midterms Archives - The Automatic Earth

BREAKING: SpaceX’s Starlink constellation has surpassed 11,000 satellites in orbit for the first time.

Today’s successful deployment of 24 Starlink satellites brought the estimated total to 11,003, making it by far the largest satellite constellation ever built. pic.twitter.com/KCZnPWh0e0
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) August 19, 2026

Is today the day?

Do read Trump’s missive!

People of the day: Fang-Fang and Natalie Harp.

• Economic D-Day (ZH)

President Trump is out with a Truth Social post describing today as “ECONOMIC D-DAY” against Iran, declaring that his total economic war against Tehran will be the “MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY.” Trump said that with Tehran’s military and military-industrial base reduced to “now rubble” and its “currency worthless,” he will unleash severe economic consequences against “ANY country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran.”

Here’s the full Truth Social post:

“.. Kpler Says US Navy Gaining Ground In Hormuz ..”

• UAE Cuts Ties As Iran Warns Gulf States Against Helping Washington (ZH)

Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf is visiting Baghdad while at the same time US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has spoken UAE National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan to discuss the Hormuz situation and security. Except of course the two sides aren’t talking with each other. President Trump has made clear that no talks are on, and that none are scheduled, as he’s been floating a ‘new’ strategy to ‘strangle’ the Iranian economy over the long term. CNN reported Tuesday that White House officials have recently communicated that they are shifting their strategy — going from “hammer Iran ASAP” to “strangle them” over time.

As for Ghalibaf, he blasted War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday, mocking this new disengagement strategy, given the US has already failed to bring Tehran to its knees. “Americans think squeezing Iran harder will win concessions that were never part of the agreement,” Ghalibaf wrote in a post on X. “Bessent and Hegseth are way out of their league,” Ghalibaf added while referring to them as the “clown crew.” He stated:”Stop waiting for the clown crew to pull a rabbit out of their hat and clean up the mess you made.”
After declaring a new ‘offensive’ military posture in response to the crisis, Iran is showing no signs of backing off the confrontation with the US in the region. On Wednesday its armed forces warned Gulf countries against hosting or assisting American forces, saying it would be tantamount to joining the war on the US side. “We wish to warn that any assistance or facilitation provided to the aggressor U.S. military amounts to participation in the U.S. military operation,” armed forces chief of staff Ali Abdollahi said. “It seems unlikely that such a large number of military aircraft, particularly refueling aircraft could be present at regional bases without knowledge of host countries,” the official continued as cited in Mehr news agency.
It’s not known how many refueling tankers or else large warplanes are still positioned in the Gulf, but certainly the bulk of regional refueling aircraft operated by the US Air Force are currently concentrated at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion international airport – and has been subject of a lot of media attention.And in another significant escalation that effectively torpedoes any remaining illusions of hoped-for cross-Gulf detente, the United Arab Emirates has announced Wednesday a complete and immediate severance of all economic ties with Tehran. The move comes on the heels of what UAE officials claim was a barrage of Iranian ballistic missiles targeted directly at Emirati territory.
Tehran had quickly denied it had fired missiles on its territory, but UAE authorities later clarified that the military observed two missiles inbound from Iran, which caused no damage or casualties – which triggered an urgent missile alert for the population on Tuesday. Meanwhile, below are some of the latest major developments and reports related to the Iran conflict:Iran has weighed attacking US military targets in Europe should Donald Trump escalate the war, according to people close to the regime, as Tehran considers its options to increase the stakes of the conflict. FT
Even as Iran projects resilience in the war with the United States, its leaders are worried that a threat of more economic punishment by Donald Trump could increase hardships, reignite unrest and further erode the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy. RTRS
Iranian attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz are piling up without an American military response, raising the risks of crossing the strategic waterway and frustrating some Arab allies who worry the U.S. doesn’t have a strategy to wind down the conflict. WSJ
However, shipping analytics firm Kpler has suggested that the US Navy is gaining ground in the Strait of Hormuz, and that Iran is ceding some control, amid a war of words between President Trump and Iranian leadership over who has actual ‘control’.

The Trump administration appears to be indicating it favors economic warfare in its approach to the conflict with Iran, touting its naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and previewing new sanctions still to be announced. https://t.co/k5g4FBcxF7
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 19, 2026

They’d still need people to execute their commands. Where are they?

• Iran’s Latest Warning Signals The Hardliners Are Just Getting Started (CNN)

US President Donald Trump is struggling to extract the United States from a war that he started almost six months ago – alternating between claims that Tehran is “begging” for a deal, and threats to renew military attacks. Now Iran’s hardline leadership is devising and promoting its own strategy for continued confrontation with Washington.The strategy emphasizes “offensive operations” as well as defensive action to neutralize enemy threats, according to one Iranian official. The more assertive stance comes as a US-Iran agreement intended to end the war, the Memorandum of Understanding, expires with control of the Strait of Hormuz still in dispute.

Iran’s military leaders believe they are in a strong position to extract concessions from the US and can further adapt Iran’s weapons systems to bridge the gap with their more powerful adversaries, according to analysts. It also likely means greater mobilization of Iran’s allies in Yemen, Iraq and elsewhere. In recent weeks, Houthi militants in Yemen have threatened Saudi shipping and struck Saudi oil refineries, while Iranian-backed militia in Iraq have targeted Saudi oil infrastructure. The starting gun for the new posture in Tehran sounded with decrees reorganizing Iran’s security leadership last week issued in the name of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.
An adviser to Khamenei, Mohammad Mokhber, said the “strategy of shifting the war to an offensive posture if Iran’s conditions are not met will undoubtedly transform the balance of power in the world.” The new head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Mohsen Rezaie, belongs to a faction of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) that believes “the only way to get concessions from the US is the continuation of fighting, exerting pressure on the US and a steady dose of pain on Donald Trump,” Sina Azodi, assistant professor of Middle East politics at George Washington University, told CNN earlier this month.
In confirming Ahmad Vahidi as the IRGC’s chief, Mojtaba’s decree spoke of the need to increase preparedness for “strong offensive operations against the enemy.” It was “clear that Vahidi’s mandate was to revise Iranian military strategy in a more assertive and offensive direction,” according to Hamidreza Azizi at the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think tank.
Days after that decree was issued, a senior IRGC official – political deputy Brig. Gen. Yadollah Javani – told Iran’s semi-official news agency Fars that “Iran’s actions are defensive, although they may also take on an offensive aspect in the future. The IRGC is developing the ability to carry out operations “on enemy soil,” said another adviser to Vahidi, Mohammad Reza Naqdi. “We need to be able to move the operations to the enemy’s soil, whenever this is needed and ordered,” he told state broadcaster IRIB. The IRGC was tasked with being able to “launch attacks against the enemy in an intelligent, selective, and targeted manner.”
This would imply again targeting US military facilities in the region. A new generation of more maneuverable ballistic missiles with cluster warheads, plus innovative use of drones, indicates Iran has adapted tactics rapidly over recent months. “The regime has withstood the US/Israeli barrage and retaliation from the Gulf Arab states, and they are still standing,” according to H.A. Hellyer, senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “Now they seek to transform this resilience into permanent political advantage in the region as opposed to letting the initiative waste away over time,” Hellyer told CNN.
“Tehran believes it has the military edge and is openly discussing going on the offensive instead of merely responding to American attacks,” says Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “By that, Iran will not only have wrested control of the scope and geography of the war from the US, but also its timing.” Iran is preparing for short and long-term scenarios, Azizi believes. The current no-war-no-peace situation – with deepening economic problems – “may prompt the Iranian leadership to escalate in order to push Trump either to remove the naval blockade or to agree to an arrangement on terms more favorable to Iran,” he said.

“New energy routes would take years to build and come at a heavy cost, IRGC adviser Mohammad Reza Naqdi has told RT..”

• Hormuz Can’t Be Replaced – Iranian General (RT)

The Strait of Hormuz will remain indispensable to global energy trade despite efforts by Persian Gulf states to develop alternative export routes, a top Iranian military advisor has told RT. In an exclusive interview with the outlet, Mohammad Reza Naqdi, a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander and adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader, argued that the strategic waterway cannot easily be replaced given the concentration of oil and gas production in the Gulf.

“The Strait of Hormuz will never lose importance. [The Persian Gulf] is the production site for oil and gas. Oil wells cannot be moved elsewhere,” Naqdi told RT correspondent Saman Kojouri. The veteran brigadier general also pointed to the time and expense involved in developing new energy infrastructure. “If they want to find alternative routes to transport oil and such, it takes many years and incurs very heavy costs,” he said. Oil-producing Gulf states have been pursuing additional infrastructure and export routes as shipping through the Strait remains severely disrupted, with July transit volumes down more than 80% from pre-conflict levels.
Saudi Arabia is considering another expansion of its East–West pipeline system, although an industry estimate cited by AFP suggests it could be completed only around 2030–31. The UAE is moving faster on an additional pipeline, which is expected next year, while a revived Iraq–Syria project has no timetable. Kuwait and Bahrain currently have no pipeline routes bypassing Hormuz. Elsewhere in the interview, Naqdi offered Iran’s version of the alleged missile plot that prompted US President Donald Trump to secretly switch planes while leaving Türkiye last month, claiming it had never existed.

Yes, “Faster please.”

• The Strait of Hormuz Is Open. Also Closed. It’s Complicated. (Stephen Green)

The Strait of Hormuz “will not be opened,” Iranian warned on Tuesday, “Until the U.S. commitments in the memorandum—including lifting the blockade, releasing frozen assets, lifting oil sanctions, ending threats and military operations on all fronts, and the other conditions to which the U.S. committed—are implemented.” I guess that settles it — the Strait is firmly in the Islamic Republic’s grip.Not so fast. On the flip side, President Donald Trump said earlier this week that the U.S. naval blockade against Iran “remains in full force and effect. The Hormuz Strait is open and operating. All water mines have been removed or detonated.”

Who’s right? I guess the only way to tell is to try and figure out whether shipping is actually moving through Hormuz, and how much. For that, let’s go to CNN’s David Goldman, who’s been covering Gulf oil flows. Events there are moving so quickly that his headline a week ago was “The Trump administration claims oil is flowing normally again. There’s just one problem,” but his Monday headline read “Wait… how much oil is actually leaving the Persian Gulf?” This morning, things had moved this much further: “Iran has lost significant control of the Strait of Hormuz.”
While “both Iran and the United States have claimed the upper hand,” Goldman wrote in his most recent report, “the competing rhetoric has caused considerable confusion and doubt.” “At the moment, however, the evidence is clear: The United States, patrolling the strait with its navy, is gaining ground – and Iran is losing much of its control of the critical waterway.” Homayoun Falakshahi, head of crude oil analysis at Kpler, said this week that “It increasingly looks like Iran has at least partially lost control of the strait.”
“The expiration of the Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran this week in theory allows Iran to begin charging tolls again. But it doesn’t appear the country has been able to,” Goldman added. Well, good. But still… what a mess. Just because Tehran’s grip has loosened doesn’t mean Hormuz is truly open. Tankers still must take evasive measures like leaving their transponders off and avoiding Iranian waters. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said last week that oil flows out of the Gulf are back up to about 15 million barrels a day from the prewar 20 million. But that’s counting oil rerouted away from Hormuz and not just through Hormuz.
Prior to February 28, Tehran had never dared to completely close Hormuz to shipping. Doing so could pose an existential threat to the global economy, which could also put the regime at risk. Besides, like the Sword of Damocles, the real power lay in the threat. But then last summer, and again this spring, Trump went to Truth Social to demand “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” from the Islamic Republic. If the threat from Washington is existential, why not take the risk?
For whatever reason — maybe we really are dangerously low on munitions, maybe the White House decided that a collapsed Iran is a worse threat to the economy than the Islamic Republic is, maybe a lack of resolve, I don’t know — Trump still hasn’t followed through on his threat. And to think that back in March and April, it at least appeared that we were on the cusp of eliminating the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, and the lynchpin of Beijing and Moscow’s Middle East ambitions.
Instead, here we are in the waning days of summer arguing over who controls the Strait of Hormuz, when the answer appears to be nobody and everybody. Depending on who you ask and what measure of reduced oil flow counts as “open.” But looking at the bigger picture, the most important element might be this: “US Navy blockade has caused Iran’s oil exports to crater — and could finally destabilize regime.” After just six months, I hope it isn’t too soon for me to add, “Faster please.”

It’s complicated but Iran is ‘losing territory’ in the Strait.

• Iran Has Lost Significant Control of the Strait of Hormuz (CNN)

The battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz has become the focal point of the Iran war. Over the past several months, both Iran and the United States have claimed the upper hand – and the competing rhetoric has caused considerable confusion and doubt. At the moment, however, the evidence is clear: The United States, patrolling the strait with its navy, is gaining ground – and Iran is losing much of its control of the critical waterway.

More than 80% of liquids transits through the Strait of Hormuz over the past two weeks have taken the Omani route – a UN-authorized shipping channel that Iran vehemently opposes – or have been “dark” transits that likely took the Omani route, according to Kpler, which tracks ships using transponders and satellite data. Iran, declaring the strait under its control, has attacked dozens of ships that tried to to travel the waterway via the north coast of Oman. Despite the risk, most ships have recently chosen to ignore Iran’s demands and cross the strait with the promise of protection from US naval forces.
“It increasingly looks like Iran has at least partially lost control of the strait,” said Homayoun Falakshahi, head of crude oil analysis at Kpler. That stands in stark contrast to a month ago, when Kpler observed virtually no shipping traffic via the Omani route. The sharp reduction in traffic around Iran’s preferred route has prevented Iran from charging tolls on ship traffic through the strait – as it did in the spring. The expiration of the Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran this week in theory allows Iran to begin charging tolls again. But it doesn’t appear the country has been able to, according to Kpler.
“Iran’s request to collect tolls is something that most Middle East folks don’t want to do and haven’t been doing,” said Dan Pickering, founder and chief investment officer at Pickering Energy Partners. “So the Oman route absolutely makes the most sense.”Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have chartered Very Large Crude oil Carriers (VLCCs) – the biggest oil tankers – to transit out of the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz, then transfering the oil to customers’ tankers outside the danger zone in the Gulf of Oman, according to Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates.
To evade Iran’s attacks, they’ve turned their transponders off, often for weeks on end. That so-called dark traffic appears to have eluded some data-tracking services like Kpler as well. Although some can be picked up on satellite, it’s harder to track via traditional means. But the United States, with significant military force on the water, has eyes on all ships passing through the strait and has reported significantly higher oil shipping numbers than most traditional estimates had previously suggested.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright last week said that combined oil transits through the strait and rerouted around the waterway totaled around 15 million barrels per day over the course of a week – much closer to the 20-million-barrel average from before the war. That led President Donald Trump to declare Monday that the United States has “total control over the strait,” a questionable claim he has reiterated often throughout the conflict. Iran’s continued attacks and oil flows still well below pre-war levels suggest the United States does not fully control the Strait of Hormuz.
But neither does Iran. “If their goal is to be ‘in charge,’ then I’d say they were never completely in control to start with,” said Pickering. “It feels like their goal is deterrence, in order to be validated as in-control. I think they are still deterring.”But if tankers are really getting as much oil through the strait as the United States claims, then Iran’s deterrence and control of the Strait of Hormuz is diminished compared to what it was a month or two ago.
Complicating matters: Oman and Iran are engaging in talks to restore freedom of navigation through the strait – absent the United States – much to Trump’s dismay. It’s not clear how those discussions will affect oil traffic or control of the waterway. “I would take all the information and headlines ‘under advisement,’” said Lipow. “But it is fair to say that Iran has partially lost control of the strait.”

“That’s a devastating admission from inside the tent.”

• A Democrat Confessed the Midterms Could Be a Disaster for His Party (Margolis)

Harold Ford Jr. is, by any honest measure, the smarter liberal who joins the table on Fox News’ The Five. That’s not saying much when the other option is Jessica Tarlov, but hey, it’s something. Tarlov is a party booster every step of the way. She pushes Democrats’ talking points blindly. Ford is far more willing to call out his party when it deserves it, which he did on Tuesday, when he admitted that Democrats will lose if they embrace the DSA’s policies.

“If we believe that the DSA, their ideas are the right ones for the country, then we’re going to lose,” Ford said. He pointed to last week’s Wisconsin results as proof the socialist wing of the party is gaining ground it shouldn’t. “We may win a few primaries, and I was delighted to see the Wisconsin outcome last week,” he said, “with the young fellow Crowley coming from behind.” He added that another candidate, El-Sayed, “only won by a very, very small amount,” a margin Ford treated as a warning sign rather than a victory lap.
That’s a devastating admission from inside the tent. Ford said Democratic voters are more focused on kitchen-table economics than revolutionary politics, and that when they realize the Democratic Socialists of America “are not for them,” they’ll bolt. He even agreed with strategist James Carville’s blunt assessment from the night before, though Ford tried to soften it. “I won’t go as far as my friend James, who used the word ‘fools,'” he said. “But you are foolish if you believe these ideas are not only going to win, but are going to make the country stronger and better.” He said politics should exist “to try to make the country better, Democrat and Republican alike,” not to score television hits or, as he put it, be “supportive of terrorist organizations.”

“If we believe the DSA and their ideas are right for the country, then WE ARE GOING TO LOSE.” @HaroldFordJr warns Democrats must reject the DSA’s far-left agenda and refocus on the economic issues voters care about, including lowering costs, cutting taxes and reducing government… pic.twitter.com/ut4F8WWEcz
— The Five (@TheFive) August 19, 2026

Ford deserves credit for saying that on Fox News, where most Democrats show up to dodge the question entirely. But here’s the problem: Ford wants to build his party’s alternative economic message around eliminating “all of President Trump’s tariffs because they’re driving up costs.” That premise has a hole in it. Namely, the runaway inflation Democrats spent months promising the tariffs would trigger simply hasn’t shown up.
He also complained that the president abandoned the fight to shrink the federal government. “I’m disappointed with President Trump,” he said, arguing Trump should have cut the government “by 5%” to pay for tax relief, since “there’s enough waste there to do it.” What Ford leaves out is that his own party has fought Trump’s downsizing efforts at every turn, from the courts to the Capitol, treating every eliminated program like a five-alarm fire. Blaming Trump for a fight Democrats themselves have waged is ridiculous. His ire should have been directed more at his party for opposing it.
Still, the tariff blind spot and the government-waste denial don’t erase the core of what Ford got right. The Democrat Party has let a small, loud, ideologically rigid faction set the terms of its future, and the voters who actually decide elections are noticing. Meanwhile, Tarlov has been out there insisting that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) counts as a moderate.

