, but because the accused moved within a protected sphere where consequences were negotiable and enforcement discretionary. Justice, like morality, was something applied elsewhere for other people.

What enrages the public is not prurience, but recognition. The scandal resonates because it confirms a growing suspicion among ordinary people that there is one moral universe for the governing class and another for everyone else. Elites preach restraint, sustainability, and responsibility while living lives of extraordinary consumption and indulgence. They urge social sacrifice while exempting themselves from its costs. They speak the language of progress while practicing a refined form of decadence.

Lasch warned that such a ruling class would eventually forfeit legitimacy, not because of ideology, but because of character. A society cannot be governed indefinitely by people who do not believe they belong to it. When elites become tourists in their own countries, financially global, culturally unrooted, and morally untethered, their authority rests on little more than coercion and spectacle. The Epstein files should therefore be read less as an aberration than as a symptom. They reveal a governing class that has lost the habits of self-restraint that once justified its power, and the sense of common fate that once bound leaders to citizens. For many, the salient point of the Epstein files is the scandal. I think it is more accurately seen as a disclosure.

The danger is not merely that such elites are corrupt, but that they are bored. Bored with limits, bored with norms, bored with accountability, and ultimately bored with democracy itself. That boredom, Lasch understood, is the precondition of revolt, not by the masses, but by those who no longer feel answerable to them. If the Epstein affair provokes lasting anger, it is because it crystallizes a truth many citizens already sense, that the people shaping the future live in a world apart, governed by different rules, and increasingly incapable of moral seriousness. No society can long endure that division without consequence. The question is not whether further revelations will emerge. It is whether the public will finally insist that elites once again live under the same moral and civic conditions as those they presume to lead.

Read more …

“.. you made…all your money in California, you ungrateful piece of s***, you could figure out a way to pay more taxes, and we deserve the taxes from you, given you made your wealth here . . . so why don’t we just do shock and awe at this point, because you don’t seem to be availing yourself to thinking that you owe your state something more.”

• California Democrats Trigger a Reverse Gold Rush with a Wealth Tax (Turley)

This month, the anniversary of the California Gold Rush came and passed with little mention … for good reason. When James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill, millions traveled great distances to seek their fortune in the “Golden State.” Now, 178 years later, California has engineered an inverse Gold Rush, virtually chasing wealth from the state. Rather than covered wagons going West, there is a line of U-Hauls going anywhere other than California.


From boondoggle projects to reparations, California politicians continue to rack up new spending projects despite a soaring deficit and shrinking tax base. Rather than exercise a modicum of fiscal restraint, Democrats are pushing through a tax that takes five percent of the wealth of any billionaires left in the state. I have long criticized the tax as perfectly moronic for a state with the highest tax burden and one of the highest flight rates of top taxpayers. In my new book, “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution,” I discuss the reversal of fortunes in California and other blue states as politicians unleash new “eat the rich” campaigns before the midterm elections.

The problem, of course, is that billionaires are mobile, as is their wealth. Liberals expect billionaires to stay put in a type of voluntary canned hunt. They are not. Billionaires are joining the growing exodus from the state, taking their companies, investments, and jobs with them. The latest billionaire to be chased off may be Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is reportedly heading for Florida. The growing departures have triggered outrage among many on the left, who are in disbelief that billionaires will just not stand still to be fleeced.

Former New York Magazine editor Kara Swisher captured that rage in a recent posting, declaring “you made…all your money in California, you ungrateful piece of s***, you could figure out a way to pay more taxes, and we deserve the taxes from you, given you made your wealth here . . . so why don’t we just do shock and awe at this point, because you don’t seem to be availing yourself to thinking that you owe your state something more.” By some estimates, California has already cost over a trillion dollars in lost investments and business. That is no small achievement. Here’s a mind teaser: How can you burn a trillion dollars (which would create a stack some 67,866 miles high) without taking years and destroying the environment? California politicians have a solution: Have people take it out of the state in a reverse gold rush.

In addition to saying that they want to grab 5 percent of the wealth of these billionaires, California Democrats are planning to base wealth calculations on the voting shares of corporate executives. Often, particularly with start-ups, entrepreneurs have greater voting shares than actual ownership. However, they will be taxed as if voting shares amounted to actual wealth. In other words, California is moving to nuke the entrepreneurs who created the Silicon Valley boom. Emmanuel Saez, the U.C. Berkeley economist who helped design the tax, insists that they may not want to stay, but they will still be tapped. They are planning to trap the wealthy fleeing the state retroactively: “The tax is based on residence as of Jan. 1, 2026, sharply limiting their ability to flee the state to avoid paying. Despite billionaires’ threats to leave, I think extremely few will have been able to change residence by Jan. 1, given the complexity of doing so.”

The effort to retroactively impose such a tax is legally controversial and will face years of challenges. In my view, this is unconstitutional, but admittedly it is a murky area. Regardless of the outcome, a wealth tax will affect a wide range of other wealthy taxpayers. If Democrats can get a retroactive wealth tax to be upheld, it is doubtful that they will stop with billionaires. Why should other top taxpayers stick around to find out where the next cull will fall in the tax brackets? Recently, Gavin Newsom boasted, “California isn’t just keeping pace with the world — we’re setting the pace.” That is undeniably true if the measure is the record number of U-Hauls fleeing the state — more than any other state. Indeed, the only thing harder to find than a wealthy taxpayer in California appears to be a U-Haul.

According to U-Haul’s data, the state is again leading blue states in the exodus. The Washington Post noted recently that “California came in last. Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey rounded out the bottom five. Of the bottom 10, seven voted blue in the last election.” Conversely, “nine of the top 10 growth states voted red in the last presidential election,” with Texas again leading the growth states. The Post put it succinctly, “People want to live in pro-growth, low-tax states, while the biggest losers tend to be places with big governments and high taxes.” The problem is that, while the economics are horrific, the politics remain irresistible.

Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents part of Silicon Valley, recently mocked billionaires rushing to escape the state. Laughing at his own constituents, Khanna quipped, “I will miss them very much.” You will not be alone as California becomes known as the La Brea Tar Pit of taxation. They are on the verge of converting the state motto from “Eureka” to “Welcome to Hotel California, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

Read more …

I have questions.

• FBI Opened 1,200 ‘Assessments’ Of Sensitive Figures (JTN)

The FBI opened 1,200 probes related to politicians, journalists, religious leaders, academics and others tied to “sensitive investigative matters,” using a special investigative tool that requires no factual predicate to launch, according to a Government Accountability Office report. The GAO report, which was obtained by Just the News, was published last month but not made public, and it was titled FBI Investigative Activities: Oversight Efforts of Opening and Conducting Assessments Should be Strengthened.


The report, which assists in congressional oversight of the executive branch, provided details on the roughly 127,000 FBI “assessments” in all opened from 2018 to 2024, the vast majority of which were eventually closed without accusations of wrongdoing or criminal charges against those targets being scrutinized. The 57-page report did not include any names of those targeted for assessment. Among the total assessments, 1,200 were related to “sensitive investigative matters” that target public officials, news organizations, houses of worship or members of academia, which the bureau views as more sensitive in nature.

So-called “assessments” were established by Justice Department guidelines in 2008, providing the FBI with an investigative tool short of opening a full-fledged investigation requiring a factual predicate. The probes are used by the bureau to “address a potential threat to national security or potential violation of federal criminal law,” the congressional watchdog said. They allow FBI agents to open probes on authorized matters but without a factual basis and allow them to employ investigative such techniques as physical surveillance on subjects.

If sufficient basis is found, assessments can turn into preliminary investigations, full investigations or enterprise investigations. But most assessments are closed without meeting the standards for a full inquiry by the bureau, the GAO said. nn The revelations were detailed in the GAO’s January 2026 report, which was designated “For Official Use Only” because of the sensitive information it contains. GAO noted that the report should be “safeguarded when not being used and destroyed when no longer needed.”

Read more …

I don’t think Trump wants to attack Iran. But does he have a choice anymore?

• US Smuggled Starlinks Into Iran Amid Riots – WSJ (RT)

The Trump administration covertly smuggled approximately 6,000 Starlink satellite internet terminals into Iran amid a nationwide unrest earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal has reported, substantiating Tehran’s claims of foreign interference behind the deadly riots. The operation, which senior US officials said involved State Department funding, came after Iranian authorities imposed a sweeping internet blackout in January. President Donald Trump was aware of the deliveries, officials told the WSJ on Thursday, though it remains unclear whether he personally approved the plan.


Iranian officials have repeatedly blamed Washington and Tel Aviv for fueling the unrest, which began in December as peaceful demonstrations over economic hardship but escalated into widespread violence. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated last month that more than 3,000 people had been killed, including nearly 700 individuals he described as “terrorists,” alongside civilians and security personnel. President Masoud Pezeshkian has accused the US and Israel of embedding “foreign terrorists” within protest crowds, alleging they have employed what an Iranian diplomatic source described to RT as “ISIS-like” tactics – including beheadings of law enforcement officers and civilians being burned alive.

At the height of the unrest, Trump openly encouraged “peaceful” Iranian protesters, posting on Truth Social: “All Iranian patriots, keep protesting. Take over your institutions if possible.” He also promised that “help is on its way,” and deployed a “beautiful armada” to the region, raising speculation of an imminent military intervention. The State Department supports a range of so-called “internet freedom” tools, including virtual private network (VPN) service providers to Iran. To purchase Starlinks, the department reportedly redirected funds from US-supported VPNs, which had allowed an estimated 20-30 million Iranians to stay online during the previous 2022 riots and the Israeli-US bombing last year.

Washington seeks to pressure Iran into accepting a new nuclear deal, after Trump unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 agreement (JCPOA) during his first term, reimposing sanctions against Tehran under a “maximum pressure” campaign. Decades of US economic pressure were the primary driver of the country’s economic deterioration, according to officials in Iran – the world’s second most sanctioned country after Russia. Despite the US administration’s public denials of involvement in fomenting anti-government riots, the reported Starlink operation reveals expanded covert support for what Moscow called an attempt to “destroy the Iranian state” through a “color revolution” playbook.

Read more …

“I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order.” An executive order would not be ideal, but I’m hoping it won’t be necessary.”

• Trump Makes A HUGE Promise About Voter ID

They finally have the votes. Now the real fight begins. The SAVE Act already cleared the House in a tight 218–213 vote, with just one Democrat, Henry Cuellar, willing to break with his party and support basic election safeguards. That tells you everything you need to know about where Democrats really stand on election integrity. Senate Republicans also just locked down the 50 votes they need to move ahead on the SAVE Act, thanks to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) finally jumping off the fence and signing on as a cosponsor. With Vice President JD Vance ready to break a 50–50 tie, Republicans now have the votes to pass the bill if it ever reaches a final vote. That’s the good news.


The bad news is that Democrats still have one powerful weapon left: the filibuster. In the Senate, the math is brutally simple. Republicans have the votes to pass the bill, but they do not have the 60 votes needed to break the filibuster. Not even Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) will support the SAVE Act — and he claims to support voter ID. So what’s the next move? Well, that’s up to the Senate GOP leadership. If they are serious about this bill, they have to force a real, old-school, stand-on-the-floor-and-talk-until-you-drop filibuster. Not the fake Cory Booker kind, either, but a real filibuster. It’s time for the Democrats’ abuse of the filibuster, effectively turning it into a de facto veto of the minority party, to be over.

Sen. Mike Lee laid out the path in a video message on X. “If senators want to debate this, if they want to filibuster it, make them work for it,” he said. “Make them stand up, make them speak. If we do it this way, we can continue this progress, and I think we can get this thing done.” The only problem is that even then, nothing is guaranteed. A talking filibuster is a tool, not a magic wand. It forces a showdown. It does not promise victory. “Look, there are no guarantees here,” Lee conceded. “But the only shot we’ve got at this is through the talking filibuster. Thanks for fighting. Keep going. We’ll get it done.”

There is, of course, a backup plan. On Friday, President Donald Trump announced that if the SAVE Act can’t pass the Senate, he plans to bypass Congress altogether and use executive action to require voter ID for the November midterms. “There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” he wrote on Truth Social. “This is an issue that must be fought, and must be fought, NOW!” he wrote in a follow-up post. “If we can’t get it through Congress, there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order.” An executive order would not be ideal, but I’m hoping it won’t be necessary.

Read more …

But Elon says in 10 years it won’t matter anymore.

• American Workers Have Less Than A $1000 in Retirement Savings (Turley)

There is a new, troubling study on the financial status of most American workers. The National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS) found that the median American worker has just $955 saved for retirement through defined-contribution plans such as 401(k) accounts. Given the expected job losses from robotics and AI, the study only deepens concerns about the economic and political pressures facing this country in the years to come.