No contest.

• Democrats Nominate a Socialist for Senate in Deep Red Florida (Rick Moran)

It’s rare that a political party lines up to jump off a cliff. That’s what the Democratic Party is doing in 2026. A newly minted Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) member defeated a Democratic Party establishment favorite who outraised the socialist by 20-to-1. It clearly demonstrated, if any more proof was necessary, that the Democrats are playing Russian Roulette with a bullet in every chamber.

huge underdog, raising less than a million dollars. And yet, she easily defeated former Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified against Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial. Vindman raised $20 million and was expected to coast to victory, setting up a November contest to fill the remainder of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s term. Repeat after me: Democrats are cray-cray in a big way-way.
Nixon will be led to the slaughter in November, facing off against Sen. Ashley Moody, whom Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to Rubio’s seat until the special election. = Moody probably can’t believe her luck. Florida just went from “lean Republican” to “Unbelievably safe.” Nixon ally, State Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-47th District), a progressive Democrat from Orlando, said Nixon’s campaign centered around working-class issues, from affordability to healthcare. Actually, the DSA doesn’t have an economic plan beyond “seizing the means of production” and probably setting up a guillotine on the Washington Mall.
“It really just speaks to saying that money doesn’t determine everything,” Eskamani said. “They’re tired of health care not being affordable and one job not being enough.” It also speaks to the suicidal nature of Democrats. They are moving, lemming-like, to the edge of the cliff and preparing to hand Republicans an easy win. With the Florida Senate race a virtual lock two and a half months from election day, Republicans can spend more resources on other, more competitive races. “It was a wild night in Florida politics,” Republican Rep. Randy Fine said at the victory party for the GOP nominee for governor, Rep. Byron Donalds.
“I mean, the Nixon win is the greatest gift ever. She’s crazy and should be in jail for the stuff she pulled on the House floor.”= Nixon brought a bright pink megaphone onto the House floor to loudly protest a congressional redistricting vote. Pacing the floor and shouting that the maps were “illegal” and “unconstitutional,” the commotion caused enough confusion that two fellow Democrats inadvertently voted yes on the GOP-backed map, thinking it was a quorum call. A Republican representative even filed a workers’ comp claim alleging hearing damage.
Dumb and crazy. Make sure you get a good seat for the inevitable flameout. During a previous special session on redistricting, Nixon was one of the lead organizers of a floor sit-in where Democratic lawmakers gathered around the House well, sang, and disrupted proceedings, leading House leadership to temporarily shut down the session and turn off the room’s broadcasting feeds. It wasn’t all roses for the GOP in Florida on primary night. The voters registered their displeasure with Republicans as well.
Politico: “On the Republican side, Trump’s endorsement didn’t prove to be the deciding factor in two races. In Florida’s 19th District, Trump’s endorsed candidate, Lauf, a former adviser at the U.S. Department of Commerce during the president’s first term, lost to Jim Schwartzel, a media executive and owner of a conservative talk radio station, by about 7 points. It was a crowded field, with several former congressmen, including former North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn and New York Rep. Chris Collins also running.
Under investigation by the House and shunned by some of his GOP colleagues in Congress, pressure has been building on Mills for weeks and only intensified recently as Republicans like DeSantis and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna came out against him. Mills has remained adamant that he has done nothing wrong amid a long line of incidents — including a restraining order placed on him at the request of a former girlfriend — and had defied calls from other Republicans to step down from his central Florida congressional seat.
GOP voters lanced a boil in getting rid of Mills in a safe Republican district. The national party can stop worrying.= Indeed, by taking Florida off the Democrats’ board, Republicans can breathe a lot easier. It’s still going to be a difficult year for Republicans as they are defending 22 seats compared to just 13 for Democrats. But their 53-47 advantage in the upper chamber gives them some wiggle room.

“.. the Democrats’ new campaign tactic: bringing sexy back.”

• Axios — Dems Might Be Commies but Hey, They’re Sexy! (Stephen Kruiser)

It has been quite interesting to watch how the hacks in the mainstream media have handled the family feud between the out and proud Democratic Socialists of America commies and their closeted commie elders in the Democratic Party establishment. There are days when it seems as if the media really wants the upstarts to win this one. Then there are others when they’re so nervous about how the changing of the guard might play out that they come perilously close to committing acts of journalism. No, really, I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

Today we’re going to look at how one alleged news organization — Axios — is dealing with it. I won’t give too much away here at the beginning, but let’s just say that the kids are going to need therapy when this is all over. Axios has pretensions of being the cutting edge future of journalism. Let’s take a look at a snippet from the site’s “About” page:We launched Axios originally to combat what we termed the “crap trap,” the perverted incentive of traditional media to mass produce click-bait nonsense to drive engagement and higher valuations. We rightly warned this was a fool’s path.
We can probably all agree that’s both noble and ambitious. If you have even a passing familiarity with the work of the Axios writers, you know that none of them have ever read the “Our Vision” section of the aforementioned “About” page. I often think that Axios only exists to make the Dem leg-humpers at Politico appear to be unbiased and full of gravitas. Near the end of last month, I wrote a column describing Axios as going “full fangirl” over Republican squishes. The Axios piece was a hot mess of cheerleading and wishcasting, which is fairly boilerplate for the organization. My Twitchy colleague Brett T. covered an example of the site’s latest bit of inane “Rah-Rah!” for the Democrats:
Axios’ Alex Thompson, who co-authored a book with CNN’s Jake Tapper about how the White House had fooled them about President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline with its “cheap fakes” defense, would like you to read an article by Avery Lotz about the Democrats’ new campaign tactic: bringing sexy back. Don’t think we haven’t noticed, James Talarico. If you need to pause to make sure that your last meal doesn’t start to come back up, it’s totally understandable. Here’s the post on X (TWEET) that Brett shared right after that paragraph:

.@ajlotz8 reports on Dems latest campaign tactic: thirst traps.

Unbuttoned shirts on CNN.
Exposed bicepson the rally stage.
Made-for-TikTok thirst trap b-roll.
And the return of the tan suit.https://t.co/tPpf4CMdLV
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) August 18, 2026

That seems to me to be the kind of “click-bait nonsense” Axios is supposed to eschew in its efforts to not fall into the “crap trap.” The title of the article is, “Democrats enter their thirst trap era.” Are you not feeling the weightiness of this hard-hitting journalism? We’re almost a year away from the next time that the Pulitzer Prizes will be handed out but everyone else who might be in the running should voluntarily remove themselves from consideration.

She says he saved her life by approving an experimental bone cancer treatment.

Being alive instead of dead can make you very grateful.

• Natalie Harp is A Main Conduit Between Trump And The Outside World (CNN)

Natalie Harp wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was October 2023, and Donald Trump was due at a New York City courthouse to fight his latest set of legal troubles. But as the motorcade idled outside his Trump Tower residence, staffers confronted a more immediate problem: There wasn’t room for Harp, the hyper-loyal aide whose devotion to Trump had quickly entrenched her within his orbit.

A screaming match in the lobby ensued, with Harp insisting that Trump had personally asked her to attend the court appearance, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Denied a seat but determined not to be left behind, Harp jumped into an SUV trunk, according to the two sources and confirmed by a photo obtained by CNN. The episode, which has not been previously reported, served as an encapsulation of the role Harp has carved out in recent years as a constant and intensely dedicated presence at Trump’s side. Her methods have irked senior aides and at times prompted efforts to box her out of the president’s inner circle, according to multiple sources who described the dynamic to CNN.
A former right-wing television host, who began working for Trump after crediting him with saving her life, Harp has become a main conduit between the president and the outside world, passing along messages from allies and setting up meetings, tapping out Truth Social posts and toting printouts of laudatory articles, all while staying in close physical proximity at all hours of the day. “[Trump] likes the attention and the fact that she is 100% committed and loyal,” one White House adviser told CNN. “She doesn’t second guess, doesn’t question.”
Harp’s relationship with Trump came under fresh scrutiny this week after Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff mentioned her by name in a now-viral speech attacking Trump. The Georgia senator swiped at the president’s “travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar,” a reference to her joining the president — along with a very limited group — when he secretly boarded a smaller aircraft to leave Turkey due to a threat from Iran in July.
The comment spurred outrage from the White House, which repeatedly labeled Ossoff a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid” and “lightweight loser” — as well as rampant attention online. Harp’s rapid rise within Trump world has stood out in large part because of the intensity of her dedication to the president since joining his staff in 2022. Despite having no formal title on Trump’s reelection campaign, Harp trailed him across the country, feeding him positive stories, social media posts and other correspondence so frequently that allies dubbed her the “human printer.”

Illustrating how she’s become indispensable to Trump, one Republican lawmaker noted that while they occasionally reach out to the president directly, they always make sure Harp is aware. “She always responds. I don’t know how she manages it all,” the source said, adding that in addition to relaying messages to Trump, Harp often personally sends lawmakers articles or notes on the president’s behalf. Since following him to the White House, multiple sources said, Harp has been omnipresent. In videos of Oval Office signings and events reviewed by CNN, Harp can often be spotted on the outskirts of the room, smiling or nodding along with the president as he speaks.
She is frequently one of a smaller coterie of aides beside Trump as he travels to rallies.“Natalie is so fast,” Trump has mused to allies after asking her to find or print something for him.The ubiquity sometimes ruffles feathers within the White House, especially for some Trump advisers who at times have wanted to meet privately with the president — only to find Harp sitting in on the meeting as well, one of the sources familiar with the dynamic told CNN. The 35-year-old is also territorial about Trump and has told others that she only reports to him, irritating other staffers who work within the White House’s chain of command, another source said.

Fang Fang, aka “Rusty Thumbs”.

• Swalwell and Fang Fang Distilled (CTH)

Many people are interested in the John Solomon release of FBI information regarding former congressman Eric Swalwell and his relationship with a known Chinese operative named Fang Fang, aka Christine Fang. Personally, I’m not that interested in rehashing the Swallwell-Fang Fang storyline. However, there is a lot of mistaken information regarding the story. So, here’s the full background context that will hopefully make sense of the FBI conduct as it relates to the Chinese compromise.

[Fang Fang, aka “Rusty Thumbs”]

[Rusty Thumbs was chosen by the FBI as the codename because the rumor was that Swallwell liked a sexual position known as the “rusty trombone.” Fang would stimulate Swalwell thusly. I know, TMI.]
• The FBI has two basic missions. The #1 primary mission is to protect the interests of Washington DC officials from the outcome of their own conduct. The #2 secondary mission is to protect the American people from known wolves.
• The Dept of Justice National Security Division (DOJ-NSD) monitors foreign influence in Washington DC. The DOJ-NSD use the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) as the primary legal tool to monitor the political influence. Former Attorney General Eric Holder, on behalf of President Obama, took this monitoring to new political levels of weaponization.
These two facets come together in the story of California members of congress who are long known to have been the primary conduit of Chinese money into DNC operations at a federal and individual campaign level. The FBI have known about this for a long time, a very long time.
There was a Chinese Spy named Russell Lowe employed by former Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for several decades. Russell Lowe began working with Dianne Feinstein in the 1970’s. According to reporting by CBS Lowe passed along information gained from Feinstein to the Chinese government. [H/T Rosie Memos] The story of Russell Lowe inside Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Vice-Chair Dianne Feinstein’s political life surfaced as an outcome of the Fang-Fang revelations. However, in reality Fang-Fang entered the orbit of Eric Swalwell as a result of Feinstein’s compromise with the Chinese spy ring.
It is said that Feinstein’s staff introduced Fang Fang to Swalwell when the Freshman Congressman first won election in 2012, taking office in 2013. Who was Dianne Feinstein’s lead staff? Dan Jones.

Dan Jones left the SSCI prior to the 2016 election and went to work pushing the Trump-Russia narrative through his media contacts. Dianne Feinstein abdicated her Vice-Chair position on the SSCI after the 2016 election, to Mark Warner. Dan Jones took over funding Fusion-GPS and Chris Steele in 2017 at the same time Senator Mark Warner took over as SSCI vice-chairman. Dan Jones and Mark Warner coordinated the efforts outside and inside government on the same objective. The Senate Intel Committee was part of the Trump-Russia collusion effort.
As a result of their alignment and common purpose the SSCI didn’t investigate the origin of the Trump-Russia narrative; and instead positioned themselves as a shield to block any investigative inquiry into what took place.

“At the same time that Fang was fundraising for Swalwell and sleeping with him, by his own admission, the files show that the FBI knew Fang was tied to China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), Beijing’s notorious intelligence service ..”

• Pelosi, Democrats Kept Swalwell On Intel Committee Despite FBI Warnings (JTN)

Liaisons dangereuses: Swalwell admitted to an intimate relationship with a suspected Chinese spy, while he still sat on the House Intelligence Committee. The FBI had warned Democratic leadership about the risks years before he was removed from the seat. When allegations of Rep. Eric Swalwell’s relationship with a woman suspected of ties to Chinese intelligence first surfaced in 2020, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the FBI’s findings. The public now knows the bureau had evidence at the time that the woman, Fang Fang, had potentially compromised Swalwell with sex, foreign interns and illicit donations, but Pelosi and Democrats still refused to remove the lawmaker from the powerful House Intelligence Committee.

The FBI briefings received by Pelosi and her Republican counterpart were so concerning to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy that he called for Swalwell to be booted from the sensitive committee where members have access to classified information.
Interns, influence, and illegal donations
The full extent of the FBI’s probe into Swalwell and Fang’s relationship was revealed on Monday when the White House Government Transparency Task Force released the investigation files that had been previously declassified by President Donald Trump. They show that Swalwell admitted to having sex with Fang, to his staff placing Fang’s interns in Congress, and to not having a strong enough campaign finance system to detect the straw donations she allegedly passed through U.S.-citizen conduits, Just the News reported. The memos indicate all of this information was possessed by the FBI at the time that it briefed then-Speaker Pelosi in December 2020.
At the same time that Fang was fundraising for Swalwell and sleeping with him, by his own admission, the files show that the FBI knew Fang was tied to China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), Beijing’s notorious intelligence service. In fact, the investigators specifically identified her parents as MSS agents.
Fang Fang’s efforts to influence U.S. politicians were first reported by Axios in 2020. According to the outlet’s comprehensive investigation, U.S. officials believed Fang sought to ingratiate herself with local politicians in the San Francisco Bay Area using campaign fundraising, networking, her charisma, and romantic or sexual relationships. Swalwell was identified as among the most significant targets of Fang. Swalwell has consistently maintained that he did nothing wrong, fully cooperated with the FBI investigation, and ceased communicating with Fang after the FBI provided him with a defensive briefing about her activities.
“A vehicle for political retaliation”: Swalwell’s lawyer says
“There is nothing new here. The government’s own memorandum confirms what Congressman Swalwell has said for more than a decade: he did nothing wrong, and there was no basis to charge him with any offense,” said Sara Azari, legal counsel for Swalwell, on Monday after the files were released. “What is new and deeply concerning is the apparent use of federal law enforcement information to punish or embarrass an outspoken critic of the current administration. An investigation that produced no charges and no finding of wrongdoing should not be resurrected years later as a vehicle for political retaliation.”
After that report, then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from Swalwell’s home state of California, said the allegations “disqualified” the congressman from serving on the Intelligence Committee and called for him to be removed from the panel. “Swalwell is a national security liability,” the Republican leader said in a post to social media.
McCarthy then requested a briefing from the FBI about the full extent of Swalwell’s involvement with Fang. After that briefing, which was also attended by Speaker Pelosi, McCarthy doubled down on his calls for Swalwell to be removed from the powerful committee. “One thing I know for sure — I had questions about whether he should. That’s the one question that was answered, he should not be on Intel,” McCarthy told reporters after the briefing.
After the Axios story, Pelosi confirmed that Democratic leadership was first briefed on Swalwell’s relationship with Fang in the Spring of 2015, shortly after the party nominated him to the Intelligence Committee. She said that after Congress was made aware, Democratic politicians cut off communication with Fang. “When that was made known to the members of Congress, it was over. That was the end of any communication with those people,” Pelosi said. The Speaker also said that Republicans were briefed about the relationship at the same time. “We knew when they knew,” explained Pelosi. Summing up her views on the matter, Speaker Pelosi told reporters that she did not “have any concerns about Mr. Swalwell.”
McCarthy filed a resolution in early 2021 that would remove Swalwell from the sensitive committee after Speaker Pelosi reappointed him to the panel in the new Congress. The House voted mostly along party lines to reject the measure with 200 votes for and 218 against. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff also backed Swalwell in the face of the resolution that would have removed him from the committee. Schiff, in a letter at the time of the vote, said that Swalwell was a “trusted member of our committee” and he had “acted fully in accordance with his responsibilities” after the 2015 counterintelligence briefing about Fang.
“Democratic leadership ‘jeopardized’ Congress”: McCarthy says
When Republicans regained control of the House in 2023, now-Speaker McCarthy blocked Swalwell from serving on the House Intelligence Committee, citing the lawmaker’s alleged relationship with Fang. “If you got the briefing I got from the FBI, you wouldn’t have Swalwell on any committee,” McCarthy said after blocking the appointment. “One thing I know for sure – I had questions about whether he should. That’s the one question that was answered, he should not be on Intel.”
The Republican Speaker told reporters that the Democratic leadership “jeopardized” Congress by allowing Swalwell to remain on the committee, which provides access to sensitive intelligence, for many years. “The only way that they even knew it came forward is when they went to nominate him to the Intel Committee. And then the FBI came and told the leadership then, he’s got a problem,” McCarthy explained. “And they kept him on. That jeopardized all of us.”

How much longer, Tony?

• Fauci Advisor Pleads Guilty to “Conspiracy to Defraud the United States” (CTH)

Dr. David Morens, 78, served as a senior adviser to Anthony Fauci (Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) from 2006 through 2022. Morens sits at the epicenter of the NIAID coverup to hide the origins of COVID-19. Today, Fauci’s Senior Advisor Dr. David Morens plead guilty to “Conspiracy to Commit Offenses and to Defraud the United States” in connection with his conspiring with Peter Danzak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, Dr Gerald Keusch, associate director at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory Institute and a recipient of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), together with others to defraud the public about NIH-funded gain-of-function research and the origin of COVID.

Morens and others plotted to conceal/destroy federal records re: COVID-19 and federal grants to avoid FOIA and the Federal Record Act. Morens admits to using his gmail account to intentionally defraud the U.S. government and conceal communication and records about his activities. In addition, Morens admits to receiving “gifts” of material value in exchange for his efforts on behalf of the co-conspirators. The conspiracy involved a “kickback” scheme in which Morens accepted and was promised gifts – including bottles of wine and meals at Michelin-starred restaurants – in exchange for performing “official acts that were favorable” to his co-conspirators.

VIA CBS – Washington — “A former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has pleaded guilty to a charge stemming from a scheme to hide federal records during the COVID-19 pandemic. Under a deal reached with federal prosecutors in Maryland, David Morens, 78, agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States. He faces up to five years in prison.
Morens, a senior adviser at NIAID’s Office of the Director from 2006 to 2022, was indicted in April and charged with five counts for what prosecutors said at the time was his role in a scheme to defraud the U.S. by shielding federal records related to the COVID-19 pandemic from the public. Tim Belevetz, a lawyer for Morens, said, “By pleading guilty today, Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did and will continue to do so.”
Prosecutors said Morens worked with two co-conspirators. The first, “co-conspirator 1,” served as the president and CEO of a New York-based nonprofit that received a grant in 2014 titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” The Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, received a subaward from the New York group on the coronavirus grant, prosecutors said, though the National Institutes of Health terminated the award in April 2020 following allegations that COVID-19 emerged from the lab. The NIAID is part of the NIH.
The second co-conspirator was described in charging documents as a physician, scientist and professor who worked for an academic institute that received federal grants. Emails made public by the GOP-led Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic indicate that the New York-based nonprofit is the EcoHealth Alliance and co-conspirator 1 is its president, Peter Daszak. The indictment stemmed from several Freedom of Information Act requests NIAID received between April 2020 and December 2022 that sought communications between Morens, the New York-based nonprofit and its president.”

“Brussels keeps misreading public backlash as foreign influence when much of it is simply exhaustion with elite overreach and failure..”

• Hey Ursula, Angry Voters Aren’t ‘Pro-Russian’, Just Fed Up (Rachel Marsden)

Look, Queen Ursula, we need to talk, girlfriend. Yes, I’m addressing you directly, EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, because I’m not going to pretend that there’s anyone in charge in Europe who’s actually elected by the people and crafting EU policy. And since you’ve apparently been more interested in monitoring Russian media platforms for dissident views that could potentially qualify as “Russian-aligned” than stopping online clarion calls for mass migration pushes into the EU, RT seems as good a place as any for an intervention.

Because the problem for the EU is that it’s getting so dissociated from the realities and concerns of its own people that even the pure data wonks are starting to sound the alarm. Seat projections for the EU parliament are set to swing populist to the detriment of the right-left establishment majority for the first time ever, according to recent reporting by Euronews on research data complied by the Europe Elects platform.
Now, the next EU election isn’t until 2029, which is a long way off, and you could very well decide to drop all of this in someone else’s lap by then. After all, you keep telling us that Putin is coming to Western Europe around that time, so maybe you’ll want to personally be busy window shopping in New York by then, instead of dealing with the headache of his arrival – or alternatively, his non-arrival after spending years scaring up billions from European taxpayer pockets for military hardware to mark the occasion.
I hate to break it to you, Queen, but the data from this very non-Russian research outfit (Europe Elects), published by a non-Russian media outlet (Euronews), is basically saying that right now, Europeans are looking more increasingly pro-Russian than not. To the point where the EU parliament, after the next election, could see pro-Russian gains and the anti-Russian firewall lose its majority. Or at least that’s how you guys see it when you look down on the plebes.
Because apparently there is no such thing as people who are just genuinely fed up with how you guys are running things. We either support you – or support Russia. We’re just mindless units to be fought over, like the last jars of Nutella in a supermarket blowout sale. Look, unlike you guys, the average European is fed up with hearing about Russia and Ukraine, and with European policies revolving around that conflict and sucking the life out of everything else that actually falls within your purview.
Perhaps it would be different if you had everything else under control, and had the luxury of jacking around outside of the Eurozone that you’re actually responsible for – but that’s clearly not the case. The usual way that politics is supposed to work is that the establishment takes action A, and its impact is direct, positive, and visible on issue A. Instead, what we’re getting is action A being taken on issue A, and causing not only aggravation and worsening of issue A, but also of issues B, C, D, E… which happened to be more or less fine before. This is what has happened with the EU’s Ukraine obsession, and now it seems like it’s becoming par for the course for other issues, too.
It’s like we’re spending money to see pure ideology in action rather than success as defined in the dictionary and not through some kind of Orwellian rhetoric that flips everything on its head.In just the latest example, even one of the most stalwart establishment entities of an EU state has explicitly asked what the heck you think you’re doing. The EU has fallen into line in pushing this authoritarian control of internet use, promoting a “harmonized” bloc-wide control of internet use under the pretext of protecting kids – which apparently requires ID collection from every single adult user, as well.
Turns out that even the French Constitutional Court told French lawmakers to take their law and shove it somewhere else other than up the rears of the French populace. “By prohibiting minors under the age of 15 from accessing certain online services, the law inherently requires every person, even an adult, to prove their age before accessing them,” the court ruled. “By failing to specify the conditions and limits under which such proof must be provided, the legislature has not established the legal safeguards necessary to ensure compliance with these requirements.”
The court obviously doesn’t understand that the whole idea is to use kids to push a mass surveillance scheme. Or else it does understand – and isn’t going for it. Is the judge populist? Does he have a photo of Putin hidden in his desk? Or maybe the judge – like so many others – is just genuinely fed up with establishment hacks on all sides colluding with some opaque agenda whose advancement routinely seems to leave the average person worse off.

Never forget how powerful and pervasive the psywar was- and continues to be. https://t.co/yMQk39VPL0
— Robert W Malone, MD (@RWMaloneMD) August 18, 2026

Tesla is making great progress on their Optimus factory at Giga Texas

When fully ramped, this factory will pump out 10 million humanoid robots per year$TSLA pic.twitter.com/zFmVbCHQmW
— Dalton Brewer (@daltonbrewer) August 18, 2026

https://twitter.com/piloly/status/2089825619529851080?s=20 https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/2089935234066227208?s=20

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Debt Rattle August 17 2026

Aug 172026

August 17, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:26 am Finance Tagged with: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, drones, Fauci, Jen Psaki, Karoline Leavitt, midterms, Newsom, Turkey, Türkiye, Ukraine 17 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Self portrait 1896

• “US Can’t Bomb Its Way To Victory ” (Scotiabank)

• Ukraine Celebrates Launching Largest Attack Drone Swarm of the War (CTH)

• Not Winning? Just Change the Rules (Victor Davis Hanson)

• This Might Be the Most Brutal Diagnosis of AOC You’ll Ever Hear (Margolis)

• Jen Psaki Calls Karoline Leavitt a Liar (Teri Christoph)

• A Love Letter to Karoline Leavitt (Scott Pinsker)

• Fauci Refuses Senate Appearance (Fox)

• 2026 Midterms Very, Very Tight Election – Martin Armstrong (USAW)

• Newsom’s High Speed Train to Nowhere is Not Arriving Anytime Soon (Turley)

• War On Rowling Continues (Sans Facts) (Christian Toto)

• It’s Spelled ‘Turkey,’ Not ‘Türkiye” (A.J. Christopher)

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2088613110579953913?s=20

"Pretty soon I'll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States."

President Trump floats a dramatic move involving the strategically critical waterway as he says Iran is being "very badly defeated." pic.twitter.com/zXJhCfOIqH
— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 14, 2026

https://twitter.com/mcafeenew/status/2088356232801427540?s=20 https://twitter.com/BoLoudon/status/2087988353522192691?s=20

Who says they can? Why would you say that? When they’re not trying?! What’s your point?

• “US Can’t Bomb Its Way To Victory ” (Scotiabank)

Bessent said Friday that Washington would announce unprecedented economic-isolation measures next week, warning that the coming pressure campaign would be unlike anything “seen in the history of economic isolation on a country.”For clarity on Bessent’s upcoming economic-isolation operation against Iran, Derek Holt, head of Capital Markets Economics at Scotiabank in Toronto, provided clients with an assessment in which Bessent’s warning could signal a move well beyond sanctioning shadow tankers and refiners, toward dismantling the entire financial network supporting Iranian oil exports.

Holt explained: WHAT COULD BESSENT MEAN? What could Bessent do to economically isolate Iran further that has “never been seen”?
• Target China and India: China is the main buyer of Iranian oil and is involved in undermining US sanctions. The US sanctions some individual Chinese entities and, in April, announced sanctions against Chinese “Teapot” refineries (here). The US could step up its actions by sanctioning all Chinese banks, this time including large institutions, and blocking their access to the US and global financial systems. That would push China further away from the SWIFT system and block access to correspondent and other forms of banking. It could block access to US dollar funding markets. This would very likely enrage China and risk multiple forms of retaliation and escalation.
• Broaden the scope of sanctions on Iran: This would extend the scope to any global group, company or entity involved in buying, financing, insuring or shipping Iranian oil. Looking at you, global banks, currency exchanges, commodity traders, shippers, etc. Actions under this category would aim to entirely thwart the sale of oil from Iran to China in yuan and its conversion into dollars and other currencies via exchange houses in Iran and elsewhere. You target other Middle Eastern nations facilitating this trade by blocking their access to dollar funding and global banking markets, such as Dubai’s one-foot-in-and-one-foot-out stance on the war, which continues to facilitate Iranian transactions. Dubai fancies itself a financial center; you destroy such ambitions.
• Target Iranian crypto assets: This Treasury announcement last month targeted individuals and entities under a specific Iranian person’s name. The US could broaden this action to include freezing access to all Iranian global holdings of crypto, gold, real estate, foreign accounts, etc.
• Target global ports: Any foreign port that facilitates trade and transactions with shipping companies that transited Iranian ports could be targeted.
He continued: “And there may well be other creative options in scale and scope. The broad point is to escalate the economic and financial blockade of the Iranian economy and financial system by enveloping all parts of the global economy, namely China, and the global financial system that allow Iran to continue to sell oil and access funding markets.” Would it work? I’m not sure. Iran knows suffering. Iran is used to being a pariah. Iran still has friends in low places. Iran has its own means of escalating, including unleashing unspeakable terror.
The consequences to the global economy and financial system could also limit or entirely thwart the chances of success. I’m sure they know the risks, but Treasury would sharply amplify tensions with China and India and could potentially cripple individual banks while not ruling out increased systemic risk within the broader financial system. Cutting off access to dollar funding markets could destabilize major players in the financial system. The spillover effects through a complicated web of connections shouldn’t be treated lightly.
The US is finally getting that it can’t just bash and bomb its way to victory against Iran. I’m not sure it gets the limitations and risks that could be associated with escalating broader measures at an all-encompassing global level. It could well take a bungled war that the US and Israel entered without much thought, without a strategy and without an exit plan, while not consulting Congress or allies, and compound the missteps even further and potentially more seriously.”
For context, China buys more than 90% of Iran’s oil exports, making it the most likely target in any effort by Bessent to cut Tehran’s energy revenues. But the escalating economic war would carry significant risks. Sanctions on large Chinese companies or financial institutions could escalate tensions with Beijing ahead of a planned meeting between Presidents Trump and Xi Jinping. Also removing discounted Iranian crude from the global market could also tighten supplies and push already elevated Brent and WTI prices higher.

How absurd and idiotic is the “news” coming out of Kiev?

As I’ve said a thousand times.

“It’s like me telling you that right now there’s a gorilla in your bathtub playing chess, and all your neighbors believe it.”

• Ukraine Celebrates Launching Largest Attack Drone Swarm of the War (CTH)

Approximately six days from now I will share a great deal of information on World War Reddit. I took the insert picture about a week ago as a Ukraine drone struck a venue 500 meters from my location. Suffice to say, I’m not reporting information to you based on propaganda media, seriously skewed alt-media or misinterpreted/intercepted Telegram channel discussion; there’s an information war on that platform also.

Almost everything being told, shared and sold about the Russia vs Ukraine conflict is entirely made-up nonsense that has zero basis in reality. My goal has been to find out why there is this much effort toward twilight-zone level propaganda being pushed by unified interests in western media. Honestly, it’s beyond crazy. According to Ukraine/NATO media, and probably soon to be shared by President Trump, “Russia suffered 42,860 battlefield casualties in July, its highest monthly losses since January 2025.” This type of stuff is so far beyond silly no one can figure out where they come up with the ideas for the rates.
In media headlines you might have read that Ukraine is celebrating the biggest launch of drones against Russia in a single day, Sunday. The Russian media counter by saying they have shot down 822 drones, with 600 of them targeting the Russian capital of Moscow. Inside Russia, none of this stuff is happening; however, the govt of Putin finds some sort of purpose/value (personally I think it is just Russian humor) in countering the Ukraine nonsense by accepting the claim and then reiterating it in their claims of interception.
It’s all an illusion. First, the illusion makes it look like Russia is under bombardment (western happy), and then the Federation flips the script (it is indeed a script) and uses the claim as evidence of their exceptional capabilities at interception of the non-existent. If you are suddenly cross-eyed, yes, that’s the level of crazy I’m talking about.
(VIA CBS) – Ukraine launched hundreds of drones across Russia Sunday, killing at least six people in one of Kyiv’s largest aerial attacks of the war. Russia’s Ministry of Defense said that it had destroyed 822 Ukrainian drones overnight. Some 600 drones were detected headed toward the Russian capital, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said, with a third of those destroyed over the Moscow region itself. An 83-year-old man was killed after a Ukrainian drone hit a private home in the Moscow region, local Gov. Andrey Vorobyov said. He also confirmed that a Ukrainian attack had sparked a blaze at a Wildberries warehouse in the town of Podolsk.
A drone attack targeted three towns in Russia’s southwestern Rostov region, killing five people, local Gov. Yury Slyusar said. The attack, with more than 150 drones, damaged several homes and a railway station and sparked a forest fire. Kyiv has stepped up its attacks on Russia this year, with long-range missiles and swarms of drones increasingly targeting military industries and energy facilities. It has also increasingly pummeled giant Wildberries depots, burning billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise belonging to the Russian online retail giant and bringing the war home to the Russian public nearly four and half years into Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. (read more)
It is accurate that Ukraine drones have hit about a half dozen Wildberries distribution centers. Think about Wildberries as if you combined Amazon with E-Bay. What would life be like in America if a dozen (out of 1,300) Amazon distribution centers caught fire? Well, that’s the sum of the disruption. All those stories of gasoline refineries taken offline(?). More nonsense. Gasoline shortages(?), total gibberish – beyond silly. Beyond the overstated drone attacks all this stuff about military industrial centers, energy facilities and infrastructure being damaged is non-existent. So, why is this such a common thing to read about? Factually, I have no idea. It’s like me telling you that right now there’s a gorilla in your bathtub playing chess, and all your neighbors believe it.
Somewhere there is also a story about a new FP-9 Ukraine ballistic missile about to go into operation (next 60 days). They are supposedly working out an issue with the rocket engines. However, where they are being built is not easy to determine. All indications are in Europe somewhere. The FP-9 is part of a rushed missile and defense system from a company called Fire Point {citation} that is hoped to replace the missing U.S. Patriot Missile (defense) and Tomahawk missile (offense) that Ukraine and Germany have desperately been seeking. As the story is told, the funding comes from Ukraine, the targeting system from Germany and the build operations are taking place somewhere unknown.

This is not just a missile.
It is Ukraine's entry into the strategic league

Look at that beauty — FP‑9, Ukraine’s home‑grown ballistic missile.
Suspended like a predator ready to strike. Not a prototype anymore

. A promise.
And the promise is clear: The first ballistic strikes… pic.twitter.com/ACfUSMYLlw
— Jarl Finland (@jalle51) August 16, 2026

I don’t have it all figured out yet, but from what is visible on the surface is there appears to be a plan to drag out the conflict as long as possible, often with as outlandish claims as needed, in order to structure some kind of narrative that will eventually bring Europe -maybe NATO- into a direct combat operation against the Russian Federation.

“.. the radicalism of the Democrats in the age of Trump Derangement Syndrome—lawfare, de-balloting, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and calls to destroy the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, and the filibuster—helped give birth to the socialists.”

• Not Winning? Just Change the Rules (Victor Davis Hanson)

Kamala Harris speaks to AOC one day before the 2024 election

What binds the new Democratic Party to the new democratic socialists is a set of shared issues and values. That is, the radicalism of the Democrats in the age of Trump Derangement Syndrome—lawfare, de-balloting, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and calls to destroy the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, and the filibuster—helped give birth to the socialists. But the overriding commonality among those on the new Left is that if they do not get their way, they blame the “system.” Then they seek to change the rules, no matter how hallowed those laws and conventions may have been or how much they themselves benefited from them in the past.