In my new book, “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution,” I discuss those impacts from robotics and AI on our democracy. Using the most conservative estimates of job losses, the book explores how a large population of unemployed citizens will affect their relationship with the state. We cannot maintain a “kept citizenship” while preserving the essential elements of the American republic. A large population of static, unemployed citizens poses challenges for what I call a “liberty-enhancing economy,” an economy that affords citizens independence from the state.

This study magnifies those concerns. If accurate, it suggests that even a short displacement in employment will return state support. Many jurisdictions are already launching Universal Basic Income (UBI) pilot programs. If this republic is to survive in the 21st Century, it will require developing new areas of “homocentric” jobs while avoiding predictable measures to subsidize positions that will inevitably be lost to robotics. Notably, the study found that among those with positive retirement plans, median savings were much higher at $40,000. Those with a defined contribution (DC) plan are far better off with an average savings of $179,082.

The takeaway from the report, for me, is the need to instill greater private savings. Some workers are barely paid above subsistence. However, we also need to educate citizens about the importance of setting aside retirement funds to the extent possible. As I previously wrote, I am a great fan of the Trump Accounts. The $6.25 billion gift of Michael and Susan Dell (now augmented by dozens of corporations) could offer the single best hope for the survival of our system. Millions of young people will be able to experience the benefits of investments, savings and, most importantly, economic independence.

The study also shows the growing dangers of the collapse of the social security accounts. Despite assurances made when Congress established the system, Congress has continued to draw on Social Security funds to avoid reducing spending levels. The system could fail for these workers, who will not be able to draw upon money taken from their paychecks for the purpose of retirement. It is one of the most outrageous betrayals in United States history.

To this day, Democrats are opposing efforts to make major changes to guarantee the viability of the system for future generations, including the use of private investment accounts that could no longer be raided by Congress for easy money. All politicians express alarm at the potential failure, but they attack any efforts to address the underlying problems as an attack on social security. As a result, we just drift toward this cliff knowing that most citizens have practically no other source of retirement support.

Read more …

AI trumps groupthink too.

• Stolen Land At The Grammys: How Hollywood Groupthink Threatens Democracy (ET)

Among the consolations of youth is the certainty with which one holds beliefs about the world. There is comfort in the conviction that one’s moral bearings are firmly set, that one’s understanding of complex questions is not only sincere but also correct. The world appears legible; right and wrong seem sharply drawn; doubt and nuance are dismissed as weakness or evasion. There is rarely a single moment when these certainties collapse. They loosen instead through the slow accumulation of experience. Over time, one discovers that life resists easy judgments. Circumstances complicate principles. Good intentions collide with unintended consequences. Our friends betray us. The world proves denser, more conflicted, and less amenable to neat and tidy conclusions than youthful confidence would suggest.


This recognition of complexity, fallibility, and the limits of one’s own certainty is among the quiet achievements of maturity. It marks the point at which conviction learns restraint and moral seriousness acquires humility. Yet much of our public culture now moves in precisely the opposite direction. It rewards juvenile certainty while punishing hesitation, qualification, or good-faith disagreements. Confidence is applauded regardless of depth; slogans substitute for argument; restraint is recast as moral failure. That inversion was on clear display at the recent Grammy Awards, when Billie Eilish declared to enthusiastic applause that “no one is illegal on stolen land.”

It was left unspecified just whose land was being referenced, by whom it was stolen, and according to what historical or legal criteria that claim could be made. The audience, however, needed no clarification. Eilish’s statement was rewarded exactly because it avoided complexity and invited no questions. What was on display was not moral seriousness but a high school performance, an adolescent sense of righteousness delivered with absolute certainty and accepted as self-evident truth. One might charitably attribute such unthinking, categorical statements to Eilish’s youth. Alas, hers is a posture that we have come to expect from many of Hollywood’s men and women: confident, declarative, and curiously uninterested in the burdens of thought that genuine moral judgment requires.

This brings us to the core issue. The greatest threat to free expression today isn’t obvious censorship or government orders. Instead, it’s a more subtle and widespread force: cultural groupthink. This informal but influential system of rewards and punishments quietly limits the range of acceptable opinions, shaping what people feel allowed to say, what they hesitate to voice, and which questions are no longer askedn Nowhere is this trend more evident than in modern celebrity culture. Hollywood and the broader entertainment sector have become models of ideological conformity, especially on divisive social and political topics.

From climate change and gender issues to racial justice and international conflicts, Hollywood repeats the same messages, all delivered with youthful confidence. The same moral language, slogans, and conclusions are echoed with ritualistic consistency. The Eilish episode was not an aberration but a symptom. It illustrated a broader pattern in which public speech functions less as a means of inquiry than as a test of ideological conformity. The cost of dissent is not a thoughtful and considered rebuttal. Rather, it takes the form of reputational damage through social media pile-ons, calls for boycotts, professional exclusion, or quiet blacklisting.

Under such conditions, silence is often the rational choice. Most people have families to support and livelihoods to protect.The greater danger lies in the lesson this celebrity culture teaches: that there is only one permissible way to think and speak about certain issues, and that deviation signals not error but moral failure. Political and social questions are reduced to dogma rather than debated. Once moralized in this way, disagreement becomes illegitimate by definition. This logic now extends well beyond Hollywood. Similar patterns can be found in journalism, medicine, academia, corporate governance, and even the legal profession.

Approved vocabularies narrow discussion; certain premises must be affirmed before conversation can begin; others may not be questioned at all. Arguments are no longer answered on their merits but dismissed as evidence of bad character or suspect motives.The consequences for democratic culture are profound. Democracies do not depend on unanimity but on citizens who can weigh competing claims, tolerate uncertainty, and revise their views in light of evidence and argument. Groupthink undermines these capacities by rewarding conformity and punishing independent judgment. Over time, public discourse loses its corrective function. Errors persist not because they are persuasive, but because questioning them carries too high a cost.

[..] Free speech, properly understood, is not a threat to democracy. It is its foundation.

Read more …

“AI Disruption Crosshairs Hone In On Hollywood Studios ..”

Why pay Brad Pitt 100 million when a computer can “build” his scenes?

• “Billion Dollar Movie In One Prompt” (ZH)

:AI-driven equity disruption was everywhere this past week, spreading like wildfire beyond software into insurance, commercial real estate, financials, shipping, wealth management, and likely many more industries in the coming trading sessions.One industry in the crosshairs of AI disruption is Hollywood. Some of the publicly traded studios include The Walt Disney Company, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global, Sony Group Corporation, Netflix, Lionsgate, and others.nOn Friday, Axios reported that the Walt Disney Company sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, alleging that the Chinese tech firm has been infringing on its films to develop Seedance 2.0 without compensation.

Disney’s outside attorney, David Singer, wrote a letter to ByteDance global general counsel John Rogovin, accusing the AI company of “pre-packaging its Seedance service with a pirated library of Disney’s copyrighted characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and other Disney franchises, as if Disney’s coveted intellectual property were free public domain clip art.” “Over Disney’s well-publicized objections, ByteDance is hijacking Disney’s characters by reproducing, distributing, and creating derivative works featuring those characters. ByteDance’s virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP is willful, pervasive, and totally unacceptable,” Singer said.

He added, “We believe this is just the tip of the iceberg, which is shocking considering Seedance has only been available for a few days.” It’s not just ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 that has spooked Hollywood studios. A growing wave of video-generation models suggests that Hollywood’s moat is crumbling, and its control of the media game is nearing its end.

“Authorities should use every legal tool at their disposal to stop this wholesale theft,” the Human Artistry Campaign – a coalition that includes dozens of creative groups such as SAG-AFTRA and the Directors Guild of America – said in a statement on Friday. Seedance 2.0 model …

Hollywood is living on borrowed time. The next big AI disruption trade could be studios.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Optimus COVID RFK jr Joe Rogan and Dr. Robert Malone https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/2022601763405103379?s=20 Pepe Casey https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/2022673982432886873?s=20 https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/2022410612689768945?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle February 12 2026

Feb 122026
 
 February 12, 2026  Posted by at 11:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  50 Responses »


Camille Pissarro The Boulevard Montmartre at Night 1897


• Elon Musk Vows To Establish A MOON CITY Within 10 Years (MN)
• Economy Adds 130,000 Jobs in January, Unemployment Rate Falls to 4.3% (CTH)
• Trump Orders CIA To Give 2020 Election Intel To ‘Stop The Steal’ Lawyer (ZH)
• 30 Years Later Massie Discovers Les Wexner Was Associate of Epstein (CTH)
• Steve Bannon Messages About Trump Included in the Epstein File Release (CTH)
• The Trump Admin Just Won the Mask Decision . . . Now it Should Appeal (Turley)
• Jordan Opens Bondi Hearing By Railing Against Sanctuary Cities (JTN)
• Lawmaker Probing J6 Worried US Capitol Police Intel Politicized vs GOP (JTN)
• Munich 2007: Putin’s Warning To The West (RT)
• Russia Will Stick To Nuclear Arms Limits If US Does The Same (ZH)
• All the Media’s Men: When Journalism Became the Story -Part II of II (Wilson)
• Texas Judges Strategize Ways to Block DHS From Enforcing Immigration Laws (CTH)
• ‘No Privacy’ CBDCs Will Come, Warns Billionaire Ray Dalio (CT)

 


 

 


 


Musk ponders his own mortality. He won’t make it to Mars in time to be the first settler.

“Priority Of SpaceX becomes a self-sustaining lunar metropolis to safeguard humanity’s future..”

• Elon Musk Vows To Establish A MOON CITY Within 10 Years (MN)

Elon Musk and SpaceX are charting a bold new course for American space dominance, prioritizing a thriving city on the Moon to shield civilization from earthly perils like natural disasters or geopolitical chaos. With frequent launches and rapid iteration cycles, the Moon offers a practical launchpad for multi-planetary life, free from the constraints of overregulated space agencies that have stalled progress for decades. SpaceX’s announcement comes amid a renewed push for lunar exploration, where private enterprise is outpacing sluggish international efforts.


According to reports, the company aims to establish a “self-growing city” on the Moon within a decade, leveraging the proximity for hundreds of test cycles that Mars’ distant orbit simply can’t match. Musk elaborated on X, stating, “SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.” He emphasized the logistical edge: launches to the Moon every 10 days with a two-day trip, versus Mars’ 26-month windows and six-month journeys.

This allows for swift advancements in life support, construction, and energy systems—key to breaking free from Earth’s vulnerabilities.

The shift doesn’t abandon Mars entirely. Musk noted that SpaceX will still pursue a long term plan for a Red Planet city, but the Moon takes precedence as a faster safeguard for civilization.

“The overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster,” Musk posted.

This pragmatic approach exposes the folly of pie-in-the-sky promises that have dominated space policy, often mired in wasteful spending and political gamesmanship. Musk also teased democratized space travel:

This development echoes broader frustrations with establishment space programs. NASA’s Artemis missions, while ambitious, are bogged down by delays and ballooning costs. SpaceX, unencumbered by such bureaucracy, is poised to deliver tangible wins, potentially including lunar data centers powered by constant solar energy, boosting U.S. tech supremacy. By prioritizing the lunar city, SpaceX advances an independent, resilient humanity—free from reliance on fragile international alliances that often prioritize control over innovation.

Read more …

In a time of large scale revisions, OK numbers.

• Economy Adds 130,000 Jobs in January, Unemployment Rate Falls to 4.3% (CTH)

The Bureau of Labor and Statistics releases the employment figures for January today [BLS DATA HERE]. Overall, in the establishment survey, 130,000 jobs were added and the unemployment rate fell to 4.3%. This is much stronger than anticipated and there are indications of significant movement back to work as the exfiltration of illegal alien workers continues.


Via WSJ – “The U.S. added 130,000 jobs in January, surging past expectations and marking a strong start to the year following a weak year of job growth. The January numbers from the Labor Department were above the seasonally adjusted 48,000 jobs added in December, which were revised slightly lower. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal were expecting 55,000 jobs in January.The unemployment rate, which is based on a separate survey from the jobs figures, fell to 4.3% from 4.4%.” (more)

What I find interesting in the Household ‘Employment’ Survey is the number of people going back into the workforce. I am left to wonder if the ICE removals are starting to create employer driven incentives, increased wages etc. that seem to be pulling sidelined workers back to the labor market.


528,000 more people employed. The unemployed dropped by 141,000, and the number of people not in the labor force dropped by 221,000.

Read more …

“The administration last year hired Kurt Olsen, who more than five years ago took part in the “Stop the Steal” campaign that promoted baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, to investigate the 2020 election.”

• Trump Orders CIA To Give 2020 Election Intel To ‘Stop The Steal’ Lawyer (ZH)

President Donald Trump has instructed the CIA and other spy agencies to hand over intelligence related to the 2020 election, a bunch of (presumably panicked) US intelligence officials told Politico and NBC News. The records are to be handed over to Kurt Olsen – now a temporary government employee in the White House – who four years ago was involved in the “Stop the Steal” campaign to determine whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election via cheating. And you know they’re freaking out by the way they tell us this… “The administration last year hired Kurt Olsen, who more than five years ago took part in the “Stop the Steal” campaign that promoted baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, to investigate the 2020 election.” -NBC News


… President Donald Trump has directed top U.S. spy agencies to share sensitive intelligence about the 2020 election with his former campaign lawyer, known for pushing debunked theories of electoral fraud, according to four people with knowledge of the effort. -Politico. Indeed:

“The president has asked Mr. Olsen to look at intelligence related to the 2020 election and the agency is ensuring that he has the access necessary to do his work,” a CIA official told NBC in an emailed statement (probably right after hanging up with the reporter). When asked about Olsen’s role, the White House told the outlet “President Trump has the authority to provide access to classified material to individuals as he deems necessary. The entire Trump administration is working together to ensure the integrity of U.S. elections.”

The admin did not specifically respond to questions about whether Olsen was focusing only on the 2020 election, or possible security threats to future elections. The freakout comes after the FBI’s recent search of an elections center in Fulton County, Georgia – where they seized ballots from the 2020 election. Now check out the tone over at Politico: “The decision to provide some of the government’s most sensitive spy material to Olsen is unusual, given that he has no known experience working with the U.S. spy community and only joined the Trump administration as a short-term special government employee in October 2025. Special government employees are supposed to work no more than 130 days during any period of 365 days, suggesting his time at the White House could end soon.”


The first person said that Olsen has passed a background check and a polygraph exam. It is not clear how close Olsen is to completing his report on the 2020 elections. Intelligence analysis is supposed to be nonpartisan, and it appears Olsen’s views on electoral fraud in prior U.S. elections are so deeply held that even some people close to the president question his ability to evaluate the material shared with him. “This guy has no background” in intelligence, said the second person, a close Trump ally. Olsen “will find some super classified report, say it’s evidence of fraud, but really it’s just completely out of context.”

… Olsen rose to prominence by working closely with Trump to undermine the results of the 2020 election under the slogan “Stop the Steal.” He urged several DOJ officials that year to file a complaint to the Supreme Court scrutinizing Trump’s loss, and even called the president multiple times during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Wow! As we noted earlier Tuesday, an affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans last month, which was unsealed Tuesday, lays out five categories of confirmed problems in Fulton County’s handling of ballots, raising questions that have simmered for over five years since Trump and his allies raised questions about the election in Georgia and other states where irregularities were alleged.

According to a report from Just the News, Evans filed the affidavit last month to establish probable cause for a raid that seized around 700 boxes of ballots from an Atlanta-area storage warehouse. The investigation stemmed from a referral by Kurt Olsen, President Trump’s election integrity czar. Evans interviewed roughly a dozen unnamed witnesses about allegations tied to the contested Georgia race, where Joe Biden edged out Trump by less than 12,000 votes in the official results. “This warrant application is part of an FBI criminal investigation into whether any of the improprieties were intentional acts that violated federal criminal laws.”

Fulton County admitted it lacks scanned images of all 528,777 ballots counted during the initial count and of the 527,925 ballots tallied during the state’s first recount. County officials also confirmed that during the recount, some ballots were scanned multiple times. Ballot images obtained through public records requests show identical markings appearing on duplicated images.During the Risk Limiting Audit, hand counters reported vote totals for batches that didn’t match the actual votes inside those batches. According to the affidavit, “The State’s Performance Review Board reported that Secretary of State investigators confirmed inaccurate batch tallies from the Risk Limiting Audit.

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“Wexner’s money was the originating capital for what would later become Epstein’s influence empire…”

• 30 Years Later Massie Discovers Les Wexner Was Associate of Epstein (CTH)

I said Monday on Twitter: “Seriously. Correct me if I’m wrong. For more than a decade we have known that billionaire Les Wexner from Victoria’s Secret was the originating money man behind Jeffrey Epstein. This should not be some kind of revelation, as it was widely discussed by those who researched Epstein over a decade ago. Wexner’s money was the originating capital for what would later become Epstein’s influence empire. Additionally, and again, stop me if this old news is incorrect, well over a decade ago it became openly known that the “PINK” brand of Victoria’s Secret was specifically created due to the sexuality of young girls becoming part of the marketing influence of Epstein. Wexner created the original VS girls, and the influence of Epstein (underage sexual perversions) then led to the adding of the VS “PINK” sub-brand.


Are we supposed to understand this is all new information? Honest question. No snark. I’m just confused by this sudden newness of it. We been knew.”The above VH1 segment was from 2007; however, even ten years prior to that it was commonly known that Les Wexner from Victoria’s Secret was the source of most of Jeffrey Epstein’s start-up finances. The resulting social network was fraught with sexual weirdos, and the VS brand alignment just fit with the club. Suddenly, Representative Thomas Massie, a Sea Island asset if ever there was one, is proclaiming the Epstein file information outlining the relationship with Wexner is new information, stunning in scope and worthy of extraordinary time to explore. It’s all weird.

https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/2021055705826943265?s=20

VIA NBC – […] The newly released version of the 2019 document shows eight people are listed as co-conspirators, including four whose names are not redacted: Wexner, the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret, Lesley Groff, Epstein’s longtime secretary, the late modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, and Ghislaine Maxwell, the only person who was charged in connection with Epstein. She was convicted of sex trafficking charges and is serving a 20-year prison sentence. Four other names on the document are still redacted. It’s unclear who those people are but prosecutors have said that Epstein used women he preyed on as recruiters. A separate document dated August 2019 indicated that some of the others were victims as well, and had been cooperating with investigators.

A Wexner legal representative said in a statement to NBC News Tuesday that “The Assistant U.S. Attorney told Mr. Wexner’s legal counsel in 2019 that Mr. Wexner was neither a co-conspirator nor target in any respect. Mr. Wexner cooperated fully by providing background information on Epstein and was never contacted again.” Wexner had a long relationship with Epstein that dated back to the 1980s, and hired him to manage his personal finances. He’s said he cut ties to Epstein after he was accused of sexually abusing minors in Florida. It was after that Wexner said he “discovered that he had misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family.”

Wexner’s name was also mentioned in a July 2019 FBI email about possible co-conspirators that was made public as part of the DOJ release. Another August 2019 FBI email said there was “limited evidence regarding his involvement.” He is scheduled to be deposed by the House Oversight Committee next week. (more)The first time I heard the information about Wexner and Epstein was sometime in the mid 1990’s. It was well known. There is a lot of horrible, creepy and perverted stuff in the Epstein file releases that is factually new information. However, the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Les Wexner is not new. Perverse, yes -as it was even then; but not new. There were even documentaries about it, one of them I think was called “Angels and Demons“. Maybe it wasn’t as widely known as I thought?

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“Trust your instincts folks, and always remember…. It’s ALWAYS about the money”

• Steve Bannon Messages About Trump Included in the Epstein File Release (CTH)

Apparently, Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein had a considerable relationship together. Bannon is cited frequently in the 3 million+ Epstein files that were released by the DOJ. Unfortunately, part of the document production includes text messages between Steve Bannon and an unknown individual. Within a segment of the text messages Bannon calls Jared Kusher “the idiot son-in-law,” and frames himself as more important that President Donald Trump who Bannon sees as “transitory.”


STEVE BANNON (SB) – “To do that shows that [Trump] is center of gravity of this movement and not me — will never do — they are transitory figures — the dc game is to succumb to that — it’s why I never did before joining campaign — I could have been the trump whisperer years ago — avoided on purpose” This rather elevated sense of self-importance likely explains why Bannon was the source for Michael Wolf via leaks, and why President Trump seems to have kept distance from Mr. Bannon. However, people who walk the deep weeds of U.S. politics will also remember when Steve Bannon was the editor of Breitbart and together with financial owner Robert Mercer in 2015/2016 was backing Ted Cruz in the run-up to the 2016 election.


Both Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway were original political consultants and financial beneficiaries connected to the failed Ted Cruz presidential effort, before they abandoned the Cruz Crew and jumped aboard the MAGA movement. The Cruz Crew has essentially morphed into the Ron DeSantis coalition and this superiority attitude expressed by Bannon is one of the key characteristics of the group we affectionately call the “alligator emojis. Perhaps the best two words to describe the brilliant political strategies of Steve Bannon are ‘Roy – Moore’. I digress.

Trust your instincts folks, and always remember…. It’s ALWAYS about the money!

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“Judge Synder came to the right conclusion for the wrong reason.”

• The Trump Admin Just Won the Mask Decision . . . Now it Should Appeal (Turley)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has become increasingly Orwellian in his declarations of success. Last week, Newsom was proclaiming the great success of his high-speed train to nowhere – a project delayed by decades, reduced to a fraction of the original plan, and set to cost tens of billions over budget. This week, he is proclaiming victory after a court struck down his signature law requiring federal agents to unmask. The preliminary injunction issued Monday by Senior status Judge Christine Snyder against California’s No Secret Police Act was a victory for the Trump Administration. However, it should still appeal Judge Snyder’s flawed decision. In other words, the Administration won for the wrong reason.


Snyder, an Obama appointee, faced two laws passed in September 2025 with great fanfare in California: the Secret Police Act and the No Vigilante Act. As their titles indicate, they are not serious efforts at legislating but unconstitutional acts designed to pander to the politics of the moment. In the oral argument, some of us were concerned over the curious position staked out by Judge Synder. DOJ counsel Tiberius Davis tried to explain how such state laws usurp federal authority and violate the Supremacy Clause. He drove that point home by asking “Why couldn’t California say every immigration officer needs to wear pink, so it’s super obvious who they are? The idea that all 50 states can regulate the conduct and uniforms of officers … flips the Constitution on its head.”

That would seem an unassailable point, but not to Judge Synder. She asked, “Why can’t they perform their duties without a mask? They did that until 2025, did they not? How in the world do those who don’t mask manage to operate?” I remarked at the time that the court seemed to miss the central point. The question is not whether the federal government can continue to function under limitations imposed by various states, but whether those states have the authority to impose such conditions. I do not believe that they do. Nevertheless, Judge Synder came to the right conclusion for the wrong reason. She enjoined the mask requirement, but did so on the basis that California exempted its own officers.

“Even though the United States has failed to demonstrate that the facial covering prohibition of the No Secret Police Act unduly interferes with federal functions, the court acknowledges that it is nonetheless an incidental regulation on law enforcement officers. The intergovernmental immunity doctrine prohibits imposing such a regulatory burden, albeit minimal and incidental to operations, in a discriminatory manner against the federal government.” By adopting this narrow basis, the court was able to enjoin the No Secret Police Act while rejecting an injunction against the No Vigilantes Act and certain other provisions of the No Secret Police Act. I think the court is wrong and should be reversed.

Snyder rejected the rationale of the federal government that these masks are being used to protect ICE agents from “doxing,” even though various agents have been targeted and threatened. Synder waved off the concern and said that the government had not shown by such masking is essential to carrying out such functions. Her opinion relies on broad, unsupported assumptions. Because officers are facing these security concerns, she concludes that they will continue regardless: “Security concerns exist for federal law enforcement officers with or without masks. If anything, the court finds that the presence of masked and unidentifiable individuals, including law enforcement, is more likely to heighten the sense of insecurity for all.”

It is a bizarre rationalization. The court is simply imposing its judgment on what will make officers safer, rather than emphasizing whether these agencies have the discretion to make such judgments in the execution of federal law. Yet the court still enjoins the law because it discriminates between federal and state officers. (Not surprisingly, Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, the author of the mask ban, immediately declared that they would amend the law to add state law enforcement).

The Court then upheld a state requirement that federal officers cannot conceal their identities in a discussion more befitting a legislative committee than a court: “The Court finds that these Acts serve the public interest by promoting transparency, which is essential for accountability and public trust. Moreover, the Court finds no cognizable justification for law enforcement officers to conceal their identities during their performance of routine, non-exempted law enforcement functions and interactions with the general public.” In my view, Judge Snyder twists the analysis into knots to try to preserve as much of these laws as possible while giving the Administration the minimum level of deference.

Under the intergovernmental immunity doctrine, the Supreme Court has mandated in cases such as McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316, 317 (1819), that “the states have no power, by taxation or otherwise, to retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control, the operations of the constitutional law enacted by congress to carrying into execution the powers vested in the general government.” A state cannot intrude into this authority absent a “clear and unambiguous” authorization from Congress, Goodyear Atomic Corp. v. Miller, 486, U.S. 174, 180 (1988).