When the Left lost the White House, Congress, and, for the most part, the Supreme Court, it began clamoring to change the system. For left-wing Democrats, that angst also translated into calls to bring in two new blue states, weaponize the FBI and the Justice Department, ally with social media to suppress the news, and spy on congressional representatives. All the socialists and communists did was up the ante in destroying norms by calling for the end of the presidency, the Senate, the border, the police, and the Pentagon.
By 2021, it was time to destroy the southern border and welcome in some 10 million illegal immigrants—without audits, English proficiency, health checks, or the ability to support themselves. Had Kamala Harris been elected in 2024, we would have had another four years and another 5 million illegal aliens. And perhaps America would have gone from 50 million foreign-born residents to 60 million, or about 18% of the population. In this regard, the Left sees California as our most liberal—and most ideal—state and perhaps concludes that the reason is that 28% of its resident population is now foreign-born, with the majority arriving with vast needs for health, education, housing, and food subsidies.
Today, 50% of all births in California are paid for by Medi-Cal, which serves 40% of the population. When second-generation immigrants are added to the foreign-born population, the two groups together comprise roughly 45% of California’s current population. This demographic transformation is one of the most profound in American history and came at a time when traditional civic education stressing assimilation, acculturation, integration, and knowledge of American traditions, history, and values was nearly nonexistent in California public schools.
So one way of achieving radical change was to alter the demography and welcome as many immigrants as possible who, in the first or second generation, might follow the examples of Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
They represent an entirely new sort of immigrant who arrives—or is born to immigrant parents—with both complaints against and dependence on their host country. They can see only the sins of America, never the catastrophes of their homeland that drove them or their parents here. This strange demand to change the rules whenever they do not bode well for angry and aggrieved parties permeates every possible manifestation of the Left but is especially egregious when demanded by immigrants who came originally as uninvited guests but almost immediately damned their magnanimous host.
It is strange for so many new immigrants to act on an elemental desire to reach America—only on arrival to profess that it is full of toxic, sinful people, living and dead. Yet the damned hosts have inexplicably welcomed total strangers like themselves, and have allowed them to share in the freedom, security, and prosperity created by the dead whom the newcomers nonetheless endlessly slander and smear.
If particular minorities statistically did not do as well on the SAT as Asians and whites did on average, the solution was certainly not SAT tutorials in the inner city or K-12 SAT outreach, demands for tougher classes in grammar, math, and analytics, or a return to the melting pot rather than the current salad-bowl tribalist model.
Instead, after the George Floyd riots, the call went out to abolish the SAT entirely—as if there had never been a purpose behind its creation. In fact, merit-based SAT exams were designed in the 1920s and 1930s to allow anyone, regardless of race, gender, region, or class, to enter college through meritorious performance on the tests—and, in particular, to overcome old-boy insider preferences and regional and ethnic prejudices.
Yet when the SAT was mostly abolished for four or five years, higher education thought it had solved the problem of minority underrepresentation. In fact, its racialist war on standards only magnified its dilemmas. The SAT had once informed admissions officers not only about applicants’ qualifications but also whether admitted students could do the work once enrolled. But soon liberal professors learned that many of the newly admitted cohorts lacked the K-12 training necessary to do customary university coursework. Yet if professors maintained their regular courses, requirements, and grading, they might soon be labeled racists once particular minorities were shown to do less well than Asians and whites.
So universities inflated grades. They introduced new remedial and gut courses. And they reduced the required coursework. But again, racialism is never a solution to problems. Instead, it is a catalyst that fuels them—as we have seen with the new notion that plagiarism is not an actionable offense when the culprit can plead victim status, whether a former president of Harvard or a current professor at Cambridge. But there are ancient laws and norms that insist intellectual theft is a crime and should be punished, not rewarded or ignored.
Soon employers noticed that the reading, writing, and analytical skills of graduates from prestigious schools were proving dismal. Alumni complained both that the reputations of their almae matres were in decline and resting on the fumes of the past and that their own children, who had prepared diligently to ensure suitably competitive grades and SAT scores for admission, were being rejected solely on the basis of their race.

“AOC has spent a decade cultivating an image as the insurgent outsider fighting the establishment. Conway just pointed out what should have been obvious all along: the insurgent outsider has become the establishment, and yet she has nothing to show for it.”

• This Might Be the Most Brutal Diagnosis of AOC You’ll Ever Hear (Margolis)

Kellyanne Conway appeared on Fox News’s The Five this week and gave a blunt yet extremely fair assessment of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.): she’s not actually doing her job. v”AOC stands for Always On Camera,” Conway said. “She is a performer, not a reformer. She went to Washington to legislate; that’s her job. She’s a pontificator, not a legislator.”Conway piled on by pointing out that, in four years under President Joe Biden, AOC passed one bill. One.

Conway’s point was simple: if you’re not good at legislating, you find something else to be good at, like living online, playing with your hair, and giggling every time someone asks whether you’d be fit to serve as commander-in-chief. Conway didn’t think that was funny. With the whole world watching, she said, that kind of response would be “embarrassing and a disaster.” Just watch The Brink of War and imagine AOC in a similar situation. You can’t, because she’s an absolute joke. But I digress.
AOC has tried to distance herself from her old positions by claiming her rhetoric from years ago doesn’t reflect where she is today. Conway found that laughable. Five years isn’t ancient history, and she made the point with a sharp comparison: does AOC’s position change with the seasons, too? If it’s raining, does she flip? If it’s October instead of April? Conway called the whole excuse disgraceful, and said both failed Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong and AOC had proven themselves untrustworthy to voters.
Conway also gave AOC credit for one thing. She started as a bartender who knocked off longtime incumbent Joe Crowley in a primary nobody saw coming. That, Conway said, was the best thing AOC ever did. Everything since has traded on being the fresh face, the disruptor. But by 2028, AOC will have spent ten years in Washington voting the party line, while also proving herself to be extremely radical. For example, she was also one of only ten Democrats to vote against a resolution condemning the October 7, 2023 attack, just eleven days after it happened.
And Conway wasn’t finished with the receipts. She explained how 2024 was a disaster for AOC’s political brand. Kamala Harris spent over a billion dollars and lost anyway. AOC endorsed Jamaal Bowman in his primary, and he lost. She endorsed Cori Bush, and she lost, too.

“AOC stands for Always On Camera!" @KellyannePolls calls AOC a “performer, not a reformer,” arguing the congresswoman is more focused on viral moments than delivering results for voters. pic.twitter.com/3KaYx0nkm1
— The Five (@TheFive) August 15, 2026

Make no mistake about it, Conway’s larger argument wasn’t really about policy. It was about authenticity, or the lack of it. She called AOC a “performative progressive,” someone running “stunts and grunts” to sway voters, rather than legislating on their behalf. Conway doesn’t think Americans are buying it anymore. Voters who tweet first and think third and fourth, she said, will pay a price for it.
She’s right. AOC has spent a decade cultivating an image as the insurgent outsider fighting the establishment. Conway just pointed out what should have been obvious all along: the insurgent outsider has become the establishment, and yet she has nothing to show for it.

“.. Then Gets Hit With a Brutal Fact Check “

• Jen Psaki Calls Karoline Leavitt a Liar (Teri Christoph)

Well, this is rich. Upon hearing the news that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt would be stepping away from her role at the end of the month to focus on her young family, former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki used the occasion to trash Leavitt and call her a liar. Yes, really, the woman whose inane and repeated “circle back” responses during her own tenure behind the White House briefing podium – she was Biden’s first press secretary – made her a laughingstock both in and outside of Washington, D.C., now wants to lecture Karoline Leavitt about how a press secretary should behave.

Psaki apparently has a show on MS NOW and let loose on the Thursday night episode, saying Leavitt didn’t engage the media “in good faith” and “reshaped” the White House Briefing Room “into her own personal safe space.” “The relationship between the press and the White House is supposed to be adversarial by design,” Psaki said on MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, where she was hired after her performance on then-President Biden’s behalf from 2021 to 2022.
“I mean, the press in the room are supposed to push for more access, for more information. And there are times when it’s absolutely appropriate for the press secretary to push back. But Karoline Leavitt didn’t want to engage in good faith with those reporters and their tough questions. “And so, instead, she did everything she could to reshape that briefing room into her own personal safe space where she rarely had to answer a tough question, hardly ever. I mean, she only briefed once or twice a week, max.”
https://twitter.com/TVNewsNow/status/2088295754242625539?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2088295754242625539%7Ctwgr%5E51a5118d96cbec2591a5d28cf11329865172c856%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fredstate.com%2Fterichristoph%2F2026%2F08%2F14%2Fformer-biden-spox-attacks-karoline-leavitt-n2205622
Psaki wasn’t done there and “accused Leavitt of lying repeatedly in her role and said she only served one man: Trump.”“It’s been about telling the version of the truth according to the serial liar who sits in the Oval Office. Reporters in the room don’t matter. The American people who rely on the reporting from the reporters in the room [don’t] matter, she’s never seen her job as working for the American people as a public servant,” Psaki said, adding she had damaged the job.
As a reminder, Jen Psaki spent years helping sell the fiction that Joe Biden was mentally sharp and physically vigorous, once claiming that the then-78-year-old president was so energetic she sometimes had trouble keeping up with him; even after leaving the White House, she insisted she had never witnessed any diminished capacity. She’s hardly in a position to cast judgment on anyone with that resume. Wid Lyman, an independent journalist who often attended Leavitt’s briefings, served up a brutal fact check on Psaki, revealing that, behind the scenes, the media has appreciated the increased access to the president, describing Leavitt’s entire team as “first class.”

Jen Psaki recently said the White House press briefing room “has massively changed” under the Trump administration and @karolineleavitt.

If you talk to anyone who has worked in media at the White House this is undoubtedly true.

Two comments I have heard recently:

"There is… pic.twitter.com/8HTTdqX1p1
— Wid Lyman (@Wid_Lyman) August 14, 2026

“Jen Psaki recently said the White House press briefing room “has massively changed” under the Trump administration and @karolineleavitt. If you talk to anyone who has worked in media at the White House this is undoubtedly true. Two comments I have heard recently: “There is way, way more going on during this administration compared to the last.” “The entire press team is first-class.” Karoline Leavitt not only fostered a more open atmosphere for multiple types of media in the briefing room, but she also created an environment where her staff was professional and courteous.
The 49 permanent seats in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room are allocated to legacy and major news organizations, but standing room only crowds of unseated journalists regularly attend the briefings. I routinely hear how much more crowded the room is compared to other times. Thank you for the opportunity to give our readers and followers a voice. God bless in all things.”
White House spokesman Davis Ingle had a very simple response to Psaki’s attack on Leavitt: “Jen ‘Circle Back’ Psaki couldn’t hold a candle to Karoline Leavitt.” Leavitt leaves the White House having expanded press access and earned praise even from journalists outside the conservative media bubble. Psaki left after helping hide Joe Biden’s obvious decline from the American people. If she really wants to have a conversation about who disgraced the podium, by all means, let’s have it.

“.. the GOAT of White House Press Secretaries”

• A Love Letter to Karoline Leavitt (Scott Pinsker)

From predicting Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 to nailing the Democrats’ Graham Platner bait-and-switch a month before everyone else, my predictive hit rate is among the best in the punditry biz. (And just this week, 48 hours after I hailed AOC’s “woke” pivot as a PR masterstroke, she shot to the top of the prediction markets. Booyah!) No, I haven’t gotten everything right, but to be fair, I’ve taken some very yuuuge swings. (Go big or go home, amiright?)
I’d guesstimate my accuracy is about 75%. But one of my proudest prognostications was less a prediction than an observation: Almost immediately, I hailed Karoline Leavitt — the youngest White House press secretary in history — as a frickin’ rockstar, and the greatest to ever serve President Trump.From March 18, 2025:
“We’re now eight weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, and two things are perfectly clear: 1) His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, is an absolute rockstar. 2) The mainstream media hates her.
The difference between Karoline and, say, Sean Spicer — Trump’s original press secretary — is night and day. Look, I don’t want to be unkind to Spicer, but her charisma, charm, and intellectual dexterity leave him in the dust. It’s the difference between chicken salad and chicken [EXPLETIVE].
Personally, I think she’s the best press secretary President Trump’s ever had”It took the rest of the media a little bit longer to catch up. People forget, but Leavitt was initially dismissed as a dumb blonde bimbo who only got the job ‘cause she’s young and hot.

Karoline Leavitt is an idiot and airhead https://t.co/4PJsf3Js0U
— rolandsmartin (@rolandsmartin) January 21, 2025

THE VIEW'S JOY BEHAR: Karoline Leavitt was only hired by Donald Trump because she's a '10.' You know that what it is.

How disrespectful.pic.twitter.com/bwjXQY8yIB
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 29, 2025

Ain’t that a kick in the head: Within 20 months, Karoline Leavitt went from an “airhead” to irreplaceable! Yet her biggest legacy will be how she transformed the position of White House press secretary. Pre-K.L. and post-K.L. are gonna be night and day. What once was an afterthought is now a PR priority. She turned White House press secretary into a prestige position.In the past, it was hit and miss. Sometimes, the White House press secretary was competent; sometimes, he/she wasn’t. Either way, nobody gave it much thought. (And at least one president clearly prioritized DEI box-checking over PR talent.)
But the era of appointing uncharismatic lumps such as Robert Gibbs, Jay Carney, Karine Jean-Pierre, and Dee Dee Myers to the position is over. It’ll NEVER happen again. That’s because Leavitt redefined the political — and personal — utility of being White House press secretary. It’s a byproduct of our media age: Voters consume content in quick bites, conflict sells, and viral moments are manna from heaven. Some of the top conservative podcasters and media personalities (including Charlie Kirk) had to manufacture conflict by traveling to college campuses, debating left-wingers, and uploading the most viral encounters to YouTube.
Kirk and others invested in this strategy because it moved the needle — repeatedly.But the White House press secretary doesn’t have to travel anywhere. Whenever she wants, she can go to the podium, whack reporters around like a piñata, and become an instant social media sensation.It’s an ambitious politician’s passport to fame and stardom!
Pre-K.L., someone such as Scott Jennings would have had no interest in being the White House press secretary. Why would he? He’s already kicking [tush] on CNN as the network’s top conservative counterweight; why deal with the headache of pushy left-wing reporters? Why hitch your wagon to the lame-duck Trump administration when you’re doing just fine on your own? (CNN pays him with real money, y’know.) Now, it’s a very real possibility — because Karoline Leavitt went from MEETING the press to BEATING the press.

CNN pundit Scott Jennings is reportedly in the running to become White House press secretary when Caroline Leavitt steps down from the podium at the end of the month. https://t.co/2tgrIcpzRV
— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) August 13, 2026

With the D.C. press corps’ blistering hatred of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, the purpose of the White House press secretary changed out of necessity. The goal, after all, of the mainstream media wasn’t to report “without fear or favor,” but to cheerlead for the Democrats and undermine the Republicans. In such a climate, a by-the-books, dispassionate PR presentation would be a disaster.You can’t treat a bad-faith question like a good-faith question. It just doesn’t work. Which is why Karoline Leavitt didn’t try:

The purpose of the position has changed. Instead of serving as the media’s punching bag, Leavitt reversed the equation, flipped the narrative, and leveraged the media’s idiocy to punctuate her own political points — manufacturing viral moments by the barrelful. Best of all, she instinctively mirrored her boss’s ethos: Trump is a fighter; so is Leavitt. If you come after Trump with a hammer, he’ll fire back with a torpedo. His tolerance for stupidity is famously thin.Same goes for Leavitt.
Plus, she had fun with the gig. Her joy was genuine; it leaped through the screen. Whether the next press secretary is Scott Jennings, Kari Lake, Spencer Pratt, or someone else, Leavitt created the blueprint that her successor will surely follow.Post-K.L., the primary job of a Republican White House press secretary is to produce viral moments by out-sparring D.C. reporters. Each day you’re behind the podium, your goal is the same: Defend the president by excoriating his detractors — and exposing their left-wing bull[feces]. It’s now a debating position, not an information desk.
Which, in all honesty, is way more fun: Not too many elite political talents would sign up to be the media’s punching bag ‘til the end of 2028… but getting two solid years of primo media facetime? Going one-on-one against America’s most famous journalists? Your top moments uploaded to X? Smashing reporters on a daily basis? Hooboy! The media is our perfect foil. Just 28% of Americans trust it — and for Republicans, it’s just 8%. We couldn’t ask for a better enemy. Post-K.L., the position of White House press secretary could elevate a current media star such as Scott Jennings to the next level for superstardom.
After leaving D.C., Karoline Leavitt will have plenty of options. If Fox News is wise, it’d load a Brink’s truck and make her an offer — as should CNN, Newsmax, and the major networks. She’d also be a helluva pick-up for The Daily Wire (assuming they could afford her). Or she could launch a digital network of her own, a la Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly. She has the name I.D. and political credibility to draw millions of eyeballs right out of the gate. Everyone knows her; everyone respects her. She’s about to be the hottest free agent in all of political media!
Or maybe she’ll take some time off and be a full-time momma for the next few years. Lord knows she’s earned the right to rest — and focus on her babies. She’s still only 28. Because, unlike most members of the media, she doesn’t have to strike when the metal is hottest. We won’t forget her — and her career won’t suffer. She can afford to take her time. Because she’s simply too talented. Congratulations, Karoline. You’re the GOAT of White House press secretaries. You were so damn good, you changed how the entire game is played. We salute you.
And it was the easiest prediction of my career.

Lock him up until he’s there?!

• Fauci Refuses Senate Appearance (Fox)

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Friday declined a request to voluntarily appear before a second Senate panel, opening another front in Republicans’ investigations into the former public health official’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. An attorney for Fauci rejected the request from Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, arguing that compelling Fauci to testify again after his contentious July 29 Senate hearing would “impermissibly harass or degrade Dr. Fauci for political purposes.”

Johnson has been conducting a parallel investigation into Fauci and the federal government’s response to COVID-19, including the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. The refusal comes after Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted along party lines last week to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress after he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times during the July hearing. Committee chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., has sought to send the contempt referral directly to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia, bypassing a full Senate vote.
“It’s a good legal discussion, and we will make those legal points to DOJ in sending the referral over,” Paul told Fox News Digital ahead of last week’s contempt vote. At issue is whether Fauci can invoke the Fifth Amendment after former President Joe Biden issued him a preemptive pardon before leaving office. Paul has argued that Biden’s pardon removed Fauci’s risk of federal prosecution and therefore undermined his basis for refusing to answer lawmakers’ questions. Fauci and his attorneys have disputed that position.
Paul has spent years investigating Fauci’s role in the government’s response to COVID-19 and has accused the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director of funding “risky” research that led to an alleged lab leak of the COVID-19 virus in China. Paul has repeatedly called for Fauci to be prosecuted.
Johnson’s subcommittee has separately obtained records related to Fauci and the government’s pandemic response. Fox News Digital previously confirmed that the Department of Health and Human Services sent the subcommittee a copy of Fauci’s pandemic-era cellphone. The broader Homeland Security panel also received more than 1,000 pages of Fauci’s personal diary before his July hearing.Fox News Digital reached out to Johnson’s office to ask whether he intends to subpoena Fauci following the refusal. Fox News Digital also sought reaction from Paul’s office and asked Fauci attorney David Schertler whether Fauci would comply with a subpoena compelling his testimony.

“It’s going to get much worse before the Midterms. As I said, these people don’t care about the country..”

• 2026 Midterms Very, Very Tight Election – Martin Armstrong (USAW)

Legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong is out with a new report (more than 100 pages) that takes a deep dive on the “2026 Midterm Elections” in November. Armstrong says, “The computer is showing this is going to be a very, very tight election. It’s a 50/50 deal where we didn’t see either party coming in with a landslide. The bottom line looks like the Democrats can take the House, but not the Senate. So, you will have a 50/50 divided government. You are going to get a lot of the crazies on the Democrat side. Even the conservative Democrats are getting very nervous. You recently had (Democrat) James Carville talking about how the party is going to split, which was our forecast in 2024.