Snyder finds that the California laws discriminate but do not constitute direct regulation of the federal government. She does so through a “functionalist” approach that avoids bright lines of supremacy. She simply dismisses the objections, saying the federal government has not shown that wearing masks is “essential” to carrying out these functions. Consider that approach for a second. A wide range of state regulations on federal officers could be deemed permissible, since federal officers can still functionally carry out arrests. States could dictate everything from uniform requirements, such as masks, to vehicle conditions to verbal commands or warnings.

The opinion is spotty in its analysis and sweeping in its implications. It is, in my view, ripe for reversal either before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit or the Supreme Court.

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“..almost 1/3 of the American people live in a city, county or state where the left wing leadership tells local law enforcement not to work with federal law enforcement..”

• Jordan Opens Bondi Hearing By Railing Against Sanctuary Cities (JTN)

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on Wednesday opened a hearing with Attorney General Pam Bondi by railing against sanctuary cities and their impact on Americans.”The chairs now recognize 18 cities, 11 states, excuse me, three counties and the District of Columbia are sanctuary jurisdictions, accounting for 31% of the population in this country, 31% of the American people, almost 1/3 of the American people live in a city, county or state where the left wing leadership tells local law enforcement not to work with federal law enforcement,” he said.


Jordan then turned to the case of Abraham Gonzalez, an illegal alien whom Colorado authorities released from prison after ignoring a detainer from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who later assaulted an officer. He then highlighted the voluminous instances of ICE detainers issued in sanctuary jurisdictions for violent offenders said that such policies were “helping create the environment that results in the tragic deaths.” Jordan made the remarks as part of his opening statement.

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“Now, why would you need these intelligence guys, these plain clothes guys, to just show up? It just stinks to high heaven, but I believe I was a target,”Now, why would you need these intelligence guys, these plain clothes guys, to just show up? It just stinks to high heaven, but I believe I was a target..”

• Lawmaker Probing J6 Worried US Capitol Police Intel Politicized vs GOP (JTN)

The House chairman tasked with investigating law enforcement and intelligence failures related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot says he is probing whether U.S. Capitol Police intelligence gathering was weaponized by House Democratic leadership against their Republican colleagues in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., who is the Chairman of the Select Subcommittee on January 6, said he suspects that Democrats used the department to gather information on Republican lawmakers concurrent with the Justice Department’s wider Arctic Frost probe into alleged efforts by President Donald Trump and his followers to contest the 2020 election results. Loudermilk told Just the News that what former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund and others told his committee raises questions about how the department’s intelligence arm might have been used to further what he says was “weaponization against members of Congress.”


“Political weaponization against members of Congress”
“There may be some evidence out there that this [Arctic Frost] extended all the way into Congress, that there was investigation and political weaponization against members of Congress that may even have ties with the Select Committee on January 6,” Loudermilk told the Just the News, No Noise TV show on Tuesday, referring to the Democrat-led committee that probed the Trump administration alongside the Justice Department. “There’s others who have spoken to us about efforts within the political element of Congress, within the Democrat Party, who were actively seeking access to the Capitol Police database and their intelligence, and they were using that intelligence against sitting members of Congress,” Loudermilk added.

The probe into Trump and his allies in the aftermath of Jan. 6, code named “Arctic Frost,” was led by an openly anti-Trump FBI supervisor, and was eventually taken over by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith. The probe treated the effort by Trump’s allies to submit alternate electors to Congress to sway the certification of the 2020 election as a criminal conspiracy, even though two prior episodes in American history were not prosecuted as crimes. Experts told Just the News last year the FBI memo that officially launched the investigation, around the time that Trump announced he would run for president again, was thin on evidence and legal justifications.

Snooping and snapping
The House Judiciary Committee, the parent of Loudermilk’s subcommittee, released FBI records last year showing that the Arctic Frost investigators targeted more than 160 Republicans in Donald Trump’s orbit, including members of the president’s staff and Republican officials from the House and Senate. Loudermilk pointed to the case of Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, a member of his subcommittee, who claims that Capitol Police searched his office. Nehls alleged in a lawsuit last year that an officer improperly entered his office during the 2021 Thanksgiving break and snapped a photograph of his office whiteboard. Later, plainclothes officers returned to the office and questioned a staffer about the whiteboard without the congressman’s permission, the court documents allege.

“That is totally outside the realm of anything acceptable here,” Loudermilk said of the Nehls search. “He was investigated as a member of Congress by the US Capitol Police, and I know he has litigation regarding that going right now, but I think this is just the tip of the iceberg of what may have been happening, not only in the Wray FBI, but under the Pelosi House of Representatives as well.” “It just stinks to high heaven, but I believe I was a target,” Nehls say Nehls also told Just the News that he believes the Capitol Police spied on him because of his outspoken criticism of the department in the wake of Jan. 6. “I think that the Capitol Police, they found a few weaklings in there to go out there and spy – I will say ‘spy’ – and look into members of Congress that were very, very outspoken and critical of January 6,” Nehls told the John Solomon Reports podcast.

“We found out that these employees worked for the intelligence division of the U.S. Capitol Police. Now, why would you need these intelligence guys, these plain clothes guys, to just show up? It just stinks to high heaven, but I believe I was a target,” Nehls added. Former Capitol Police Chief Sund confirmed that even before Jan. 6 he faced increasing pressure from Democratic leadership for access to the Capitol Police intelligence unit, which he called “very concerning.” Sund told Just the News that “it was an ongoing process where we had, you know, people, senior staffers, like from [Senator Chuck] Schumer’s staff that wanted to be involved in intelligence briefing, wanted to have access into the Capitol Police Headquarters, specifically to be able to access into the intelligence unit.”

Though he pushed back on those efforts, Sund told the John Solomon Reports podcast that he does not know what happened after he resigned on Jan. 16, 2021, just ten days after the riot during which hundreds of protesters entered the secured Capitol building. “My concern is, what happened after January 6? You know, did these people then all of a sudden, now get involved? They’re now on the intelligence calls, intelligence briefings, things like that. Now, are they using that for any political benefit?” Sund questioned. Loudermilk has doggedly investigated the Jan. 6 security failures and politicization related to the Democrat-led Jan. 6 Select Committee for years. He exposed a key witness who changed her story that was damaging to Trump and documented failures to secure key entry points at the U.S. Capitol before protesters entered.

Pipe bomb mystery solved by Patel’s FBI
He also relentlessly pursued accountability for what was the biggest unsolved mystery of that day, how the FBI had failed to identify a suspect in the planting of two pipe bombs at the Democratic and Republican Party headquarters. That case was blown open last year when the new FBI Director, Kash Patel, and his then-Deputy Director, Dan Bongino, brought a new team and a fresh perspective to the mountains of data collected by investigators. The new approach led to the arrest of suspect Brian Cole Jr. of Virginia. Earlier this month, Loudermilk subpoenaed T-Mobile for the phone records that it had turned over to the FBI and had languished in its possession until last year.

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19 years ago he spelled it out. Who listened?

• Munich 2007: Putin’s Warning To The West (RT)

Exactly 19 years ago on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin took the podium at the Munich Security Conference and demolished the myths and falsehoods underpinning the American-led world order. Did anyone heed his warning? To Russia, the “rules-based international order” has always been shorthand for a system in which the US makes the rules and issues the orders. “However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making,” Putin told the audience in Munich. “It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.”


Under the auspices of protecting this order, the US carried out “unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions,” in “disdain for the basic principles of international law,” he declared.In the decade before Putin’s speech, the US invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq, and led a NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia on behalf of Kosovo separatists. Four years after his speech, NATO forces dropped more than 7,000 bombs on Libya, ending Muammar Gaddafi’s rule and handing the keys of the country to jihadists and slave traders. “No one feels safe,” Putin stated in 2007, “because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them.”

Putin warned that NATO’s broken promises to halt its eastward expansion after the Cold War represented “a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.” The Russian president noted that the US-led bloc had already placed its “frontline forces on our borders,” and asked “against whom is this expansion intended?” The following year, NATO published its infamous Bucharest declaration, assuring Ukraine and Georgia that they “will become members” at an unspecified future date. The consequences of this declaration – which flew in the face of warnings from Putin and American strategists – are playing out in Ukraine today.

No, the Atlanticist neoliberal establishment roundly ignored Putin’s layered and impassioned warning. But Russia kept trying. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov echoed Putin’s complaints when he spoke at the conference in 2018, pointing out that “NATO troops and military infrastructure are accumulating on our borders,” and that “the European theatre of war is being systematically developed.” By that stage several thousand people had been killed in Donbass. Lavrov urged European leaders to abide by the Minsk agreements, which were ostensibly aimed at ending hostilities in Donetsk and Lugansk and granting autonomy to the two predominantly Russian-speaking regions.

Following the collapse of the accords, and the escalation of the conflict in 2022, European and Ukrainian leaders admitted that the agreements were a ruse to enable Ukraine to buy time to prepare for a war with Russia.The organizers of the Munich Security Conference have not so much as attempted any introspection over the last 18 years. Instead, in their latest report, they blame US President Donald Trump for taking a “wrecking ball” to the so-called “rules-based international order.”

All the Europeans could do was cry. Literally, conference Chairman Christoph Heusgen broke down in tears during his closing comments, sobbing as he lamented the decline of the “rules-based international order” and proclaiming that “our common value base is not that common anymore.”nVance’s speech “illustrated just how different the current administration’s perspective on key issues is from the bipartisan liberal-internationalist consensus that has long guided US grand strategy,” Munich Security Conference Foundation President Wolfgang Ischinger wrote in a report ahead of this year’s conference, which kicks off on Friday. As such, discussion in Munich this year will focus almost entirely on “the United States’ evolving view of the international order,” he wrote.

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” For the first time since 1972, Russia (the former USSR) and the US have no treaty limiting strategic nuclear forces..”

• Russia Will Stick To Nuclear Arms Limits If US Does The Same (ZH)


One of the globe’s biggest developing stories this month, but which has been largely underreported in mainstream TV networks and other press, is the collapse of New START – the last major nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and the United States. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that Moscow will in good faith stick to the nuclear limits outlined in the now-expired arms control treaty, provided Washington does the same. It expired earlier this month after Washington declined to respond to President Vladimir Putin’s proposal for a one-year extension capping both sides’ nuclear arsenals.

The Trump admin has long wanted a more comprehensive agreement which brings China’s arsenal into the scope; however, there’s been no formal process on this front with Beijing or Moscow. Lavrov said Russia has no intention of rapidly expanding or deploying additional weapons, clarifying remarks from his ministry last week that suggested Moscow no longer considered itself bound by the treaty. “We proceed from the fact that this moratorium, which was announced by our president, remains in effect, but only while the United States does not exceed the outlined limits,” Lavrov told Russia’s parliament.

Some key aspects to the treaty have gone unobserved for some time, especially the regimen of mutual nuclear site inspections.President Trump has in the recent past called New START “badly negotiated” and said it “is being grossly violated. He has in mind Russia having blocked inspections of its nuclear facilities under the treaty framework in 2023, as tensions with Washington escalated over the proxy war in Ukraine. Moscow has in turn complained that Washington is the chief violator, and that it now refuses to respond to Putin’s overture to extend it by one year, while a more comprehensive and extended deal is negotiated.

That’s it. For the first time since 1972, Russia (the former USSR) and the US have no treaty limiting strategic nuclear forces. SALT 1, SALT 2, START I, START II, SORT, New START – all in the past. pic.twitter.com/D3TBZM9ffC — Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) February 4, 2026


Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave insight into why the White House has let New START expire: “Obviously, the president’s been clear in the past that in order to have true arms control in the 21st century, it’s impossible to do something that doesn’t include China because of their vast and rapidly growing stockpile,” he explained.

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Did the Internet make journalism worse?

• All the Media’s Men: When Journalism Became the Story -Part II of II (Wilson)

There was once a professional rule in American journalism that functioned as a real constraint: report the story; do not become the story. It was not a claim of purity. Ego, ambition, and moral certainty were known dangers, and the rule existed to keep them from overwhelming the work. Journalism was never perfect. Nothing is. But it was once constrained by this rule and by rivalry among competing papers, by scarcity of publishing platforms, by reputational risk, and by audiences willing to walk away. Those constraints mattered more than ideology.mThe first visible crack came with Nellie Bly, fairly described as a stunt reporter. Her work was brave and effective, exposing abuses that would otherwise have remained hidden.


But it also introduced a dangerous precedent: the journalist as protagonist. Readers followed the reporter as much as the facts. The tool proved powerful and reusable. The profession corrected itself for a time. Through the 1940s and 1950s, likely learning from war reporting norms, American journalism emphasized impersonality and restraint. Authority came from distance. Reporters were meant to be interchangeable. Credibility rested on institutional voice rather than personality. Television eroded that equilibrium. Once news had faces, voices, and time slots, personality became unavoidable. The anchor was no longer merely delivering information but performing steadiness and judgment.

Journalism did not yet see itself as entertainment, but it had begun using entertainment tools: lighting, camera angles, makeup, vocal intonation, even on-scene reporting.The decisive rupture came with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. What they uncovered mattered. Watergate took advantage of a nascent mythic template: the journalist as lone truth-seeker standing between power and the people. Reporting, fed by classic Hollywood movies that romanticized the crusading reporter, became an identity rather than a function.mFrom that point forward, becoming the story was no longer a lapse. It was aspirational.

Hollywood, Myth, and Moral Authority
Watergate supplied the moment. Hollywood, already primed to heroize the reporter, crafted the meaning. Films like All the President’s Men dramatized and then sanctified the Heroic Journalist. The journalist was patient, tenacious, hard-working, incorruptible, and uniquely qualified to Bring Truth to the public — a pattern that perfectly follows the Hero’s Journey. Opposition was framed not as disagreement but as ignorance or corruption. Journalism absorbed that image. It began to see itself as a secular clerisy: interpreters of reality rather than accountable informers. A clerisy assumes its authority by right of wisdom and superior knowledge. Questions are permitted only within bounds. Dissent is treated as moral failure rather than feedback.

Skepticism became asymmetrical. Journalists remained suspicious of every institution except one: their own. Tone displaced argument. Moral urgency crowded out evidentiary discipline. Entertainment tools such as emotion, narrative compression, repetition ceased to be aids and became substitutes for reasoning. And any pushback became grounds to cast the questioner out as a heretic.The pattern is familiar enough to be lampooned, as in my favorite satirical novel The Narrative, which captures how story replaces fact once the reporter becomes the hero and the audience becomes a problem to manage.

How Journalists Rise on the Left Today
Once journalism adopted that heroic clerical self-image, advancement followed a different logic. Status stopped coming from readers and started coming from institutions adjacent to power.Journalists rise by demonstrating narrative reliability, not truthfulness or factuality. Their stories must follow the Approved Narrative. Editors and other gatekeepers learn who can be trusted to frame events without destabilizing the approved story. This is rarely enforced explicitly. It works through selection. Those who create friction are sidelined; those who anticipate expectations are rewarded.

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“.. openly strategizing ways to work around that higher court ruling and keep giving bond releases to illegal aliens under the guise of “liberty interest.”

• Texas Judges Strategize Ways to Block DHS From Enforcing Immigration Laws (CTH)

This is one step further than simple Lawfare, this story is about lower court judges openly strategizing ways to stop the enforcement of laws they are supposed to uphold. Last week the Fifth Circuit Cout of Appeals ruled that detaining illegal aliens during the deportation proceedings is entirely following current immigration law. Now, according to Politico, federal judges in Texas are openly strategizing ways to work around that higher court ruling and keep giving bond releases to illegal aliens under the guise of “liberty interest.”

POLITICO – […] two federal district court judges in Texas, who are bound by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit’s ruling, said the 2-1 decision left an opening for them to continue granting immigrants’ release on other grounds, primarily constitutional arguments against detaining people who have established roots in the U.S. without due process. Those roots amount, in legal parlance, to a “liberty interest” that the Constitution says cannot be taken away without at least a hearing before a neutral judge. “This conclusion is not changed by the Fifth Circuit’s recent decision,” Judge Kathleen Cardone, an El Paso based appointee of George W. Bush, ruled late Monday in at least five cases, concluding that the circuit’s decision “has no bearing on this Court’s determination of whether [the petitioner] is being detained in violation of his constitutional right to procedural due process.”


Judge David Briones, an El Paso-based Clinton appointee, reached a similar conclusion. “The Court reiterates its original holding that noncitizens who have ‘established connections’ in the United States by virtue of living in the country for a substantial period acquire a liberty interest in being free from government detention without due process of law,” Briones wrote. The decisions from the Texas-based judges are notable in part because the administration has often rushed detainees there after their arrests in other states such as Minnesota.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.n A Justice Department official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the rulings were in keeping with the view that there are rogue judges who continue to make results-oriented decisions to suit their personal policy preferences.The 5th Circuit’s ruling has yet to percolate through federal courts across Texas and Louisiana, where detained immigrants have been filing so-called “habeas” petitions in extraordinary numbers to seek freedom from what they say is illegal detention without the opportunity for bond. The losing parties in Friday’s ruling may still appeal the decision to the full bench of the 5th Circuit or the Supreme Court. (more)”

Lower courts trying to circumvent higher court rulings, even before any plaintiff brings them a case or argument. This is judicial activism in the extremes.
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Hedge fund manager Ray Dalio warns that CBDCs will eliminate financial privacy and enable governments to tax, seize funds and cut off political opponents.

• ‘No Privacy’ CBDCs Will Come, Warns Billionaire Ray Dalio (CT)

American billionaire and hedge fund manager Ray Dalio has warned that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are coming, offering benefits but also potentially allowing governments to exert more control over people’s finances. “I think it will be done,” said Dalio on CBDCs in a wide-ranging interview on the Tucker Carlson Show on Monday, which also included topics on the US debt crisis, gold prices, and even a potential civil war. Ray Dalio is a billionaire hedge fund manager who has been co-chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates since 1985, after founding the firm in 1975.


During the interview, Dalio said CBDCs could be appealing due to the ease of transactions, likening them to money market funds in terms of functionality, but he also cautioned about their downsides. He said there will be a debate, but CBDCs “probably won’t” offer interest, so they will not be “an effective vehicle to hold because you’ll have the depreciation [of the dollar].” Dalio also cautioned that all CBDC transactions will be known to the government, which is good for controlling illegal activity, but also provides a great deal of control in other areas. “There will be no privacy, and it’s a very effective controlling mechanism by the government.”

A programmable digital currency will enable the government to tax directly, “they can take your money,” and establish foreign exchange controls, he said. mThat will be an “increasing issue,” particularly for international holders of that currency, as the government can seize funds from nationals of sanctioned countries. mDalio also said that you could be “shut off” from a CBDC if you were “politically disfavored.” An American CBDC is unlikely to be deployed in the near future, as US President Donald Trump has been vocally opposed to them.

Soon after taking office in January 2025, Trump signed an executive order prohibiting “the establishment, issuance, circulation, and use” of a US CBDC. According to the Atlantic Council’s CBDC tracker, only three countries have officially launched a CBDC: Nigeria, Jamaica, and The Bahamas. Another 49 countries are testing CBDCs, including China, Russia, India and Brazil. Twenty nations have a CBDC in development, and 36 are still researching central bank digital currencies. India’s central bank reportedly proposed an initiative in January linking BRICS CBDCs to facilitate cross-border trade and tourism payments.

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Debt Rattle July 3 2025

Jul 032025
 
 July 3, 2025  Posted by at 9:01 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  53 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Olga in a hat with feather 1920

 

• Trumpworld Rages At GOP Holdouts After Tax Bill Stalls In House (ZH)
• The Big Beautiful Bill Now Back in The House (CTH)
• A Big Beautiful Bill for the Military-Industrial Complex (Ron Paul)
• Coalition of Democrat Senators Challenge Layoffs As Rubio Shutters USAID (JTN)
• President Trump Firm, No More Tariff Extensions Beyond July 8th (CTH)
• Everywhere There Is Talk of War (Paul Craig Roberts)
• The Keys to Trump’s Middle East Triumph (Joecks)
• What Means ‘Winning’? (Alastair Crooke)
• Biden’s Energy Department Disbursed $42 Billion in Its Final Hours (Varney)
• Russiagate Was A Ploy To ‘Screw Trump’ – CIA Boss (RT)
• NATO Chief ‘Totally Understands’ US Cutting Off Weapons For Ukraine (RT)
• Halt To US Military Aid Could Spell Doom For Kiev – Bild (RT)
• Polish President Approves Memorial Day For Victims Of Ukrainian Nazis (RT)
• Women’s Sports Just Scored a Massive Win Against the Trans Agenda (Margolis)
• Putin-Backed Effort Saves Siberian Tiger From Extinction (RT)

 

 

CNN

Bannon

Scott

 

 

 

 

A 940-page bill is not supposed to be easy.

“.. July 4th looks like a pipe dream from here – then again, we’ve seen these grifting gasbags shake a tail like nobody’s business when vacation is on the line.”

• Trumpworld Rages At GOP Holdouts After Tax Bill Stalls In House (ZH)

Update (0018ET): Wednesday night came and went without the House GOP advancing the ‘Big Beautiful Bill Act’ to the floor for debate, after roughly a dozen Republicans stood their ground. As such, things have officially gotten ugly – with longtime Trump aides Jason Miller and Chris LaCivita telling the holdouts that they can either vote with Trump, “or you can vote with the Democrats.” “Buckle the fuck up,” said Miller, adding It’s a binary choice”. Top White House aide Stephen Miller, meanwhile, demanded that Republicans “stand with Trump” to show loyalty to the man who had peen persecuted by “the communist left.” Earlier in the evening, a procedural vote on adopting the rule for floor consideration of the Big Beautiful Bill was open for more than 2.5 hours, as Speaker Mike Johnson scrambled convince the holdouts to vote yes.

Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert indicated she’s sticking with her fellow Freedom Caucus members on any rule vote. “Not tonight,” she said, before several of the hard-liners huddled again, this time in Johnson’s office. -Politico Rep. Thomas Massie told the NY Times that he switched his vote to ‘no’ on the rule because if it ends up being the only vote on the BBB, he doesn’t want to be on record as having voted for it. “If it goes down, I can’t be a yes,” said Massie, who’s been a hard ‘no’ on the bill for weeks. That said, his comments seem to indicate that if his party is able to advance the procedural measure, he’d switch back and support bringing up the bill. Needless to say, July 4th looks like a pipe dream from here – then again, we’ve seen these grifting gasbags shake a tail like nobody’s business when vacation is on the line.

Update (2300ET): A dramatic scene is unfolding on the House floor, as four Republicans have voted ‘nay’ on the Senate-revised version of the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ – when House Speaker Mike Johnson could only afford three. According to Fox News’ Chad Pergram; ‘A 216-216 tie loses by rule. Dems got all of their members there and stuck together GOP needs to flip 1 mbr so long as other Republicans don’t vote no.’ So now the question is; will someone flip?

* * *
Update (1450ET): Are we having fun yet? Major divisions within the House threaten to derail the Big Beautiful Bill, with Speaker Mike Johnson struggling to overcome resistance by fiscal conservatives. Earlier in the day the House appeared ready to hold a test vote, however several conservative Republicans raised objections – suggesting that Johnson might not have the votes to move forward, given that he can only afford a handful of defections on the measure. As of midday, at least two Republicans were a hard ‘no’ on the bill in its current form. Meanwhile Rep. Thomas Massie says he has the votes to block it…

President Trump, meanwhile, met with holdouts at the White House as Democrats and Republicans argued over the merits of the bill on the House floor. At the end of the day, Johnson has little room for maneuvering – as any changes to the bill would send it back to the Senate for further deliberation that could drag on for weeks. Members of the House Freedom Caucus are livid over measures added to the Senate that increases costs. “The Senate doesn’t get to be the final say on everything. We’ve got to work this out,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) Wednesday morning, adding that there are enough Republicans “right now” who wanted to reopen the bill and don’t care about the July 4 recess deadline. More moderate Republicans objected to Medicaid cuts approved by the Senate that went deeper than the House’s May iteration.

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“As they say, Trump’s been right about everything, and this is the easiest of them all to predict..”

• The Big Beautiful Bill Now Back in The House (CTH)

With the BBB back in the House of Representatives, Speaker Mike Johnson now has the difficult job to push the bill to a final floor vote and get it to President Trump’s desk. Anticipating pushback and refusal of support from the House Freedom Caucus, earlier this morning President Trump sent a message via Truth Social drawing attention to the objective of the bill to generate economic growth:

PRESIDENT TRUMP – “Nobody wants to talk about GROWTH, which will be the primary reason that the Big, Beautiful Bill will be one of the most successful pieces of legislation ever passed. THIS GROWTH has already begun at levels never seen before. Trillions of Dollars are now being invested into the USA, more than ever before. Likewise, hundreds of Billions of Dollars in Tariffs are filling up the coffers of Treasury. The Tariff money has already arrived and is setting new records! We are growing our way out of the Sleepy Joe Biden MESS that he and the Democrats left us, and it is happening much faster than anyone thought possible. ”

“Our Country will make a fortune this year, more than any of our competitors, but only if the Big, Beautiful Bill is PASSED! As they say, Trump’s been right about everything, and this is the easiest of them all to predict. Republicans, don’t let the Radical Left Democrats push you around. We’ve got all the cards, and we are going to use them. Last year America was a “DEAD” Nation, with no hope for the future, and now it’s the “HOTTEST NATION IN THE WORLD!” MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Meanwhile, as noted by Politico: “House Freedom Caucus members like Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) blasted the Senate’s bill Tuesday for adding to the deficit and softening clean energy tax credits. Roy and Norman both voted against the bill in the Rules Committee overnight.” Speaker Johnson has to navigate the timing of the BBB reaching the floor, and in an effort to dissuade the concerns of the professional republican naysayers he is informing them of possible alternatives to changes in the current bill. “In an interview on Fox News on Tuesday night, Johnson said the House will plan to do two more reconciliation bills during this session of Congress, which ends in 2026.”