So, this is where we are heading. By the Dems taking the House, you will see all kinds of investigations, there will be another impeachment of Trump, etc. They will be real obstructionists. They don’t give a crap about the country. If Trump says the sky is blue, they have to say it’s red. This is the way politics degenerated.”The implications for the Democrats will be long lasting and not in a good way. Armstrong says, “If the Democrats take the House, they will basically make this a real shit fight. Our computers show for 2028 something very, very interesting. I have never seen it do this, and it’s showing the Democrats will lose dramatically. On the Republican side, it shows they win even slightly above 70%.
You take the two favorites from both sides, which would be Vice President Vance against AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), Vance would blow her out, yes. I think the Democrats need to take the House to show the world how screwed up they really are. There will be a check against them from Trump and the Senate. They can do an impeachment, but the trial has to be in the Senate, and it’s not going to go anywhere. . .. It’s going to get much worse before the Midterms. As I said, these people don’t care about the country. This has turned into a bloodsport. This is part of what the computer has been projecting. By 2032, we are looking at the collapse of Republican forms of government.”
On the war in Ukraine, Armstrong says, “I am not optimistic. It looks like it goes off the boards by 2030 or so. Even the EU looks like it’s going to collapse after 2029 and break up again.” With the Iran war, Armstrong says, “China is using Iran to drain our resources, which has happened. It takes two to three years to replace the missiles. Taiwan is up in arms saying to the US, you don’t have the fire power to protect us. . .. You see the same thing with Russia and Ukraine. They say Russia is weak. They can’t take Ukraine, and Ukraine has seriously weakened Russia. That is what Ukraine is doing. That’s the whole purpose of this, and that was to drain Russia. Iran is doing the same thing to America.”
Armstrong says don’t expect the stock market to crash anytime soon as money is flowing into and not out of America. Armstrong also is forecasting a new gold bull market in 2027.
Extra:

I did check the date to make sure it’s recent.

• Newsom’s High Speed Train to Nowhere is Not Arriving Anytime Soon (Turley)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been frantically trying to restart a presidential campaign that appears moribund, with polls showing him losing in some states to figures such as Pete Buttigieg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In his absence, his multibillion-dollar high-speed train also seems to be going nowhere fast. A new report from the state inspector general revealed that the train will be delayed again and that the public is being kept in the dark about ongoing problems with Newsom’s signature project. Oh, and one more thing: the project will run out of money by December 2027.

Benjamin Belnap’s report revealed the project is again running out of money. It found missing details in the project’s 2026 business plan, and concluded that the project will again be out of money by next year. The state has already spent $18 billion, but it will need at least another $18 billion to finish the first segment. It could take roughly $200 billion more actually to complete the original San Francisco-to-Los Angeles line. Even with billions more, the current segment will not be completed until 2034.
Voters approved a $9.95 billion bond issue in 2008 under Newsom’s predecessor after absurdly low cost estimates. Newsom has been a champion of the project. Influential figures and companies stood to make a fortune, and the key was to secure a “buy-in” worth billions, so that it would become increasingly difficult to abandon the project as overruns and delays sent costs soaring. Now the official estimate of future ridership has dropped by 25%, and it demands billions more to complete a project delayed by decades. Remember that this entire project was meant to create a rail line of only 171 miles.
One would think that the California voters would be marching to the capital with pitchforks and torches over such breathtaking incompetence and waste. However, they appear to have been conditioned to accept the lowest level of performance from their public officials.
The response of Democratic leaders is crushingly predictable: they are pledging to seek a federal bailout to cover their own incompetence. The Democratic nominee for governor, Xavier Becerra, is promising to fight to get back federal funds that were cut off by the Trump Administration. While promising to seriously review any problems in the project (as if they are not obvious), no one has been held accountable for this financial train wreck. Instead, all Democrats can do is demand that citizens around the country help bail out their boondoogle.
Yet, the Inspector General is describing a failure of leadership where no one is making any real decisions: “Exploration of specific financing mechanisms is a positive step, but because the Authority might run out of funding as soon as December 2027, and the financing strategy the Authority uses has the potential to significantly affect the amount of interest it will need to repay, the Authority and state lawmakers have little time for delay in deciding upon a strategy and implementing it.”
Belknap indicated that those in control are simply shrugging off the problem, noting that “[b]ecause the Authority has thus far not demonstrated a willingness to establish and reinforce a process that ensures accuracy and transparency in project reporting, we have directed our report recommendations to the Board.”
In the meantime, the state will continue to creep along with a project that is sucking billions into a project that has become a national disgrace. Beccera’s pledge to seek bailouts shows that the problem remains the political culture in California. There is little accountability left in a one-party state where companies and individuals have made fortunes off this debacle. The only people being taken for a ride are Californian citizens and it is not the ride that they bargained for.

What is this? Communiusm? There’s only one possible opinion?

• War On Rowling Continues (Sans Facts) (Christian Toto)

Journalists love to ask two questions spun from the same unhinged premise. Do you support trans women in women’s sports, and do you agree with author J.K. Rowling’s “anti-trans” views?The former bullies athletes for passing Biology 101. The latter targets the Harry Potter author at every possible turn. We’re seeing both in action of late. Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham is under media assault for sharing a simple truth about men in women’s sports, a fact supported by science at every turn. “She’s MAGA Barbie,” select outlets cry!

Rowling is under a fresh attack from an actor lucky enough to snag a role in HBO Max’s hotly anticipated Harry Potter TV series. Bel Powley, who plays Petunia Dursley in the upcoming series, told The Telegraph that she “strongly disagrees” with Rowling’s position on trans issues.”I strongly disagree with J.K. Rowling’s views on gender. I think that the trans community deserves safety and dignity and respect and total acceptance … but I love Harry Potter. I grew up with the books. I am from that first generation of readers and, again, I love magic and spookiness.”
That’s why Powley took the gig. That, and the paycheck, of course. It’s likely that The Telegraph asked Powley about the Rowling issue and that the actress didn’t bring it up on her own. Either way, it’s part of a larger, disturbing media trend. Reporters describe anyone who doesn’t embrace the whole activist trans agenda as “anti-trans.” And they never ask the person in question to share specifics on what they’re criticizing or recite the actual comments by the “villain” du jour. For Cunningham, that means her critics won’t admit the obvious. Men have clear, distinct biological advantages that don’t vanish if they embrace “womanhood” or take hormones. Cunningham spoke very clearly on the issue. She did so without malice or political rhetoric.
The media and the Left, but we repeat ourselves, targeted her anyway. Rowling also has been very careful in her language on trans issues. She doesn’t wish the trans community harm. Her initial statements on the subject were kind and hardly alienating. She simply understands the need for separate spaces for biological women while acknowledging the physiological differences between male and female athletes. Oh, and she’s faced frequent death threats for sharing her commonsense opinions. Here’s what Rowling wrote in 2020, responding to the very early stages of the Left’s war on the beloved author.
“Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk…I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.” Does that sound cruel or hateful? Hardly. Did Powley read Rowling’s long, personal essay on the subject back in 2020? Has she read it lately? Unlikely.
The same is likely true for John Lithgow. The veteran actor plays Professor Dumbledore in the series, and he, too, has been coaxed into savaging Rowling for her trans views. They’re “inexplicable,” Lithgow said. Has he tried speaking with her directly? She’s a key player behind the scenes of the new HBO Max show.
Why not start there? Has he read everything she’s said on the matter? Where does he agree or disagree? It’s fine to disagree, of course, but he must know the intense cancellation movement she’s faced in recent years. Or does he realize that the “safe” position in Hollywood for anyone, let alone an 80-year-old actor, is to slam Rowling and leave any critical facts out of the conversation? To be fair, the legacy media does just that, too.

If Washington were the capital of a piece of land named Turkey, someone would do something about it too.

• It’s Spelled ‘Turkey,’ Not ‘Türkiye” (A.J. Christopher)

I noticed that when media outlets write about the country Turkey, they’re now spelling it “Türkiye.” Have you noticed it, too? Did you get the memo on this? Because I sure didn’t.
But apparently the United Nations did. At the request of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the United Nations in June 2022 agreed to use the spelling “Türkiye” to refer to the country. The State Depa
rtment also must have gotten the memo, because in January 2023, it followed suit. Naturally, the Western media was only too happy to play its polished role as court eunuch to Biden’s autopen, and it slipped into the usage of “Türkiye” with nary a peep.
So why did Erdogan make the request? Because “Turkiye” is how the country is spelled in its native Modern Turkish alphabet, and Erdogan’s rebranding of its spelling is part of his larger nationalistic, anti-Western agenda. Erdogan is also well aware of the West’s Achilles’ heel, which is the insatiable addiction of white liberals to pander to anything they feel counters Western influence. Erdogan is a president in name only. In reality, he lords over an increasingly repressive Islamist dictatorship that has been busying itself for over a decade with decoupling from the West and aligning with Russia and Iran. One would think that Western liberals would recoil from taking direct orders from a man who cozies up to the oppressors of women, the murderers of gays, and the architect of the Ukraine invasion.
Ah, but that would require them to stand on their stated principles. And it turns out their stated principles are not really their principles at all. It’s more important for them to denigrate their own culture and language — hence their eager and willing use of the word “Türkiye” – than to make common cause with “workers of the world” or “indigenous communities” or whatever their catchphrase of the week is. White liberals do this effortlessly with other linguistic overlaps as well. This is why they pronounce Spanish-originating words with faux-accents. They’ll pronounce the word Latino as (Lah-TEE-no), and they’ll over-accentuate the double E. Or they’ll pronounce the word Mexico as (Meh-hee-co), and pronounce the X as an H.
Liberals do this partly to brag about how cultured they think they are. They do this partly because they think it makes them sound exotic and diverse. But they do it more so as a direct criticism of the English language and American culture, as if by pronouncing these words with Spanish accents and pronunciations, they are disavowing their own native language as inferior. This is pandering, and it’s embarrassing to watch. It reeks of desperation. And the attempt doesn’t flatter the minority whose rear end the groveling white liberal is desperately trying to kiss. He’s rather insulted. You don’t get into people’s good graces by poorly mimicking their accent. You don’t impress them by flaunting the half a dozen or so words you know of their native language.
One particularly asinine example is that of the Micmac Indians, a Native American tribe in the American northeast, formally changing their name to the Mi’kmaq to appear less “colonial.” The left, of course, duly did what they were told and began using the word Mi’kmaq. It solved none of these Indians’ problems and changed nothing of history, but it made everyone feel woke and special.I find this particular example silly for two reasons. First, let’s be honest. None of us even knew the Micmacs were an Indian tribe until the movie Pet Sematary hit the theaters in 1989. And second, there is nothing colonizing about the spelling of the word Micmac.
Do you know why? Because there was never a written native version of the word which could be “colonized.” Do you know why? Because the Micmac Indians had no written language. That’s why. They were that primitive. And it amuses me that a culture which appropriated the concept of written language from us now tries to dictate to us how to use that language. Sorry, not sorry. I’m spelling it as Micmac. And if you continue to insist on taking the word and making it Mi’kmaq? Fine. You can take that word back. And I will take back electricity and indoor plumbing and modern medicine and literacy and the wheel.
The worst, though, is when white liberals do this with Islam. It starts, again, with their pronunciation of the word itself. In English, we pronounce it as (IZ-lam). But the pandering white liberal will try to adapt an Arabic accent and pronounce it as (Is-LAHM). It’s subtle, but it’s unmistakable when you hear them do it. And it sounds like nails on a chalkboard. Because it’s such shameless pandering. But they have to outdo each other to show whose most woke. And so they refer to the religion’s founder Mohammed as the Prophet Mohammed. As if he were an actual prophet, and not a schizophrenic, incestuous warlord. And you’ll notice they never extend this respect to any other religion. They never refer to Moses as the Prophet Moses. They never refer to Jesus as Jesus the Messiah.
But with Islam? They trip over one another rushing to fasten the shackles to their own wrists. So let’s get a few things straight. Without apology, I will continue to pronounce every word I speak, regardless of that word’s origin, with an American accent, just as people of other languages will continue to speak their words using their own accents, without anyone trying to guilt trip them for it. Without apology, I will continue to spell every word I write using phonetic English, just as people of other languages will continue to write their words using their own phonetics without anyone trying to guilt trip them for it.
And without apology, I will never refer to Mohammed as a prophet. Because he wasn’t one. He initiated a death cult which rivals only leftist ideology in the amount of sheer human suffering it inflicts wherever it goes. I’m American, and I speak and write based on the culture in which I was raised. I’m proud of that. And because of my cultural self-confidence, I feel no need to insist that strangers halfway across the globe pronounce and write the word “America” the same exact way I do. And if some dime store Islamic thug like Erdogan thinks he has a say in how I speak my language in my country, I’d like to see him try to enforce it.
Hey Erdogan, you know that city you call Istanbul? The proper pronunciation is actually “Constantinople.” And you want us to spell your country as Türkiye? The proper spelling is actually “Byzantium.” You might not be aware of that now.

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2088335459713716536?s=20 https://twitter.com/cb_doge/status/2088368087536169145?s=20

TRUMP JUST REPOSTED JFK’S MOST TERRIFYING SPEECH — AND THE DEEP STATE IS PANICKING

JFK saw it coming. In 1961. And now, Trump has just made sure 300 million Americans see it, too. pic.twitter.com/Af6TR5g7kP
— Kelly Marie Brady (@KellyMarieBrady) August 14, 2026

https://twitter.com/WakeUpPatriott/status/2088014520602022365?s=20 https://twitter.com/AmericaPartyX/status/2088347581705302441?s=20

If Tesla and SpaceX merge, you’ll have AI (Grok), Physical AI (FSD), Robots (Optimus/Cybercab), Energy, Chip Manufacturing, and Rockets all under one umbrella.

Game over. https://t.co/Ii2y4CJOVX pic.twitter.com/Fmg2q5Eeg4
— Nic Cruz Patane (@niccruzpatane) August 14, 2026

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Debt Rattle July 21 2026

Jul 212026

July 21, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:31 am Finance Tagged with: border czar, Britain, burn bags, Don Lemon, ICE, Kamala, midterms, NATO, Netanyahu, unelected 33 Responses »

Wassily Kandinsky Autumn Landscape with Boats 1908

• Trump: Iran Will Pay ‘Many Times Over’ For US Troop Deaths (ZH)

• Border Czar Warns New York City That ‘ICE Surge’ Is Coming (Hyde)

• Trump Insists Netanyahu Will Not Face Arrest In The US (Ben Whedon)

• The 2026 NATO Summit Confirmed A New Transatlantic Bargain (Ruel Domi)

• Come Meet Britain’s Next Worst Prime Minister Ever (Stephen Green)

• The Unelected Monarch Creates the Unelected U.K Prime Minister (CTH)

• About Those Burn Bags President Trump Mentioned in His Address (O’Brien)

• Democrats Dismiss Our Constitutional Traditions as ‘Nostalgia’ (Turley)

• War, Over There, Over Here (James Howard Kunstler)

• Here’s How the Democrats Are Blowing the Midterms (Margolis)

• Why Democrats Can’t Do Better Than Kamala Harris in 2028 (Daniel McCarthy)

• Don Lemon Wants the White House and Thinks MAGA Is the Nazi Party (Manney)

• “I’m Not Living In Communist America”: Bill Maher Blasts DSA Democrats (ZH)

• China’s Fake US Driver’s Licenses Tampered With the 2020 Election (O’Brien)

• Can Elon Musk Really Put ONE MILLION Data Center Satellites in Orbit? (Green)

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2079000563333939440?s=20 https://twitter.com/ivan_8848/status/2079122207796548037?s=20

They each deserve presidential medals of freedom for standing up and speaking out so honestly to protect our freedoms. @POTUS @realDonaldTrump @SusieWiles https://t.co/vs9V8Bi0oo
— General Mike Flynn (@GenFlynn) July 20, 2026

https://twitter.com/FreedomHasWon/status/2079197047576825994?s=20

“Air war alone cannot dislodge a large military/regime, hence the dilemma of restraint vs. quagmire and new forever war…”

• Trump: Iran Will Pay ‘Many Times Over’ For US Troop Deaths (ZH)

After at least three more American troops were reported killed in Iranian attacks on Jordan and Iraq, President Trump has newly warned Monday that “Every time Iran kills an American soldier they will pay for that killing many times over!” The Commander-in-Chief says further he’s given “directives” on a presumably impending US military response to Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, as well as his generals. Trump had on Saturday said the deaths of service members in Jordan are “a very sad thing.” He stated: “We hate to see it happen.” In follow-up he described that the retaliation on Iran would be in ‘honor’ of these fallen ‘patriots’.

Greek Tankers Hit, Also as Iran Targets Bahrain
Iran’s IRGC continues to insist that it along is in control of the Strait of Hormuz, as it continues firing on foreign vessels seeking to traverse the Strait of Hormuz outside of Iran’s ‘approved’ zone and protocol. According to some of the latest developments on this front, via regional media: One of two Greek-owned tankers hit by projectiles in the Strait of Hormuz has been abandoned by its crew after fire was reported on the vessel. The crew was rescued by a tugboat after abandoning the Maltese-flagged Kavomaleas owned by Greece’s Dynacom Tankers.
Earlier, UKMTO reported fire onboard the tanker north of Kuzmar, Oman. It had been stranded in the Arabian Gulf after spending months offshore of Saudi Arabia. It appeared to exit the Strait of Hormuz on July 2 although its AIS tracking was turned off. Various locations across Iran meanwhile continued to get pummeled by US aerial attacks. Iran in turn has been heavily targeting Bahrain on Monday. “The US launched an aerial attack on one of the areas in Shiraz, it resulted in no casualties, and the situation is under control,” IRIB reports. Currently, FM Araghchi is said to be en route to Pakistan, as mediators scramble to contain the war.
Air war alone cannot dislodge a large military/regime, hence the dilemma of restraint vs. quagmire and new forever war…

I'm confused.

The USA has the most powerful military on Earth. We've bombed the HELL out of Iran for 4 months. Trump says their Air Force, Navy, and nearly all of their missile capabilities are destroyed.