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“..America should return to the Founders’ vision of a country that, in the words of John Quincy Adams, does not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy”..”

• A Big Beautiful Bill for the Military-Industrial Complex (Ron Paul)

The US Senate worked through the weekend on the “Big Beautiful Bill.” The goal was to pass it quickly to ensure the House will then pass it and send it to President Trump’s desk before the July 4th holiday. However, disagreements among Republican Senators over reductions in spending on programs including Medicaid and food stamps as well as language in the bill eliminating “clean energy” tax credits were preventing Senate Republican leadership from getting enough votes to pass the bill. Also, some Republicans disagree with other Republicans in both the House and Senate on increasing the state and local tax (SALT) deduction. Many conservatives see this income tax deduction as encouraging states to maintain high taxes to fund big governments.

One item in the BBB that few Republicans are objecting to is the bill’s increase in military spending. The House version of the BBB added 150 billion dollars to the Pentagon’s already bloated budget. The Senate bill gave the military-industrial complex 156 billion dollars. Increasing military spending contradicts President Trump’s promise to stop wasting money on endless wars that have nothing to do with ensuring the security of the American people. Some of the BBB’s military spending will be used to put troops on the border. I support strengthening border security. However, I do not support using the military for domestic law enforcement, which includes enforcing immigration laws. Soldiers are trained to view people as potential enemies, not as innocent civilians to be protected. Introducing this mindset into domestic law enforcement will lead to abuses of liberty.

Increasing spending on militarism while cutting spending on programs that help low-income Americans is bad politics and bad policy. Polls show that the majority of Americans, including many Republicans, do not support overseas intervention. The growing opposition to our hyper-interventionist foreign policy is easy to understand. The US has engaged in numerous military actions in many countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria since the beginning of the 21st century. The American people pay for this militarism in several ways. One is the “inflation tax” imposed by the Federal Reserve in order to monetize the debt incurred by the US government for endless wars. President Trump has turned his back on his antiwar supporters by bombing Iran and by increasing military spending to over a trillion dollars.

The Republican insistence on increasing military spending is the main reason Congress cannot cut taxes without increasing the debt, making cuts in domestic welfare programs, or both. If the Republicans want to be the Make America Great Again party, they need to embrace a true America First foreign policy. This means no more regime change wars or US taxpayer supported “color revolutions.” Instead, America should return to the Founders’ vision of a country that, in the words of John Quincy Adams, does not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy” and instead is “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” while “the champion and vindicator only of her own.” A return to a noninterventionist foreign policy is the only way we will be able to begin to pay down the national debt and restore a government that adheres to the constitutional limits on its powers and respects all the people’s rights all the time.

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A lot of corruption at USAID has been uncovered. Something must obviously change. Are these senators just trying to keep the graft vehicle in place so the money keeps flowing?

• Coalition of Democrat Senators Challenge Layoffs As Rubio Shutters USAID (JTN)

A coalition of Democratic senators introduced legislation Tuesday to combat reductions-in-force within the State Department as Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development. “This legislation is crucial to protecting America’s ability to respond to global threats,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., a sponsor of the bill. The legislation specifically targets an agency’s ability to conduct a reduction-in-force, where it can lay off large numbers of employees for budgetary reasons. Large-scale RIFs across the federal government marked the early days of the Trump administration, prompting a flurry of legal action against the government. The Senate legislation specifically targets RIFs against employees at the State Department and the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development.

“The Trump administration is systematically dismantling our diplomatic institutions and weakening the workforce we depend on to advance U.S. interests, respond to crises, and out-compete adversaries like the People’s Republic of China,” Shaheen said. Rubio criticized USAID for its practices in distributing assistance across the globe. “The era of government-sanctioned inefficiency is OVER,” Rubio wrote in a social media post. “From now on, our foreign assistance programs will be accountable to the American taxpayer.” The state department secretary said USAID’s assistance functions will be absorbed by his agency. The bill contains four provisions that would limit the timeline and effectiveness of RIFs within the State Department.

First, the bill requires an agency to report RIFs involving more than 50 people to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee 20 days in advance of the planned layoff. The layoff must be accompanied by an explanation of the reduction that includes alternatives considered, whether the RIF complies with associated laws and how the RIF affects the agency’s mission. Second, the legislation extends protection for foreign service officers by only allowing them to be included in RIFs only based on job performance, rather than budget needs. This would include considering employment tenure, language capabilities and military preference before laying off a foreign service officer. The bill also requires a minimum 120 days’ notice for foreign service officers and 60 days for civil service employees included in RIFs.

Lastly, the bill requires the State Department to provide at least 30 days’ advance notice before making changes to RIF procedures. The bill will likely not pass in the Republican-controlled Senate. Additionally, Rubio’s dismantling of USAID further cemented the agency’s desire to cut spending across its operations. “Americans will not pay taxes to fund failed governments in faraway lands,” Rubio said. “Moving forward, our assistance will be targeted and time limited.” It is estimated USAID spent $715 billion over several decades in its operation. “We will favor those nations that have demonstrated both the ability and willingness to help themselves and will target our resources to areas where they can have a multiplier effect and catalyze a durable private sector, including American companies, and global investment,” Rubio said. Rubio said he would implement a 15% cut in the State Department on July 1 but appeared to delay while nationwide injunctions held up the layoffs in court.

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“This firm date is why India has extended their negotiation team in Washington DC, and is also the reason why Europe is coming Thursday..”

• President Trump Firm, No More Tariff Extensions Beyond July 8th (CTH)

There is some interesting information within the video of President Trump aboard AF-1 as he returns from Florida. However, one of the more interesting aspects comes around 05:39 when asked if he was thinking about extending the tariff pause beyond July 8, 2025. As noted by President Trump, very firmly, no. There is no reason to extend the deadline for reciprocal tariffs beyond July 8th for any country not in direct negotiations as of that date. Trump intends to just send them a letter outlining the applied tariff rate and that’s it. Done is done. WATCH:

This firm date is why India has extended their negotiation team in Washington DC, and is also the reason why Europe is coming Thursday. The baseline tariffs are done, everyone pays 10% regardless of a FTA or not. The reciprocal tariff rate will be applied to those without an FTA effective July 9th. [The EU (who wants a trade deal now) is eventually going to align with Canada (who will need a trade deal later). This factors into the current trade dynamic and looms over the decision making.] Post July 9th, President Trump moves on to other important geopolitical matters with the tariffs as an ancillary weapon for adherence to the new international trade alignment.

Those who want to benefit commit to the U.S. dollar as the trade currency (that’s the reason for India’s announcement today), and trade preferences are then used to shake up the geopolitical alignments. Watch for how this plays out with Trump’s planned UK visit. From there, and after the gnashing of teeth settles down, later in the summer President Trump then triggers the USMCA renegotiation phase with Mexico and Canada. President Trump is essentially ambivalent to the pleas from nations who want to continue their trade imbalance. This sequencing and outline appears clear; but let’s watch and see what happens.

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“What percentage of the Western population understands that the Kremlin was forced to intervene in the Russian provinces in Ukraine in order to prevent a Gaza-type destruction of Russian people?”

• Everywhere There Is Talk of War (Paul Craig Roberts)

Pundits are debating when the Israel-Iran war will resume. They are debating the West’s use of its Ukraine proxy in the war with Russia. They are debating when and how the US conflict with China will flare up. But no one is asking what is the point of the wars. What are they about? This is the most relevant question, especially when four of the parties to the conflicts have nuclear weapons. The answer to the question is the wars are about hegemony. Israel wants hegemony over the Muslim Middle East, and so does Washington. And Washington wants hegemony over Russia and China. Israel’s war with Iran is about eliminating an opponent to Israel’s hegemony as expressed by the Zionist aspiration of Greater Israel–from the Nile to the Euphrates, recently expanded to include half of Saudi Arabia and all of Pakistan.

Washington’s war with Russia and China is based on the Wolfowitz doctrine that declares US hegemony over the world as the principle goal of American foreign policy. No American president has yet repudiated this doctrine. So the wars are about nothing but the selfish aspirations of Israel for regional hegemony and Washington for world hegemony. Be sure you comprehend that it is nothing but the selfish aspirations of two countries that are the cause of millions of dead, maimed, and dislocated peoples, for the destruction of entire countries in the Middle East –Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon, with Iran a current target and with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey waiting in the wings. The US is responsible for massive deaths, injuries, displacement, and destruction in Ukraine (and Palestine) and for provocations of Russia, such as the attack on the Russian strategic triad that eventually will result in nuclear war, with China waiting in the wings.

The US currently is increasing the pressure on Russia by fomenting color revolutions in former Central Asian provinces of the Soviet Union. Washington’s intent is to create more Ukraines on Russia’s borders in hopes of destabilizing the Russian government. As the American military/security complex sees it, the more proxy wars Washington can get going on Russia’s borders, the quicker the Russian state will be overcome. Foreign policy commentary pretends that the West is defensively resisting Russian aggression that otherwise will spread beyond Ukraine into the EU. The proxy war against Russia that Washington initiated by overthrowing the democratically elected government in Ukraine and installing a neo-Nazi American puppet and siccing US trained Ukrainian forces on the break-away former Russian provinces in Ukraine is presented as defending Ukraine against a Russian invasion. This transparent lie is treated as truth in Western foreign affairs commentary.

What percentage of the Western population understands that the Kremlin was forced to intervene in the Russian provinces in Ukraine in order to prevent a Gaza-type destruction of Russian people? How many know that Putin refused the request of the Donbas Russians to be reunited with Russia when Crimea was? How many know that instead Putin relied on the Minsk Agreement, which the West used for eight years to deceive Putin while building up a large and well equipped Ukrainian army to invade the Donbas and slaughter the Russian population? How many understand that it was only after the Biden regime, NATO, and the EU cold-shouldered Putin and Lavrov’s frantic efforts to achieve a mutual defense agreement with the West during December 2021-February 2022 when the Ukrainian army was poised to attack Donbas that Putin was forced to intervene for which Russia was unprepared as Putin, averse to war, had relied on negotiations.

What has Iran done to us? Iran has not assassinated our leaders, sanctioned us, bombed us or stolen our bank reserves. All lran has done is to refuse to submit to Israel. Why is that a cause for an American war with Iran? None of these facts are part of the foreign policy discussion. Those of us who insist on facts are labeled “Russian agent/dupe” and demonized as spreaders of disinformation. Who is it that wants war so badly that facts are unacceptable? Alas, the Western World has no media to investigate, no congressional and parliamentary committees to investigate, and no one but a few of us demonized souls to hold liars accountable. This is the sad state of affairs in the Western World.

As one of a diminishing number who defends Western Civilization for its achievement of embedding values in society and its mores, law, and politics that raised humans from barbarity into civilization–values such as respect for truth over power, of forgiveness over vengeance, of empathy over unconcern, of love over hate, of integrity and self-respect over material gain, I wonder at times whether I am defending an entity that no longer exists. Perhaps a society whose values have eroded away brings itself to its end in self-destruction. The weapons for the end of life on earth exist in abundance. It only takes one mistake, and we live in a world where human mistakes are the ruling hallmark of humanity, a world that has succumbed to evil.

What excuse is there for the Genocide of Palestine, for the world to stand aside while a people and their country are exterminated? What did Palestinians ever do to anyone? Why did Americans provide Satan’s Chosen People with the means to destroy a people who never harmed anyone, a people who submitted for 78 years to Israel stealing their country from them village by village, all the while demonizing them as terrorists? When one looks honestly at the West today and its Israeli appendage, is its survival morally justified? How can Western Civilization be renewed? Who can do it? Where are the leaders? All are busy feathering their nests as Western Civilization collapses.

Yesterday I described how President Trump could end the war in the Middle East and Washington’s war with Russia. That would be a beginning, but is it a bridge too far for a civilization that has been loosened from its moorage? Can Western Civilization renew itself when its universities and pubic schools teach its failures and not its successes? Can America be made great again when law schools do not believe in the US Constitution, which they designate as a “racist document,” when journalism schools teach that service to liberal-left agendas, not to truth, is the function of journalists, when governments at every level are accountable to the self-interest of interest groups who supply their campaign funds, not to voters, when decades of open borders have replaced an American population with a tower of babel? What is left for Trump to work with?

Trump needs to come home from the world stage to America. He should turn off the money and diplomatic protection to Israel and Ukraine and focus on trying to save America and Western Civilization. He will get little, if any help, from Europe and Canada, whose politicians have already delivered their ethnicities to The Camp of the Saints. But possibly America could be saved. It is a long shot, but worth a try. People should lay off Trump. Give him a chance to understand the real challenge. Perhaps he will undertake the challenge. Perhaps he will succeed. What other chance do we have?

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Meet the fanclub.

• The Keys to Trump’s Middle East Triumph (Joecks)

If you blinked, you just missed World War III. President Donald Trump on June 23 announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. That came two days after Trump sent B-2 stealth bombers to drop bunker-buster bombs on the Fordow nuclear enrichment plant. Only the United States had the capability to obliterate the deeply buried site. U.S. submarines also launched 30 Tomahawk missiles against two other Iranian nuclear sites in Natanz and Isfahan. Despite some initial attempts to test its boundaries, the agreement has held up as of this writing. According to some of the loudest voices on the Left and Right, it wasn’t supposed to end this way. Shortly after it happened, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., declared that Trump’s decision to bomb Iran was “disastrous.”

“He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations,” she wrote on X. “It is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment.” For months, Tucker Carlson has railed against attacking Iran. “It’s worth pointing out that a strike on the Iranian nuclear sites will almost certainly result in thousands of American deaths at bases throughout the Middle East,” he wrote on the social media platform X in March. He continued, “A bombing campaign against Iran will set off a war.” AOC and Carlson may not agree on much, but they now have this in common. They were both spectacularly wrong. It’s worth looking at what Trump understood, which they didn’t.

First, he rejected the false dichotomy of doing nothing or a regime-change war. This tactic is common in politics. It involves claiming that someone either supports your position or endorses an extremely unpopular position. In complicated policy issues, there are usually many options. Those opposed to Trump attacking Iran rushed out this line of attack. After the United States bombed Iran, Geraldo Rivera wrote on X that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “suckered Trump (and the USA!) into another forever war with Iran.” On June 23, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posted on X, “Only 6 months in and we are back into foreign wars, regime change, and World War 3.” As Trump showed, there was another option. He destroyed Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons and left the fate of the Iranian regime to the Iranian people.

Next, Trump exhibited moral clarity. There are many on the Left and some on the Right who are vocally anti-Israel. They attacked Israel as it fought Hamas after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre. They attacked Israel for Operation Grim Beeper, which neutralized thousands of Hezbollah fighters. They attacked Israel for bombing Iran. But here’s the key point Trump understands. Some violent acts are morally good. In Michigan recently, a church member spotted a would-be mass shooter and ran into him with his pickup. An armed security guard then killed the gunman. Intentionally ramming someone with a car or shooting someone else is a violent act. In this circumstance, it was morally justified. Similarly, Israel acts violently to kill terrorists and foreign officials who plot to kill its civilians. That’s not morally equivalent to Iran and its terrorist proxies targeting Israeli civilians. Trump made that distinction.

Finally, Trump showed courage. It isn’t enough to have the world’s strongest military in theory. The country needs a leader with the internal fortitude to exercise that power. Just look at former President Joe Biden’s surrender in Afghanistan in 2021. Since Bill Clinton, every U.S. president has said that Iran can’t be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon. At the opportune moment, Trump had the guts to ensure it won’t any time soon. Unless the Iranian people overthrow it, the Iranian regime will remain America’s enemy. But by depriving it of access to nuclear weapons, Trump has made it a much less threatening one. Bravo.

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“..the Israeli promise of an ‘Iran ready to implode, Syria-style’ – an ‘Epic’ transformation to a ‘New Middle East’ – must have been alluring enough for Trump to brusquely sweep aside Tulsi Gabbard’s assertion that Iran had no nuclear weapon.”

• What Means ‘Winning’? (Alastair Crooke)

At one level, Iran plainly ‘won’. Trump had wanted to be regaled with a reality-TV style, splendid ‘Victory’. Sunday’s attack on the three nuclear sites indeed was loudly proclaimed by Trump and Hegseth as such – having ‘obliterated’ Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme, they claimed. ‘Destroyed it completely’, they insist. Only … it didn’t: The strike caused superficial surface damage, perhaps. And seemingly was co-ordinated in advance with Iran via intermediaries to be a ‘once and done’ affair. This is a habitual Trump pattern (advance co-ordination). It was the mode in Syria, Yemen and even with Trump’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani – all intended to give Trump a quick media ‘victory’.

The so-called ‘ceasefire’ that rapidly followed the U.S. strikes – albeit not without some hiccoughs – was a hastily assembled ‘cessation of hostilities’ (and no ceasefire – as no terms were agreed). It was a ‘stop-gap’. What this means is that the negotiating impasse between Iran and Witkoff remains unresolved. The Supreme Leader has forcefully laid down Iran’s position: ‘No surrender’; Enrichment proceeds; and the U.S. should quit the region and keep its nose out of Iranian affairs. So, on the positive side of cost-benefit analysis, Iran likely has enough centrifuges and 450 kg of highly enriched uranium – and nobody (except Iran) now knows where the stash is hidden. Iran will resume processing. A second plus for Iran is that the IAEA and its Director-General Grossi have been so egregiously subversive of Iranian sovereignty that the Agency most likely will be expelled from Iran.

The Agency failed in its basic responsibility to safeguard sites at which enriched uranium was present. The U.S. and European intelligence services thus will lose their ‘eyes’ on the ground – as well as forego the IAEA’s Artificial Intelligence data collection (on which Israel’s identification of targets likely was heavily dependent). On the cost side, militarily, Iran of course suffered physical damage, but retains its missile potency. The U.S.-Israeli narrative of Iranian skies as ‘open wide’ to Israeli aircraft is yet another deception contrived to support the ‘winning narrative’: As Simplicius notes: “There remains not a single shred of proof that Israeli (or American, for that matter) planes ever significantly overflew Iran at any time.

Claims of ‘total air superiority’ have no grounds. [Footage] up until the final day shows Israel continued relying on their heavy UCAVs [large surveillance and strike drone aircraft] to strike Iranian ground targets”. Furthermore, drop tanks from Israeli planes were recorded washing up on Iran’s northernmost Caspian shores, suggesting rather, stand-off missile launches were being mounted by Israel’s Air Force from the north (i.e. from Azerbaijani airspace). Up a level in the cost-benefit analysis, one must move to the bigger picture: That the destruction of the nuclear programme was pretext, yet not the main objective. The Israelis themselves say that the decision to attack the Iranian State was taken last September/October (2024).

Israel’s intricate, costly and sophisticated plan (de-capitation, targeted assassinations, cyber-attack and the infiltration of drone-equipped sabotage cells) that unfolded during the 13 June sneak attack was focussed on one immediate aim: the implosion of the Iranian state, paving the path to chaos and ‘regime change’. Did Trump believe in the Israeli delusion that Iran was on the brink of imminent collapse? Very likely, he did. Did he believe the Israeli story (reportedly concocted by the IAEA Mosaic programme) that Iran was speeding ‘towards a nuclear weapon’? It seems possible that Trump was suckered – or more likely, was willing prey – to the Israeli and U.S. Israeli-Firster narrative building. As the Ukraine issue has proved more intractable than Trump expected, the Israeli promise of an ‘Iran ready to implode, Syria-style’ – an ‘Epic’ transformation to a ‘New Middle East’ – must have been alluring enough for Trump to brusquely sweep aside Tulsi Gabbard’s assertion that Iran had no nuclear weapon.

So, has the Iranian military response and the massive popular rallying to the flag been a ‘big win’ for Iran? Well, it is certainly a ‘win’ over the ‘brink of regime change’ pedlars; yet perhaps the ‘win’ needs refining? It is not a ‘forever win’. Iran cannot afford to let its guard down. ‘Iranian unconditional surrender’ is, of course, now off the cards. But the point here is that the Israel establishment, the pro-Israeli lobby in the U.S. (and possibly Trump too), will continue to believe that the only way to guarantee that Iran never moves toward threshold weapon status – is not through intrusive inspections and monitoring, but precisely via ‘regime change’ and the installation of a purely western puppet in Tehran.

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“..a sum that exceeded the total amount its Loan Programs Office (LPO) had put out in the past decade.”

• Biden’s Energy Department Disbursed $42 Billion in Its Final Hours (Varney)

In its last two working days, the Biden administration’s Energy Department signed off on nearly $42 billion for green energy projects – a sum that exceeded the total amount its Loan Programs Office (LPO) had put out in the past decade. The frenzied activity on Jan. 16 and 17, 2025, capped a spending binge that saw the LPO approve at least $93 billion in current and future disbursements after Vice President Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election in November, according to documents provided by the department to RealClearInvestigations. It appears that Biden officials were rushing to deploy billions in approved funding in anticipation that the incoming Trump administration would seek to redirect uncommitted money away from clean energy projects.

The agreements were made despite a warning from the department’s inspector general, urging the loan office to suspend operations in December over concerns that post-election loans could present conflicts of interest. In just a few months, some of the deals have already become dicey, leading to fears that the Biden administration has created multiple Solyndras, the green energy company that went bankrupt after the Obama administration gave it $570 million. These deals include:

• Sunnova, a rooftop solar outfit that thus far had $382 million of its $3.3 billion loan guaranteed, filed for bankruptcy this month. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
• Li-Cycle, a battery recycling facility, had a $445 million loan approved in November, but since then, the company was put up for sale and has filed for bankruptcy. The Energy Department said no money has been disbursed on that deal. Li-Cycle did not respond to a request for comment.
• A $705 million loan was approved on Jan. 17 for Zum Energy, an electric school bus company in California, and its “Project Marigold.” At $350,000 and more, electric school buses currently cost more than twice as much as their diesel counterparts. So far, Zum has received $21.7 million from the government, according to usaspending.gov. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
• A $9.63 billion Blue Oval SK loan on Jan. 16 was the second largest post-election deal, topped only by a $15 billion loan the next day to Pacific Gas & Electric, with most of that for renewables. The Blue Oval project in Kentucky – a joint venture between Ford Motor Co. and a South Korean entity – has been dealing with numerous workplace complaints, and construction of a second EV battery manufacturing plant there has been delayed. More than $7 billion has been obligated on that deal, according to the Energy Department. Blue Oval did not respond to a request for comment.

The money and the hasty way in which it was earmarked have drawn the attention of the Trump administration. “It is extremely concerning how many dozens of billions of dollars were rushed out the door without proper due diligence in the final days of the Biden administration,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement to RCI. “DOE is undertaking a thorough review of financial assistance that identifies waste of taxpayer dollars.” The enormous sums came from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which injected $400 billion into the LPO, a previously sleepy Energy Department branch originally intended to spur nuclear energy projects. That total represented more than 10 times the amount the LPO had ever committed in any fiscal year of its existence.

Prior to the post-election blowout, the office’s biggest fiscal year was 2024, when it committed $34.8 billion, records show. Even with the rush to push billions out the door in its last months, close to $300 billion of the Inflation Reduction Act money remains uncommitted by the LPO. Trump administration officials have already nixed some smaller deals. Secretary Wright recently urged Congress to keep the money in place as the LPO now aims to use it to further the Trump administration’s energy policy, particularly with nuclear projects.

That unprecedented gusher of cash from the LPO echoes the efforts of the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency to push $20 billion out the door before it left office. As RCI has previously reported, the EPA – which had never been a consequential grant-making operation – was tasked with awarding $27 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funding through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and Solar For All programs. It did so in less than six months in 2024, including an unorthodox arrangement in which Biden officials parked some $20 billion outside the Treasury’s control. That money was earmarked for a handful of nonprofits, some of which had skimpy assets and were linked with politically connected directors.

The LPO’s post-election bonanza was put together in even less time. The Energy Department deals, however, involve mostly for-profit enterprises, which raises questions about whether the Biden administration was propping up companies that would not have survived in the private marketplace. Should any of the companies hit it big in the future, shareholders could get rich, while taxpayers will receive only the interest on the loan. “The loan office should not be in the virtual venture business,” said Mark Mills, executive director of the National Center on Energy Analytics. “But in a few cases, it could make sense to serve as a catalyst or backstop for viable and important projects from a national security or policy perspective.”

RCI spoke with several Trump administration officials who declined to comment on the record, given the extensive ongoing review of both the LPO’s post-election arrangements and other Energy Department projects linked to Biden’s climate agenda. “They wanted to get the billions to companies that probably wouldn’t exist unless they could get money from the government,” one current official said. “The business plans, such as they were, were ‘how do we secure capital from the government?’”