…so how is Iran still capable of hitting US bases right now???
— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) July 18, 2026

Bahrain statement: “Bahrain’s Civil Aviation Affairs said Monday that an Iranian drone attack targeted civilian air navigation systems used to manage the country’s Flight Information Region as military escalation continues to rage on between Iran and the US.” Latest from CENTCOM: The US military says it has disabled one ship and redirected seven in its continuing blockade of Iranian ports. “As of July 20, the US military has redirected 7 commercial vessels and disabled 1 to prevent the ships from leaving or entering Iranian ports,” CENTCOM wrote on X.

Trump confronting Mamdani.

• Border Czar Warns New York City That ‘ICE Surge’ Is Coming (Hyde)

Federal Border Czar Tom Homan has announced that an unprecedented surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents is coming to New York City in response to the city’s sanctuary policies. Homan told Fox News on Sunday, “It’s coming,” citing the Trump administration’s refusal to be hampered by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s vow to champion the city’s sanctuary status and to continue resisting federal immigration enforcement. Homan refused to discuss specifics as to where and when enforcement actions would occur so as to avoid tipping off the various leftist groups who have organized to oppose ICE actions.
https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2078838491388031146?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2078838491388031146%7Ctwgr%5Eaf9f5cf6ec9507f23d141bbd7943e1b2278b5c8f%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fborder-czar-warns-new-york-city-ice-surge-coming-enforcement-expanding

Homan told Fox News that “there needs to be a surge” and added, “But I am not going to show our hand because there are… well-funded groups who will try to impede, interfere. We’re not going to give them any upside on this.” The border czar’s comments followed statements Mamdani made during a New York Times interview on Saturday, in which the mayor expressed “pride” regarding the city’s refusal to cooperate with immigration enforcement and vowed to protect immigrant communities.
Mamdani told the Times, “What we are unwilling to do is to participate in civil immigration enforcement with a federal government that has said openly it wants to deport a vast majority of people for crimes that we will never even know.” According to Fox News, Homan fired back at Mamdani’s statement, saying that the mayor can have his stance but he will not prevent ICE from doing its job, noting, “That’s called the rule of law. If he doesn’t like it, call your members of Congress, tell them to change the law.”
The federal surge is also tied to New York state budget legislation signed into law by Governor Kathy Hochul that strictly curbs local law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration officials and bans ICE agents from wearing masks during community operations. Homan has also argued that blocking ICE access to municipal jails removes operational efficiencies, forcing federal teams out onto the streets to conduct widespread community arrests. The border czar said that President Trump’s campaign promises to address border security and to impose mass deportations are a large reason why he is the president today.

“The International Criminal Court (ICC) previously issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu amid the Gaza conflict.”

• Trump Insists Netanyahu Will Not Face Arrest In The US (Ben Whedon)

President Donald Trump on Monday strongly asserted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would not face arrest while in the United States as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani reportedly weighs options to bring him into custody. The International Criminal Court (ICC) previously issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu amid the Gaza conflict. The U.S. is not party to the Rome statute and is under no obligation to arrest Netanyahu. However, Mamdani has mulled doing so amid the Iran war.

“Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “He is fighting against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which recently killed 52,000 innocent protestors, and has spent the last 47 years killing American Soldiers, and others,” he added. “The only ones that should be arrested are the people that led Iran into this unprecedented SPIRAL OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION, something that should have been dealt with years ago, by previous Presidents!”
Mamdani’s authority and ability to arrest Netanyahu without the consent of Washington, D.C., is dubious at best.

“President Trump has been clear: As China becomes a rising threat, America cannot single-handedly carry the burden of Europe’s defense.”

• The 2026 NATO Summit Confirmed A New Transatlantic Bargain (Ruel Domi)

For three decades after the end of the Cold War, the transatlantic relationship rested on an implicit bargain: America guaranteed European security while the EU and its satellites concentrated on economic and political integration and drastically expanded their generous welfare states. The latest NATO summit in Ankara demonstrated that this bargain is falling apart. A new one is emerging, one in which Europe is expected to assume far greater responsibility for its own defense while the United States increasingly shifts its strategic focus toward containing China in the Indo-Pacific. Europe appears reluctant to accept it, but eventually, it will need to get used to it. NATO’s latest summit demonstrated such a need.

Firstly, the new bargain rests upon the fundamental assumption that Europe cannot continue to outsource its security indefinitely. During his first campaign for president, stretching for the entirety of his first term, President Trump demanded that America’s allies on the other side of the Atlantic spend more on their defense.
Up until that point, NATO’s 2006 defense minister agreement established a 2% of GDP requirement for all members to spend on defense. And despite that agreement, only Poland and the United States had achieved that goal, leaving behind powerful and wealthy European states such as Germany, France, and even the United Kingdom (at the time, an EU member). Such a discrepancy suggests deep-rooted and structural unfairness, as wealthier and more influential countries must be willing to spend more on defense, which hasn’t happened until this summit.
While the American left idolized European welfare states and the robust social safety nets that came with them, it was clear that those welfare states would have been impossible to finance without the American taxpayer bankrolling European defense. Needless to say, when America needed Europe the most, in the aftermath of Operation Epic Fury, European allies repeatedly refused to join the United States in military activity designed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz from the Iranian blockade—which, ironically enough, would benefit Europe more than it would America—due to Europe importing much of its oil and natural gas through the Strait of Hormuz. When a conflict began with Iran, Europe once again proved reluctant to shoulder a larger share of the burden.
Donald Trump understood that this posture is unsustainable, which is why he asked Europeans to raise their defense spending in his first term, while raising the requirement to a historic 5% of the GDP for all NATO members throughout this ongoing second term. The bargain is clear: Europe must not be allowed to outsource its defense spending to the United States, at least not without increasing defense spending and implementing serious changes to its economic, political, and social model.
The current American administration correctly understands that a weak Europe is a threat to the future of the transatlantic alliance and to the alliance’s security in the face of looming threats from Russia, China, and growing competition from the Global South.
Secondly, as outlined in the 33-page national security strategy of the United States published in early December, the U.S. is diverting its attention away from continental Europe to the Indo-Pacific. There, Chinese control of the South China Sea and a looming invasion of Taiwan are seen not just as geopolitical inconveniences but as real and existential security threats to the United States and its strategic interests in the region.
For that reason alone, Europe must spend more on its defense to deter potential Russian aggression, while the United States deals with China. The notion that the United States should be left dealing with the Sino-Russian axis alone, while the EU goes down the drain of unfettered leftism, at the expense of its civilization and the NATO alliance at large, represents an absurd and unsustainable model of alliance maintenance—and, I should add, grave political malpractice.
If the United States were to continue on the liberal path of relationship building with Europe, it would have to concede the chips race to China, as a successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan would give the CCP control of over 80% of the world’s semiconductors, leading to almost complete Chinese control of global supply chains and a consequent economic disaster for America and Europe alike.
It is clear that the liberal bargain of the US-EU relationship needs to be replaced by a pragmatically realist approach that preserves the alliance while deterring foreign adversaries. The latest NATO summit did exactly that.

“As mayor, he promised to end homelessness in Greater Manchester by 2020. He didn’t. But he sure spent a lot of money on it.”

• Come Meet Britain’s Next Worst Prime Minister Ever (Stephen Green)

Following King Charles III’s formal request to form a new government on Monday, new U.K. Labour Leader Andy Burnham takes Keir Starmer’s place as Britain’s next worst prime minister ever. “I now pass the baton to Andy Burnham, I wish him every success. He has my full support,” Starmer said to anyone still listening. It won’t be easy topping — bottoming? — Starmer’s record of increasing Islamification, two-tier justice, and economic decline, but I have faith in Burnham’s ability to do so. At the very least, there’s certainly no doubting his willingness to try.

It seems like just last month [It was just last month, Steve —Editor] I wrote that “The U.K.’s most destructively feckless prime minister (since the last one)” would soon be history, but that Burnham “could prove Britain’s final undoing.” I hate to be so pessimistic when it’s only Monday, but take a look at this guy. Burnham hasn’t worked in the private sector in 30 years — as a writer, yuck! — serving in Parliament for two decades, both in and out of power. He held positions we don’t even have here, like Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Shadow Secretary of State for Health, and Undersecretary for Taxing of Things We Haven’t Yet Taxed.
Then he served as Mayor of Greater Manchester (2017-2026), until returning to Parliament earlier this year following a by-election (kind of like a special election year), seemingly for the sole purpose of taking a run at Starmer. Mission: Accomplished. As of this writing, Burnham is busy sacking various members of Starmer’s cabinet, including Rachel Reeves as Chancellor, Steve Reed as Housing Secretary, Lord Hermer as Attorney General, Peter Kyle as Business Secretary, and the execrable David Lammy from his dual roles as Justice Secretary and Deputy PM.
But as one commenter on X warned: “Many people are loving all Burnham’s sackings because of what they think about the politicians he’s getting rid of. But don’t cheer too enthusiastically because it’s not at all clear that the new appointees will be any better.” The situation remains fluid, as they say, but Burnham has yet to name any replacements to serve in his cabinet. The name to keep an eye on — as I warned you last month — is the woman often called “the brains” behind Burnham’s time as mayor, the Liberian-born daughter of lefty radicals: Miatta Fahnbulleh.
CutMyTaxUK reported last year that Fahnbulleh “was born in Liberia as part of a prominent leftist revolutionary family, has served as a junior energy & housing minister in the Starmer government before resigning to support Burnham.” Previously, as the “former head of the far-left New Economics Foundation,” she proved “adept at churning out socialist policy proposals.” Or as CMT-UK put it, “Keir Starmer has appointed a Housing Minister who hates private housing.” And guess what? Before even naming Fahnbulleh as Permanent Undersecretary for Ending Private Property, Politics UK reported that Burnham is considering introducing rent controls as part of his cost of living announcement on Tuesday. “We are looking at measures that could make a difference this year,” Burnham said.
Tell me if this next item rings any bells, particularly for readers in California. “We ran a [homelessness] scheme every night. 600 beds,” Burnham said Monday. “But we were the only place doing it. It taught me the only way is to do this together.” As mayor, he promised to end homelessness in Greater Manchester by 2020. He didn’t. But he sure spent a lot of money on it. Now he’s taking his program nationwide, presumably. What Britain needs is a national election that might correct Labour’s lopsided majority in Parliament despite the party’s massive unpopularity. What they’ll get is the country’s next worst prime minister. Until the next one, I’m afraid.

He’s just the next one.

• The Unelected Monarch Creates the Unelected U.K Prime Minister (CTH)

There is absolutely nothing democratic within the political schemes of the communists, leftists and Nazis’. Just as Ukraine is led by an unelected authoritarian under the guise of the ‘new democratic norms’; just as Kamala Harris was installed as a presidential nominee under those same anti-democracy norms; so too is U.K Prime Minister Andy Burnham now installed without any election by the British citizens. nThe unelected monarch, King Charles, appoints the unelected Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, and the first pledge of the unelected leader is a promise to make life better for the people who are denied a voice in his agenda.

THE BACKGROUND – Former communist Prime Minister Kier Starmer was facing a massive amount of opposition, his policies and party platform had collapsed, and the people of Britain were revolting against him. Starmer’s Labour party lost more than 1,400 seats in the country’s local elections, and the non-communist, nationalistic Reform Party was winning. Something urgent was needed. Polls showed communist Mayor Andy Burnham was popular as his mask still had still not fully dropped, and the illegal immigrants on the streets of Manchester were only raping a few girls each month which was still easy to hide.
However, the problem was that Burnham could not replace Starmer unless he was a Member of Parliament (MP). With urgent payments for future indulgencies quickly afforded, the communist MP for Makerfield, a district within Greater Manchester, resigned from his job so that communist Andy Burnham could run for his MP position. A few days later, exactly at the moment communist Burnham was being sworn in to the MP job, communist Starmer announced his exit. The plan had worked seamlessly.
The Communist Labour Party of the U.K then coalesced quickly to replace Starmer with Burnham, and today Communist King Charles appointed Communist Andy Burnham to lead the country. No election needed; i.e. ‘The New Democratic Norm’ again fulfilled. Great Britain’s Bernie Sanders is now in charge of things. …”I have just come from Buckingham Palace where I have accepted his Majesty the King’s invitation to form a government”…

“These bags were supposed to be at a different level, by different people, incinerated…but it never happened. Maybe we got lucky.”

• About Those Burn Bags President Trump Mentioned in His Address (O’Brien)

In addition to its general corruptibility, one thing you can be sure of when it comes to the federal government is that it’s probably not a good idea to trust federal employees to conceal your misdeeds. In the bureaucracy, “good enough” is the standard for quality work And so, when President Donald Trump delivered his address to the nation on July 16, he brought attention to something we should know much more about but don’t yet: the discovery of “burn bags,” which Trump said contained sensitive documents from the Obama administration.

Trump said, “Recently, we found significant numbers of burn bags… and this is a group of bags that were used to destroy information given by President Barack Hussein Obama to be burned….These bags were supposed to be at a different level, by different people, incinerated…but it never happened. Maybe we got lucky.” As the term implies, burn bags contain material that is slated for destruction, sending all of the former administration’s secrets into that big shredder in the sky. But someone “dropped the bag,” and more than a few of them were left to be discovered by the second Trump administration in the FBI building.
https://twitter.com/jason_meister/status/2078875275115282912?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2078875275115282912%7Ctwgr%5Eed99d8927aa77488474324fc575801ef2c654e35%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpjmedia.com%2Ftim-o-brien%2F2026%2F07%2F19%2Fabout-those-burn-bags-president-trump-mentioned-in-his-address-to-the-nation-n4955234

Now that Trump is sitting on a political treasure trove of data and information that can be used to expose the left, expect a distraction or two. Whenever the left panics, you start to see ginned-up controversies over allegations of Trump “stealing our democracy,” “climate change,” “Christian nationalism,” or all of the above. Given the seriousness of the potential contents of those burn bags, it wouldn’t surprise me if the left goes even harder with its lies and wrap-up smears to try to take Trump out using the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.
As a result of the Trump administration’s discovery of those burn bags, the president ordered the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA to review the documents, analyze them, and see if any laws were broken. That analysis will focus on the handling of the sensitive information and the chain of custody of the documents themselves, and the contents of the documents that were never destroyed. It must be noted that simply finding some old burn bags doesn’t mean something improper was done. The federal government uses burn bags as a matter of course to destroy sensitive materials that will no longer be kept on file.
The president believes that the bags of documents could unearth critical information that has been concealed from the public eye. He bases this viewpoint on his past experience with both the Obama and Biden administrations and their pattern of not preserving, or not providing access to, certain important intelligence information. In other words, Trump knows what he doesn’t know, and he wants answers. Could those bags contain more proof of the deep state covering up election schemes? Do any contain information that implicates specific members of the Obama or Biden administrations? If Trump knows, he’s not naming names or providing details just yet.
Trump’s mention of those burn bags was in the context of his larger address on election integrity failures and questionable activities on the part of Democrat administrations, their political operatives, and others. As leftists circle the wagons to protect their favorite former Democrat presidents and their people, leftist central messaging is already testing the following key messages:
• “Alleging foreign interference in an election is not proof (evidence) that a foreign government successfully controlled the outcome.” This is like saying, “Sure he had a gun and shot at ya, but he missed ya, so he didn’t do anything wrong.”
• “Criminal charges require more than political accusations.” Of course, this is true, but where do criminal charges themselves come from? They come from accusations that can be supported by evidence.
• “Even if you find some incriminating information in those burn bags, you’re going to need to prove that the person implicated knowingly violated federal law.” Depending on the situation, that would be a matter for the courts to decide, but this key message gets at understanding and intent, which in a PR sense can be a straw man. For example, it doesn’t matter whether you intended to kill someone with your car; if you ran over them, intentionally or not, you likely broke a law or two. In other words, “I did not know there was a law against this” is no excuse.
• “The discovery of documents alone would not establish a criminal conspiracy.” Another straw man. No one is saying “discovery of documents” is all you need. If the documents contain words and sentences that do establish a criminal conspiracy, someone’s goose may be cooked.
• “As for China, investigators must have direct evidence of coordination, communication, or actions that link actual people to the effort to tamper with an election.” Once again, this is just a description of the legal and justice process. All of this is true, but stating it does not get anyone off the hook.
Back in 2020 and 2021, when Trump sought to use the court system to contest the manner in which the 2020 election was conducted, he literally had no time left in his term to go the legal route as president. By the time the courts would consider some of his claims, he was essentially an outsider without access to much of the information that he now has. After election day in 2020, Trump was shut out of the system long enough to ensure that he would live the rest of his life in political exile after one term in office. But in 2024, Trump shocked the world and won. His administration now has access to what it needs to better determine what happened in 2020, to address it, and, hopefully, to tap the justice system to ensure such corruption never happens again.

“California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) last week also declared that “nostalgia is not working” and, while refusing to embrace socialism, added that “capitalism as we know it doesn’t work.”

• Democrats Dismiss Our Constitutional Traditions as ‘Nostalgia’ (Turley)

It appears that the Madisonian democracy has joined shackets and combat boots as embarrassingly outdated for many on the left. In calling for radical changes to our constitutional system, leading Democrats are now calling the lingering loyalty to our traditions as mere “nostalgia.” To be nostalgic in today’s parlance is to be a dupe of the oligarchs and an enemy to reform. “Nostalgia” has become the new coded term for reactionaries among Democratic figures, who are trying to convince Americans to accept radical changes to our republic after 250 years.