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“..calling the work on the report “chaotic,” “atypical,” and “markedly unconventional.”

• Russiagate Was A Ploy To ‘Screw Trump’ – CIA Boss (RT)

A US intelligence report on Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election, commissioned by then-President Barack Obama, was nothing but a deliberate manipulation, CIA Director John Ratcliffe has said, citing his agency’s recent internal review. Known as the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Election Interference (ICA), the report kickstarted the Russiagate conspiracy, prompted special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry, and “ate up the first two years” of President Donald Trump’s first term, Ratcliffe said in an interview with the New York Post published on Wednesday. The new CIA head ordered an internal review of the report in May.

Obama ordered the ICA just six weeks before leaving office. According to the CIA review of its drafting and rushed release, declassified on Wednesday, then-CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were unusually and “excessively involved” in the process. “The rushed timeline to publish both classified and unclassified versions before the presidential transition raised questions about a potential political motive behind the White House tasking and timeline,” the review said, calling the work on the report “chaotic,” “atypical,” and “markedly unconventional.”

The CIA review found that Brennan effectively directed the compilation of the ICA and particularly insisted on including the later discredited Steele dossier. The dossier – a compilation of unverified rumors about Trump and his alleged links to Russia – was compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and reportedly funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. “This was Obama, Comey, Clapper, and Brennan deciding, ‘We’re going to screw Trump,’” Ratcliffe said, commenting on his agency’s findings. “It was, ‘We’re going to create this and put the imprimatur of an IC assessment in a way that nobody can question it.’ They stamped it as Russian collusion and then classified it so nobody could see it.” “Brennan and Clapper and Comey manipulated [and] silenced all the career professionals and railroaded the process,” the CIA director added.

American public opinion was further manipulated by constant media leaks and unnamed officials cited by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other mainstream outlets. “Before work on the assessment even began, media leaks suggesting that the IC had already reached definitive conclusions risked creating an anchoring bias,” the review noted. The ICA, as well as the FBI’s 2016 ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation and the subsequent Mueller inquiry, cast a long shadow over Trump’s first term, with allegations of “Russian collusion” persisting in the media even after Mueller’s report found no evidence to support them. Moscow has also repeatedly denied any election interference.

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But… Just this once…

• NATO Chief ‘Totally Understands’ US Cutting Off Weapons For Ukraine (RT)

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has said he “totally understands” the US prioritizing its own national interests, but stressed that European allies cannot continue backing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia without support from Washington. Rutte made the remarks in a Wednesday interview with Fox News, responding to reports that Washington has scaled back critical military aid to Kiev, including deliveries of air defense ammunition, missiles, and artillery shells. “I totally understand that the US always has to make sure that their own interests are covered,” the NATO chief said, but argued that “flexibility” was needed.

“In the short term, Ukraine cannot do without all the support it can get when it comes to ammunition and to air defense systems,” Rutte stated. When it comes to the burden shift from the US to Europe, that’s taking place, but we cannot do without the practical US support. According to Matthew Whitaker, Washington’s envoy to NATO, the cut in US aid to Ukraine is part of President Donald Trump’s domestic-focused policy shift. “This is what ‘America first’ looks like,” he told Fox News on Wednesday. The Pentagon needs to “make sure that the US has the strategic defense capabilities necessary to project power,” Whitaker stated.

The US president has previously criticized the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid sent to Ukraine under his predecessor Joe Biden. Trump has instead pushed for peace talks, while demanding that NATO allies take on a greater role in supporting Kiev and increase their own military spending. Last week, European members of the US-led military bloc pledged to provide Ukraine with more than €35 billion ($41 billion) in aid and vowed to increase their NATO military spending to 5% of GDP over the next decade, up from a longstanding 2% target. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned that such a “catastrophic” burden on NATO state budgets could spell “the organization’s collapse.”

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“..could make Kiev’s situation dire in less than two months..”

• Halt To US Military Aid Could Spell Doom For Kiev – Bild (RT)

The US decision to suspend its supply of weapons to Ukraine could make Kiev’s situation dire in less than two months, the German tabloid Bild has reported, citing military experts. Without America’s support, the Ukrainian military would struggle to fight Russia in several major fields, the outlet stated. Washington’s envoy to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, confirmed to Fox News on Wednesday that the decision to halt arms shipments was made as part of the “America first” policy. He also said that the US needs to focus on maintaining its own “strategic defense capabilities” and particularly make sure that “we have enough Patriot missiles.”

Patriot missiles were included by several Western media outlets, including Politico and NBC News, among the categories of weapons that will no longer be sent to Kiev. The list also includes Stinger and AIM air-to-air missiles, hundreds of Hellfire and GMLRS systems, and thousands of 155mm artillery shells. According to Bild, the lack of Patriot missiles could deal a particularly significant blow to Ukraine’s air defense capabilities as the US-made weapons are reportedly the only ones capable of intercepting Russian ballistic missiles.

The halt in deliveries of AIM missiles could potentially leave the Ukrainian military struggling to intercept Russian strike drones, the tabloid stated. The lack of GMLRS munitions would also reportedly be “devastating” as it would make US-made HIMARS multiple rocket launchers used by the Ukrainian military “virtually useless.” Kiev’s forces have just enough western-supplied weapons to last them until late summer, Bild reported, citing Carlo Masala, a political scientist and defense expert heading the Intelligence and Security Studies program at the Bundeswehr University of Munich.

After that, the situation “will become critical,” Masala told the tabloid, adding that the Ukrainian military is heavily reliant on Western arms shipments. US President Donald Trump has previously questioned the rationale behind endless aid to Ukraine. He also made no specific promises to Kiev at a meeting with Vladimir Zelensky on the sidelines of the NATO summit in The Hague last week. Moscow has repeatedly stated that Western weapons supplies only prolong hostilities and human suffering while having no effect on the eventual outcome of the conflict.

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“Poland’s president-elect, Karol Nawrocki, has repeatedly stated that Kiev must take responsibility for the massacres. Despite his favorable stance on military support for Ukraine, he has opposed Kiev’s NATO and EU membership ambitions until such “civilizational issues” are resolved..”

• Polish President Approves Memorial Day For Victims Of Ukrainian Nazis (RT)

Outgoing Polish President Andrzej Duda has established an official day of remembrance for the victims of the “genocide” committed by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during World War II. From 1943 to 1945, Ukrainian Nazi collaborators murdered over 100,000 ethnic Poles in the regions of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, now part of modern Ukraine. The peak of the massacres, which the Polish government has officially recognized as a genocide, occurred in mid-1943, when the residents of “about a hundred villages” were exterminated on July 11, according to the text of a bill passed by the Polish Parliament and Senate last month.

On Wednesday, Duda signed a law officially establishing July 11 as the “National Day of Remembrance of Poles – Victims of Genocide committed by the OUN and UPA in the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic,” according to his office. “The martyrdom of Poles for belonging to the Polish nation deserves to be remembered with an annual day designated by the Polish state to honor the victims,” the document states. The massacres have long been a source of tension in relations between Kiev and Warsaw, despite Poland being one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters in its conflict with Moscow.

Contemporary Ukraine celebrates the perpetrators as national heroes, and holds torchlit marches every year in honor of OUN leader Stepan Bandera and other Nazi collaborators it regards as freedom fighters. Ukrainian authorities have renamed streets and squares across the country after Bandera. The government has also faced criticism for its reluctance to allow the exhumation of victims’ remains. Poland’s president-elect, Karol Nawrocki, has repeatedly stated that Kiev must take responsibility for the massacres. Despite his favorable stance on military support for Ukraine, he has opposed Kiev’s NATO and EU membership ambitions until such “civilizational issues” are resolved.

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There will come a day when we won’t believe we were ever this far gone.

“..You can’t trample women’s civil rights in the name of political correctness and expect to get away with it.”

• Women’s Sports Just Scored a Massive Win Against the Trans Agenda (Margolis)

The Department of Education just delivered a major dose of accountability: The University of Pennsylvania has agreed to resolve Title IX violations tied to its decision to let Will “Lia” Thomas—a biological male—compete on the women’s swim team during the 2021-22 season. It’s the latest fallout from a controversy that never should have happened in the first place. UPenn’s reckless embrace of gender ideology came at the direct expense of female athletes, who were sidelined, stripped of titles, and told to stay silent in the name of “inclusion.” Now, they’re finally getting some justice. But it doesn’t stop there. The university will also restore the records and titles that were effectively stolen from female athletes and issue personal apologies to each woman impacted by the farce they were made to endure.

“I am deeply grateful to the Trump administration for standing firm in protecting women and girls and restoring our rightful accolades,” Paula Scanlan, one of Thomas’s former teammates, told OutKick. “It is because of their strong leadership that my alma mater now knows it has no choice but to begin the process of reforming its policies to uphold women’s rights. Today marks a momentous step toward repairing the past mistreatment of female athletes and forging a future where sex discrimination no longer limits girls’ potential.” This is a long-overdue win for common sense and fairness in women’s sports—and a brutal indictment of the woke insanity that allowed it to happen in the first place. It never should have taken federal intervention to make this right, but credit where it’s due: The Biden-era weaponization of Title IX is finally getting checked under Trump’s administration.

Let’s hope this sets the precedent. No more erasing women. No more ideological experiments on college athletes. Biology isn’t bigotry, and the women who earned those records deserve every last bit of recognition they were denied. This isn’t just a symbolic gesture. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights ruled that UPenn’s decision to let Thomas compete wasn’t just unfair—it was illegal. The university, which raked in about a billion dollars in federal funds last year, was staring down the barrel of serious financial consequences if it didn’t comply. Unlike the state of Maine, which is still fighting the federal government over similar violations, UPenn chose to cut its losses and do the right thing—albeit only after being cornered.

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon put it plainly: “Today’s resolution agreement with UPenn is yet another example of the Trump effect in action. Thanks to the leadership of President Trump, UPenn has agreed both to apologize for its past Title IX violations and to ensure that women’s sports are protected at the University for future generations of female athletes.” This is what real leadership looks like—standing up to the mob and restoring sanity to American institutions. McMahon also made it clear that this isn’t just about apologies and paperwork. The university is erasing Thomas’ so-called “records” and giving them back to the women who actually earned them. “We wanted to make sure that it was emphasized that this was wrong and the university didn’t take the right kind of action and to apologize to these women for putting them in situations where they could have been hurt or where they would have lost opportunity or where they might have had their dignity impugned because they had to change in private spaces in front of males… So I think an apology was absolutely warranted.” That’s not just policy—it’s common decency.

Riley Gaines, another athlete who tied Thomas in NCAA competition, called the resolution “further proof that President Trump and his government agencies are committed to a pro-woman agenda.” Gaines is right. This administration isn’t just talking about women’s rights—they’re actually defending them, sending a clear message to every college and university in America: You can’t trample women’s civil rights in the name of political correctness and expect to get away with it. This resolution is a victory for every girl and woman who’s been told to sit down, shut up, and accept unfairness for the sake of someone else’s feelings. It’s a reminder that truth matters, biology matters, and women’s sports deserve protection—not just lip service. The days of universities hiding behind woke slogans while sacrificing the dignity and achievements of female athletes are over. This is the beginning of a long-overdue course correction, and it’s about time.

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Majesty.

• Putin-Backed Effort Saves Siberian Tiger From Extinction (RT)

Russia’s population of Amur tigers, also known as Siberian tigers, is no longer under threat of extinction, the chair of the Amur Tiger Center announced on Wednesday. The foundation was launched in 2013 by Russian President Vladimir Putin, a long-time supporter of protecting the endangered animals.Over the past 13 years, conservation efforts have raised the number of the big cats in the Russian Far East from around 430 to 750, according to Konstantin Chuychenko. ”The goal set out in the national tiger conservation strategy has been achieved,” he told reporters at the Land of Big Cats exhibition in Moscow. Chuychenko encouraged the public to visit the Far East to see the animals in their natural habitat.


© Sputnik/Alexander Kryazhev

The Amur tiger is native to forests in Russia’s Far East and Northeast China. It is the world’s largest cat subspecies and the only one adapted to cold, snowy climates. Despite progress in Russia, the Amur tiger remains classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), meaning it still faces a very high risk of extinction globally. A formal status change would require further international assessment. Russia’s 750 Amur tigers live in protected areas and remote forests. Several hundred more are kept in zoos and wildlife parks around the world.

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Baldwin

Duck
https://twitter.com/gunsnrosesgirl3/status/1940351468487549257

Moai
https://twitter.com/gunsnrosesgirl3/status/1940334765884014863

Melody

 

 

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