Kamala Harris recently insisted that opposition to ideas like packing the Supreme Court is mere “nostalgia” for a system that is no longer working. “I would caution us against talking about rebuilding with any sense of nostalgia about how things work, because even before, they weren’t working so well for a lot of folks,” she said. That “nostalgia,” according to Harris, is preventing us from doing things like packing the Supreme Court with an instant liberal majority. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) last week also declared that “nostalgia is not working” and, while refusing to embrace socialism, added that “capitalism as we know it doesn’t work.”
Morris Katz, a political strategist for Zohran Mamdani, spoke to CNN’s Dana Bash about looking beyond the label of democratic socialism and instead simply to accept that “our government does not work.” They are joining socialists who have long promised revolutionary changes without “introspection, nostalgia or regret.” It is an all-too-familiar pitch. Sixty years ago, a call to break free of “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits” revolutionized a nation. That call was heard in a Chinese paper that would help lay the foundation for Mao Zedong’s bloody Cultural Revolution. Marxists had long rejected calls to preserve institutions and citizens’ rights as “nostalgia” and “sentimentality,” standing in the way of needed progress.
For the Democratic Socialist of America organization, nostalgia stands in the way of getting rid of the Senate, presidency, and the Supreme Court to fundamentally change the republic. The effort is to condition Americans to adopt radical changes to our core institutions that professors and pundits say will guarantee Democrats never lose power again. That is not an easy task for a people who have benefited from the oldest and most prosperous democracy for 250 years. They have to be very angry or very afraid to take such a radical course.
The Soviets understood that about the U.S. After Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB agent working in the media, defected in 1970, he revealed the four stages by which the Soviets hoped to bring about revolutionary change in the U.S. It began with undermining our institutions and values, with the help of journalists and academics. With establishment figures lining up behind radical changes, including packing the Supreme Court, the public is hearing a constant drumbeat of how our system is broken. Even Democratic judges are joining the chorus. Indeed, some appear to be auditioning for the slots promised by Democratic leaders to take over the court with a reliable liberal majority.
This week, the Hawaii Supreme Court issued an unhinged diatribe against the U.S. Supreme Court that abandoned any semblance of judicial restraint or decorum. It declared the majority as effectively racists, saying that “The Roberts Court sees only white.” It portrayed the court as a rogue institution that “overrides what Congress passed. It overrides what the people chose. All to serve its own ends.” It is an opinion that would make an MS NOW host blush. But it follows a pattern on the left to get people to turn against our institutions and even against the Constitution itself.
Others are telling the public that they are being repressed by the Constitution, which must be scrapped. In a New York Times op-ed — “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed” — law professors Ryan Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.” In yet another New York Times editorial, Jennifer Szalai denounced “Constitution worship” and claimed that “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us. A growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.”
Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky insists that it is time to trash the Constitution in favor of “radical changes.” These voices are seeking to remove all of the moderating elements of our system —the safety features that have produced the world’s most successful and stable republic. They are the very constitutional elements protecting us from the tyranny of the majority, protecting us from ourselves.
Without those protections, we will unleash the self-destructive forces that have been tearing apart other democratic systems since Athens. It is our constitution that spared us from that fate. As James Madison observed, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” Of course, history has shown that such radical proposals ultimately produce not democracy, but what the Framers called mobocracy. If we let that happen, many Americans will indeed look back at the last 250 years with a tragic sense of nostalgia.

“The left’s goal is always to break human reason. . . .” —Elizabeth Nickson

• War, Over There, Over Here (James Howard Kunstler)

You ask: Why did Achilles drag Hector around the city of Troy three times? Answer: He was just that pissed.

So it goes with President DJ Trump and the intransigent jihadi maniacs running Iran down a rat hole. Mr. T is just that pissed, too. “War is Hell,” the savvy Union general WT Sherman observed after he torched Atlanta, setting a precedent for moral clarity in the service of tactical fortitude. And thus, a century-and-a-half later, this is Iran’s hard time. Iran can make it stop at any time by. . . stopping. But the catch is, they really have to stop it, no more head fakes, ruses, jukes, dodges, and ploys. Just stop it.
Don’t doubt that they will have to stop it. We are going to make them stop. In the meantime, there is plenty else to concern those of us who care about our country, and Western Civ more generally, on the home front. Here comes the Insane Clown Posse of the Democratic Socialists. Their platform: abolish the police; no more jail for criminals; open borders; amnesty for all border-jumpers; abolish the Senate; Abolish the electoral college (House of Representatives to elect the president); defund the War Department, voting rights for all non-citizens; “wealth” taxes; free housing, food, medical care for all; green new deal laws; free Palestine (which is more important than any place else on Earth)!
Oh, and they are quite out-front about merely using the Democratic Party as a means to acquire power. Yeah, you noticed that already? Nobody actually had to read the quiet part out-loud. (Well, it wasn’t all that quiet.) Question is: how is all this going to work in practice (or in the praxis, as the Gramscian Marxists like to say — because it sounds like some occult power), as they roll over every institution in the land.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are our own jihadistas. They aim to make their program work by jamming it down America’s throat, starting with the throats of the plain old Democratic Party, the party of FDR, JFK, and HRC, currently fronted by Hakeem Jeffries (the House) and Chuck Schumer (the soon-to-be-abolished Senate). These two appear to be totally buffaloed by the DSA’s Insane Clown Posse. It’s their own Frankenstein monster, stitched together in their laboratory from the tatters of the 20th century. And like in the original by Mary Shelley, this monster is fixing to abolish its maker. Hakeem and Chuck are just standing by like a couple of credulous clucks waiting to see how things develop as the calendar marches implacably toward the catastrophic midterm election.
Last week’s Maine Senate primary debate was instructive. A more pitiful conclave of political losers had not been observed on continental US soil since Millard Fillmore led the Know-Nothing party into oblivion in 1856. (And, of course, five years later the American Civil war ignited.) Remember the old maxim: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Well, Gawd help us, then. See for yourself.

The fellow on the right pretending to be a woman is one Ashley Webb (formerly James Charles Webb) who cited “her” reasons for joining the race as: running for office before (unsuccessfully), being a songwriter, writing books, and being an “angry citizen” who would be an “angry senator.” Perfect! You might ask: why wasn’t Punch the Monkey onstage with the rest of this bunch?
Here is your very picture of Progressivism, the larval form of DSA — and, as you read this, there are Progressive larvae yet metamorphosing into full-blown DSAs all over these fifty states. Mamdani in New York. . . Brandon Johnson in Chicago. . . Katie Wilson in Seattle. . . Michelle Wu in Boston. . . Karen Bass in LA, etc. And here come DSAs Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, taking House seats in New York and Melat Kiros out in Colorado (yes, the lady who likes to wipe her hands on the US flag) who are expected to join The Squad (AOC, Jayapal, Pressley, Tlaib) next January. Plus, over on the soon-to-be-abolished Senate side, one Dr. Abdul El-Sayad running in Michigan. They all promise to keep the punishment coming until American morale improves!

Looming over this Insane Clown Posse of — oh, let’s just say it — feckless communists, is the ancient visage of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Eyes of Dr. TJ Eckleburg — the old war-horse’s long-cherished dreams finally coming true. Remember, in 1988 Bernie took his new wife on a honeymoon to the Soviet Union? Like. . . to witness how well that system was working. . . exactly three years before it collapsed. You can say the Democratic Socialists of America have got exactly the avatar they deserve.
The question is: will the DSA drag the Democratic Party into oblivion? Most assuredly they will. We are going to get election reform one way or another this year. There will be no more mail-in ballot harvesting or voting by non-citizens or vote tabulation machines. It might be that a substantial demographic in our country is insane, say, generously, maybe forty percent. But a firm majority of Americans are not insane and they are going to put a stop to this communist insurrection just as President DJ Trump — who is really pissed — will put end to the forty-seven-year Iranian jihad. What a week it has been!!! More thrills and chills ahead, you can be sure.

“In 2018, 90% of Democrats disapproved of him. In 2026, that number sits at 69%.”

• Here’s How the Democrats Are Blowing the Midterms (Margolis)

It can’t be said enough that history is on the Democrats’ side, but they seem determined to blow it. Precedent alone should hand Democrats a comfortable advantage this year. Only three midterms in nearly a century broke the pattern. In 2002, George W. Bush’s Republicans held their ground just over a year after the 9/11 attacks, when national security dominated everything else. In 1998, Bill Clinton’s Democrats benefited when Republicans overplayed their hand chasing impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In 1934, Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats rode the enduring popularity of the New Deal through the depths of the Great Depression. Each exception had a distinct, extraordinary set of circumstances behind it.

On the surface, it looks like Democrats should be able to win easily. Aside from precedent, Donald Trump’s polling gives them even more room to work with. Yet recent surveys suggest Democrats are underperforming badly enough that the wave they were counting on might not materialize. That underperformance could cost them control of the House. If Republicans hold the House this November, the reasons will be obvious: a socialist insurgency reshaping the party from within, and a singular obsession with opposing Trump that has crowded out everything else voters actually care about. The evidence is already sitting in the polling.
On the generic congressional ballot, Republicans are either tied with Democrats or ahead by three to four points, nowhere near the margin Democrats need to flip the House. A recent Washington Post/Ipsos poll put Democrats up just 48% to 45% on that same generic ballot question. Asked which party they agree with more on the issues that matter to them, voters split 41% Republican to 40% Democrat. Asked which party they trust more to handle the economy, the gap widened: 39% for Republicans to 35% for Democrats.Analysts at The Wall Street Journal have said a Democratic edge of anything under four points on election night is good news for Republicans trying to hold the majority. Right now, Democrats aren’t clearing that bar.

Because of Redistricting, analysts estimate that Democrats need to win by 3 to 4 points to gain a majority in the House Per WSJ https://t.co/qtBq5JC9Q8 pic.twitter.com/r4RCp2pbEr
— OSZ (@OpenSourceZone) July 18, 2026

Here’s the part that should really worry them. Trump’s disapproval rating among Democrats is far lower than it was during his first term. In 2018, 90% of Democrats disapproved of him. In 2026, that number sits at 69%. Despite those low approval numbers, most surveys still don’t show Democrats building a clear advantage in the races that will actually decide who controls the House. Democrats have assumed that being anti-Trump is enough. But the fact is, they aren’t giving voters a reason to vote Democrat, and the party’s growing tolerance for socialism isn’t helping them. Socialism remains deeply unpopular with the broader electorate, and its visible presence inside the Democrat Party is giving persuadable voters a reason to back Republicans they might not have otherwise supported.
Every historical tailwind is blowing in Democrats’ direction this year, and still, Democrats may fail to capitalize on any of it. Make no mistake about it, if they blow this midterm, they won’t be able to blame the map, the money, or the message alone. They will have blown the most favorable set of conditions a minority party could ask for, and they will have done it to themselves.

He may well be right.

• Why Democrats Can’t Do Better Than Kamala Harris in 2028 (Daniel McCarthy)

There are only two lanes to the Democratic presidential nomination two years from now, and one of them is already blocked — by Kamala Harris. Get ready for the Kamala comeback, followed, in all likelihood, by a replay of her crushing defeat by the Republican nominee. Believe it or not, the ex-VP occupies what counts as the “center lane” within the party, and for most of the last three decades that’s the one that’s led to the nomination. Republicans used to be the party of orderly succession, even if the candidate whose turn had come looked like a certain loser: think Bob Dole in ’96.

But recently, it’s been Democrats who’ve tended to pick a party elder as their nominee: Al Gore, as a sitting VP, might not have been remarkable in 2000, but in ’04 it was John Kerry, in ’16 Hillary Clinton, and in 2020 Joe Biden — with only Barack Obama butting ahead of the line in 2008. Democrats like a known quantity, a reliable liberal who isn’t too overtly radical; the radicalism can wait until after Election Day.= So they’re leaning to running Harris again, even if donors aren’t happy about it: They blew nearly $2 billion on her campaign and aligned PACs in 2024, only for Harris to lose every battleground state to Trump.
It won’t be donors who decide the party’s 2028 nominee, though, and ordinary Democrats actually find Harris reassuring. She’s a familiar face, after all, commanding practically universal name recognition. Harris checks the identity-politics boxes that may be as important as winning to Democratic primary voters: Their ticket must have a woman, and it can’t be all white. And after being vetted as a VP and undergoing the trial-by-fire of the ’24 campaign, Harris isn’t likely to surprise voters with any extremist tattoos or sexual-assault allegations — things that can’t be taken for granted among Democrats nowadays.
Then there’s the revenge motive: What better way to repudiate the Trump era and reverse the ’24 humiliation than by making the woman he defeated president? Democratic primary voters are still smarting from Hillary Clinton’s drubbing in 2016: by 2028, the election of America’s first female president will have been postponed 12 long years, and feminists in the party aren’t willing to wait any longer. These are the reasons Harris tops almost all polls of 2028 Democratic hopefuls, with an 11.6-point lead in the RealClearPolitics polling aggregate as of mid-July.
“She comes in with 99 percent name ID and everyone else is going to have to raise money and buy it,” a former Harris aide tells New York’s David Freedlander. The donors might prefer just about anyone else, yet they’d have to pour an enormous amount of cash into another candidate just to make him or her recognizable. This has led one longtime Democratic strategist with donors’ ears to welcome the inevitable: “I hope she runs,” Alex Hoffman told New York, “Because then she will lose and we will never have to hear from her again. She will never win an election at a national scale. Never.” But if Harris is hopeless, why does she seem inevitable?
She has seniority no one else can match, but what about the other lane that leads to the nomination? That’s the left lane — the far left lane. The one Bernie Sanders occupied in 2020 and 2016, and that a candidate like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might fill in 2028. Young Dems keep moving leftward, with the Democratic Socialists of America making deeper inroads into the party. Harris is not nearly left-wing enough for them — but then, anyone who is would be upsetting to the old guard. It’s not that the old-timers aren’t also well to the left on economics, but they don’t want to be labeled “socialists”— while the insurgent left is proud of the brand. The party’s mainstream wants to have it both ways on the Israel-Palestine conflict — while the young left, increasingly, is explicit about its anti-Zionism.
There are still enough baby boomers and suburbanites in the Democratic Party to make the left lane an unlikely road to the nomination. For now. Harris can expect a challenge from the left, but the party is still probably one more presidential cycle away from nominating someone who openly represents where Democrats are headed. In fact, a Harris defeat in 2028 would be the perfect prelude to the socialist and anti-Zionist left’s takeover, discrediting the old guard for forfeiting the election to Donald Trump’s successor. Insider Democrats know Kamala Harris is a terrible candidate, but the party they built can’t tell her no — even if this is the last nomination they get to make before DSA takes over.

For now far left field, but despair works miracles.

• Don Lemon Wants the White House and Thinks MAGA Is the Nazi Party (Manney)

Don Lemon believes America may need him in the White House. Days after saying he might run for president in 2028, the independent “journalist” and podcaster offered a sample of his judgment. “MAGA is the closest thing to the modern version of the Nazi Party.” He softened the smear with “without the Holocaust and all that stuff.” Lemon then claimed MAGA supporters remain loyal because they want white supremacy and power. From the New York Post:

“Lemon – who also revealed he is considering a presidential run in the 2028 election, saying he’d be a “really good” commander-in-chief – argued MAGA supporters have stuck by the movement in an effort to promote white supremacy. “Most intelligent people or logical people, when they get new information and that information is negative or not factual, then they change their minds and go, ‘Oh, well I wish I’d known better, and now that I have this information, then I can readjust,’” Lemon said.
“No matter how many facts and how much information you give them about this presidency, about the policies, they don’t change their minds,” he continued. “Because they’re really not voting for the price of eggs – they’re voting for white supremacy, they’re voting for power, they’re voting to have a preeminent voice.” Speaking as one of the millions of Americans who voted for President Donald Trump, Lemon is a bloody fool! He doesn’t know us, speak for us, or understand why the country rejected the left’s lectures in 2024. The Nazi Party was a racist, antisemitic movement that destroyed German democracy, established a one-party dictatorship, and murdered six million Jews along with millions of other victims.

Lemon’s qualifications empty the comparison of its defining horror while preserving every ounce of the insult. MAGA is a broad American political coalition that won an election. Trump’s 2024 voters were more racially and ethnically diverse than in either of his previous campaigns. He received 48% of the Hispanic vote and 15% of the black vote. From Pew Research: Trump won with a voter coalition that was more racially and ethnically diverse than in 2020 or 2016, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of the 2024 electorate. Among Hispanic voters, Trump battled to near parity in 2024 (51% Harris, 48% Trump) after losing to Joe Biden 61%-36% in 2020. Trump won 15% of Black voters – up from 8% four years earlier.
Trump also did better among Asian voters. While a majority of Asian voters (57%) backed Harris, 40% supported Trump. This was a narrower margin than Biden’s in 2020 (70% to 30%). These shifts were largely the result of differences in which voters turned out in the 2020 and 2024 elections. As in the past, a relatively small share of voters switched which party’s candidate they supported. Lemon can dislike their choice, but branding those voters as supporters of white supremacy strips them of thought, motive, and agency. The insult grows more absurd beside Lemon’s presidential musings. He said people keep asking whether he’ll run and declared he could lead the country better than Trump.
A man seeking presidential stature should be able to describe his political opponents without reaching for Hitler. Lemon treats tens of millions of Americans as morally diseased, then wonders whether they might welcome him as their president. From the New York Post: “Lemon made the eyebrow-raising declaration on “Can’t Be Censored” podcast hosted by Karman Wong and Travis Dhanraj, insisting that everyone wants to know if he has White House aspirations. “Do you have political ambition? Is that true?” Dhanraj asked on Wednesday’s show. “No, but people keep asking me if I’m running for president,” Lemon answered. “And I don’t know. I might. I’m serious. I don’t know. I might, because people keep asking me to do it, or if I’m going to do it.”
Lemon, 60, argued that experience isn’t necessarily a requirement to be commander-in-chief, citing President Trump’s lack of a political background before his election win in 2016. I can already hear many of you who are saying we should ignore Lemon. Silence has its place, but repeated public smears gain power when decent people shrug and move on. Sharing his words exposes the contempt behind them. Lemon wants attention, influence, and perhaps political power. The public should know how he speaks about Americans who vote differently.

“Establishment Democrats are freaking out over the Democratic Socialists of America’s attempted hijacking of their party ..”

• “I’m Not Living In Communist America”: Bill Maher Blasts DSA Democrats (ZH)

“I’m not living in Communist America… I’ve read the quotes from the DSA platform, from their own mouths. Don’t tell me I’m not seeing what I am seeing,” Bill Maher told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl in an exclusive interview that aired on Sunday.

Bill Maher: “I’m not living in Communist America… I’ve read the quotes from the DSA platform, from their own mouths. Don’t tell me I’m not seeing what I am seeing.” pic.twitter.com/grWslcyxD9
— America (@america) July 19, 2026

Karl asked Maher, “Could you see yourself voting for JD Vance?” Maher responded: “Yes. If this is the Democratic side, yes.” Establishment Democrats are freaking out over the Democratic Socialists of America’s attempted hijacking of their party because this anti-American, far-left Marxist movement, with possible ties to foreign subversion, risks dooming the party in the midterms and beyond.
The problem for Democrats is that years of letting socialists and Marxists into their DEI kingdom have only now produced dire consequences. Status quo Democrats are watching their power evaporate as DSA candidates defeat mainstream Democrats in primaries across New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and other states.

That’s a lot of licenses.

• China’s Fake US Driver’s Licenses Tampered With the 2020 Election (O’Brien)

When President Donald Trump talked about some of the things China has done to literally steal our democracy by seeing to it that, in 2020, its Manchurian candidate was elected in the form of a semi-comatose Joe Biden, many of the things he mentioned had already been in the news, but they may not have been covered by the legacy media. Case in point: Trump mentioned in his July 16 address to the nation that China stole TikTok data to create fake U.S. driver’s licenses.

If you follow conservative media, you may have known this. If you get your news from the legacy media, you most likely didn’t know it, and if you heard it now, you won’t believe it. That’s the group Trump was targeting in his address. His national address strategy was to speak past the legacy media and to begin the process of planting the seeds of the truth in the minds of those who rely on the CNNs, ABCs, and NBCs of the world. Strategically, Trump is now trying to break through the information barrier that the legacy media and the left have created to keep the majority of Americans in the dark on what’s really happened to corrupt our elections.
A year ago, Brooke Singman published a lengthy piece on the Fox News website that detailed just how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) executed its TikTok data theft scheme. Her primary source for the story was the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). The Senate Judiciary Committee launched its own investigation into this after the FBI had announced its own investigation in July 2025. As Singman reported, the CCP allegedly worked to get “fake driver’s licenses to Chinese sympathizers in the U.S. who would cast a vote for candidate Biden.” It is not clear how successful the CCP was in getting its ballots for Biden to count.
In July 2025, a Grassley spokesperson told Fox News, “Chairman Grassley is in receipt of an FBI document (response) to a request he made based on legally protected whistleblower disclosures…. The document alleges serious national security concerns that need to be fully investigated by the FBI.” As stated in that document, the intent of the alleged scheme was for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to produce and export fraudulent U.S. driver’s licenses to Chinese sympathizers in the U.S., so as to create “tens of thousands of fraudulent mail-in votes for US Presidential candidate Joe Biden, in late August 2020.”
According to the document at the center of these investigations, by August 2020, “the Chinese government had produced a large amount of fraudulent United States driver’s licenses that were secretly exported to the United States,” Fox News reported. The fraudulent drivers licenses would allow tens of thousands of Chinese students and immigrants sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party to vote for US Presidential Candidate USPER Joe ((Biden)), despite not being eligible to vote in the United States… China had collected private US user data from millions of TikTok accounts, to include name, ID and address, which would allow the Chinese government to use real US persons’ information to create the fraudulent driver’s license, the document states.
Reporting on the investigation indicates that the fake IDs included true ID numbers and the true addresses of U.S. citizens, which made the fraud difficult to detect. “China planned to use the fraudulent driver’s licenses to account for tens of thousands of mail-in votes,” according to the document.] What’s not clear is how specifically the PRC accessed the TikTok data and got all the information it needed to create those fake driver’s licenses. TikTok, for example, does not require a physical address when users register for an account. Did the creators of the fake IDs use the physical addresses of those Chinese sympathizers? This is fuzzy.
FBI Director Kash Patel and Grassley had been working closely on this case prior to the president’s speech on July 16.In another uncanny development from around the same time, in July 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at the International Mail Facility (IMF) at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport announced that in the first half of that year, they had seized 1,513 shipments of fraudulent documents, which included 19,888 fake U.S. driver’s licenses. Most of those shipments originated in China and Hong Kong, as well as Great Britain and South Korea.
According to the CBP statement on the matter from 2020, “The driver’s licenses were for various people in different states with a vast majority destined for neighboring states. Most were for college-age students, and other licenses would share the same picture but have different biographical data. Another concern was the bar code attached to the Michigan licenses worked.” In typical fashion, the Democrats’ propaganda machine known as the Associated Press reported at the time, “There is no evidence to suggest they were linked to voter fraud.” Case closed, I guess.
Maybe leftist newswire Reuters had a different take: “Facebook posts shared thousands of times claim that 19,888 fake driver’s licenses were seized at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport after being ordered by people ‘all registered to vote, all Democrats.’ Suggesting that the licenses were part of a voter fraud conspiracy, this claim is partly false. While it is true that U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 19,888 counterfeit licenses at O’Hare in late July, they had no apparent connection to Democratic Party registration or the upcoming election.”

Will Jamie Dimon finance it?

• Can Elon Musk Really Put ONE MILLION Data Center Satellites in Orbit? (Green)

Now that you’ve read the headline, I’ll show you the numbers, and you’ll probably say, “OH NO WAY!” But indulge me, won’t you. Ars Technica’s senior space guy Eric Berger looked at how much it might cost SpaceX to fulfill Elon Musk’s stated goal of putting ONE MILLION DATA CENTER satellites into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for the company’s artificial intelligence division, xAI. I don’t want to bother you with all the background math — you can click the link for the full MEGO effect, should you desire — but you do need to see the final totals for putting all those birds in orbit:

ª Optimistic: $350 billion in launch costs; $1 million per satellite; all-in cost of $1.45 trillion • Neutral: $1.85 trillion in launch costs; $1.5 million per satellite; all-in cost of $3.45 trillion • Pessimistic: $7.7 trillion in launch costs; $2.0 million per satellite; all-in cost of $9.8 trillion
The median scenario is $3.45 trillion dollars, or roughly 70% of what the U.S. spent waging World War II. Honestly, I felt the need for a shot of tequila after going through those figures. “Daunting” doesn’t even begin to cover the expense and complexity of such lofty goals. “Unimaginable” perhaps comes closer. But things become less daunting and more imaginable when viewed from the proper perspective.

The question isn’t, “Can Elon Musk really put one million data center satellites in orbit?” The correct question is, “Can he put enough data center satellites in orbit at a low enough cost to generate positive cashflow?” It’s all about the money, honey — because once you’re making more than you spend, the sky’s the limit. Literally, in this case. And while one can say for sure whether Musk can make the economics work, this is an area where SpaceX enjoys hard-won expertise. You might have heard of a little space-based internet service provider called Starlink.

The first operational batch of 60 satellites went up in May 2019, and Starlink beta service went live near the end of 2020 with fewer than 1,000 in orbit. By the end of 2024, with around 6,400 satellites, Starlink turned cash flow positive. That was the key metric, not whether Starlink had achieved its longterm goal of having a constellation of 42,000 operational satellites. “The key takeaway I want everybody to walk away with is, if SpaceX was building the Starlink system to pay for a Mars colony, we’ve got evidence that the company will generate the type of free cash flows from the business that could pay for said endeavor,” Quilty Space president Chris Quilty said at the time.
Today the end goal has changed — the Moon and data centers, not Mars — but the means remain the same: using orbital operations-at-scale to turn a profit doing the previously impossible. It took roughly 6.5 years for SpaceX to launch the 10,000th Starlink bird, and for the division to start raking in serious profits. So I tend to think of roughly 10,000 satellites — an unimaginable number not that many years ago — as the number required for sustained operations at a return worthy of the effort.
And Another Thing: Naysayers were all doom-and-gloom that SpaceX lost money in 2025, entirely on data center buildouts. But now the company leases server space to companies like Google and Anthropic for about $2 billion a month. xAI isn’t quite cash flow positive, but it’s closing in. Assuming SpaceX makes Starship work, the launch economics improve considerably. If the company doesn’t make it work, the entire project falls apart.
Also, Starlink enjoys a built-in audience, as it were, of people in rural or underdeveloped areas who had no other means of getting affordable high-speed internet service. Plus previously unfulfilled demand from airlines, cruise ships, and the Department of Defense. There’s no similar built-in demand for orbital data, so it’s my assumption that xAI will have to compete with terrestrial data centers on price. If Musk can overcome the serious technical and financial challenges to achieve positive cash flow, then SpaceX can continue putting data center satellites into LEO until they’ve hit one million… or 100,000, or 10,000. Or whatever number the market will allow.

https://twitter.com/MarioBojic/status/2079224872039756072?s=20 https://twitter.com/Chicago1Ray/status/2079010414445130084?s=20

CATHIE WOOD SAID TESLA IS THE LARGEST AI PROJECT ON EARTH.

"WE BELIEVE THE ENTIRE ECOSYSTEM OF AUTONOMOUS TAXI NETWORKS WILL GENERATE $8–10 TRILLION IN REVENUE OVER THE NEXT 5–10 YEARS.

TO PUT THAT IN CONTEXT…

THE ENTIRE GLOBAL GDP TODAY IS ABOUT $113 TRILLION."

ELON MUSK… pic.twitter.com/K4zRXVCwIM
— Vivek Sen (@Vivek4real_) July 20, 2026

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Debt Rattle May 19 2026

May 192026

May 19, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:09 am Finance Tagged with: election fraud, Germenny, Gulf states, Hormuz, immigration, Iran, midterms, nuclear, OpenAI, Russia, Spain 22 Responses »

John Atkinson Grimshaw A moonlit lane 1874

• Trump: Holding Off ‘Planned’ Attack On Iran At Request Of Gulf Allies (ZH)

• Gulf States Negotiating with Iran (CTH)

• Iran Will ‘Under No Circumstances’ Give Up Nuclear Program To End War (ZH)

• Trump China Trip, Canada/EU Conflict and 2026 Midterm Positioning (CTH)

• Multiple 2020 Election Fraud Investigations in Georgia and Arizona (Margolis)

• ‘Smartest Guy’ In the Belatedly Realizes Trump’s Relevance (Morrissey)

• Democrats Face Midterm Disappointment (Daniel McCarthy)

• As Student Scores Plummet, Teachers’ Union Head Rants Against Trump (Salgado)

• We’ve Been Taking Down Some Really Bad Guys Lately (Anderson)

• Judge Dismisses Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit After Jury Reaches Verdict (ZH)

• The Too-Long Goodbye (James Howard Kunstler)

• Germany Fears Next Migration Wave (ZH)

• Secretary Marco Rubio Delivers Message of National Faith (CTH)

pic.twitter.com/UJQsfy40hK
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 18, 2026

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2056410099137073194?s=20

True https://t.co/82gBZNh2Pk
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 18, 2026

https://twitter.com/JasonJournoDC/status/2056111745282785295?s=20

Dear @DAGToddBlanche

Addressing your question as to WHY.

Why did the outgoing @BarackObama administration do what they did to me, President @realDonaldTrump, our country, and many others whose lives were turned upside down?

The short answer is because they could.

The… https://t.co/F7QOMUie85
— General Mike Flynn (@GenFlynn) May 18, 2026

https://twitter.com/mcucolo57/status/2056334846515925229?s=20 https://twitter.com/GOP_is_Gutless/status/2056121534993838325?s=20

There’s movement.

• Trump: Holding Off ‘Planned’ Attack On Iran At Request Of Gulf Allies (ZH)

Trump ‘Not Open’ to Any Concessions for Tehran: NYP Interview
Another repetition of the weeks-long stale-mated reality: …so Trump is ‘not open’ to any concessions, but Iran deal happening ‘soon’ – we are yet again told, as the Iranians themselves haven’t appeared to budge on anything. President Trump told The NY Post on Monday he is “not open” to any concessions for Tehran after receiving the latest disappointing Iranian response on peace deal talks. Highlights: And in an ominous foreshadowing, Trump said Iran knows “what’s going to be happening soon.”
In the brief phone interview The Post, Trump seemingly shut the door to Iran’s Sunday offer for a diplomatic talks. Asked about his Friday remark that he’d be willing to accept a 20-year moratorium on Iranian uranium enrichment, Trump interjected: “I’m not open to anything right now.”The president declined to get into any detail. “I can’t really talk to you about it. Too many things are happening,” he said. “I can tell you they want to make a deal more than ever, because they know we’re—what’s going to be happening soon,” Trump said.
Questioned about regional source claims that Iran is attempting to “wait out” Washington on both the nuclear issue and reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said he “hadn’t heard that.”
US Denies Tasnim Report It Agreed to Lift Iran Oil Sanctions
And the denials keep rolling in. First via CNBC:
A U.S. official tells me the Iranian state media report that the U.S. has agreed to lift oil sanctions while talks are ongoing is false. https://t.co/gOcyBKDAxC
— Megan Cassella (@mmcassella) May 18, 2026

…as the US side does not seem very confidently in control of the situation – quite the opposite:

Senior U.S. official: "It's time for the Iranians to throw bit of candy out. We need some real, sturdy, and granular conversation [regarding the nuclear program]. If that's not gonna happen, we will have a conversation through bombs, which will be a shame" https://t.co/qTNrY1fgoN
— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) May 18, 2026

Just like that, back to square zero once again we go… and back to headline roulette.
US PLANS NEW RUSSIAN OIL WAIVER AS IRAN WAR CRUNCHES SUPPLIES
US DENIES REPORT IT AGREED TO LIFT IRAN OIL SANCTIONS: CNBC
Steady climb in oil continues on the denials…

New moves.

• Gulf States Negotiating with Iran (CTH)

President Trump announced on Truth Social that he is delaying further strikes against Iran pending current negotiations with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. According to the announcement the Gulf States are negotiating a ‘zero nuclear’ position.

This is an interesting development as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) were previously the ones urging President Trump not to halt the military pressure campaign.
PRESIDENT TRUMP – “I have been asked by the Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, and the President of the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to hold off on our planned Military attack of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was scheduled for tomorrow, in that serious negotiations are now taking place, and that, in their opinion, as Great Leaders and Allies, a Deal will be made, which will be very acceptable to the United States of America, as well as all Countries in the Middle East, and beyond. This Deal will include, importantly, NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS FOR IRAN! Based on my respect for the above mentioned Leaders, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, The Chairman of The Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Daniel Caine, and The United States Military, that we will NOT be doing the scheduled attack of Iran tomorrow, but have further instructed them to be prepared to go forward with a full, large scale assault of Iran, on a moment’s notice, in the event that an acceptable Deal is not reached. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
~ President DONALD J. TRUMP

“It also seems Russia’s offer to take and temporarily hold Iran’s enriched uranium is being taken seriously. ”

• Iran Will ‘Under No Circumstances’ Give Up Nuclear Program To End War (ZH)

In a far too familiar pattern, just before US market open on Monday, a slew of optimistic Iran headlines saw oil erase weekend gains, which mostly came through Saudi Arabia’s state-funded Al Arabiya, as well as Reuters… only to be followed by Iranian officials rejecting the substance of these reports, putting things firmly back at square one. nTasnim has newly cited Iranian government sources who seek to make clear that “Iran under no circumstances” will engage in new nuclear negotiations for an end to the war. Contradicting the earlier morning reports, it still sees negotiations to find peace in the war with the US as separate from the nuclear file. “Fundamental differences between the Iranian and American texts still remain”, Tasnim reports, citing a source.

“Despite some changes in the new American text, fundamental differences stemming from the Americans’ exaggeration and lack of realism remain,” Tasnim writes, citing the Iranian source. According to more of the statements per state media:
“Iran will not abandon its firm and principled positions on ending the war and realizing the rights of the Iranian people”.
“Iran’s frozen assets must be returned to the Iranian people in a transparent and definitive manner, and paper promises are of no use”.
“Despite some promises, there is disagreement about the return of the frozen funds”.
“Iran’s determination regarding the necessity of paying compensation by the Americans for the military aggression against Iran is very serious”.
“The Americans are far from Iran’s demands regarding its amount and some other issues.”
“the Americans are still trying to tie the negotiations to end the war to the nuclear issue, which is against logic and Iran will not agree to it. The Americans must understand that Iran will in no way agree to an end to the war in return for nuclear commitments”.
“Iran has not and does not have any intention of building nuclear weapons, and this claim is just an excuse and deception by the Americans. This issue has also been emphasized in the new text”.

Oil reacted as expected to this official ‘denial’ of the prior optimism – quickly rebounding, also as Trump is said to be “losing patience” with the progress of talks. A US source has told Al Jazeera Iran has “days not weeks” to show progress.
Tasnim: Another Iranian Ship Breaks Through US Blockade Line
Iranian state media is claiming that a Iranian oil tanker under US sanctions that was off the coast of India two weeks ago has now docked at Kharg Island, having broken through the US naval blockade. Tasnim reports that “the LPG tanker passed through the US blockade line undetected and entered Iranian waters.”
The Pentagon has been asserting an essentially airtight blockade on ‘illicit’ ships going to or from Iranian ports. CENTCOM has said it has turned around at least 75 vessels, while Iranian media has since the blockade’s start touted several ships making it through.
Long-Term Nuclear Freeze on Table
Saudi state-owned Al Arabiya early Monday has issued a bombshell if true (but still very much not officially confirmed), reporting that Iran has agreed to a long-term nuclear freeze instead of a complete dismantling. The outlet also reports that Iran has withdrawn its demand for compensation, instead demanding economic concessions. However, this could be highly dubious, given over the past several days Tehran has not shown willingness to back down from this demand of compensation.
It also seems Russia’s offer to take and temporarily hold Iran’s enriched uranium is being taken seriously. Here are the alleged “leaks” of the working draft peace document: “Working on a condition transfer of enriched uranium to Russia instead of the US.
Seeking multiple international guarantees for any agreement.
Wants Pakistan and Oman to have a ‘role’ in any ‘clash’ in the Strait of Hormuz.
Seeking a political formation that allows Iran to save face.
Separate the maritime route from nuclear issues.
Oil pushes lower on the additional headlines, following initial reports that the US would lift sanctions on Iranian oil during the negotiating period…

”Barbara Boyd from Promethean Action PAC gives her take on the current situation.”

• Trump China Trip, Canada/EU Conflict and 2026 Midterm Positioning (CTH)

Barbara Boyd Recaps Trump China Trip, Canada/EU Conflict and 2026 Midterm Positioning

Barbara Boyd from Promethean Action PAC gives her take on the current situation.
“Barbara Boyd argues the key outcome of Trump’s China visit was the personal trust between Trump and Xi, symbolized by Xi’s “secret garden” tour previously reserved for Putin, and framed as establishing guardrails for U.S.–China strategic and tech competition amid the Iran war and energy geopolitics. She says London and Democrats are “screaming” because Trump is reshaping global economic relationships while Treasury Secretary Bessent lifts U.S. sanctions on Russian exports.
The episode targets Mark Carney and Keir Starmer as City of London figures who tried to capture China finance, advance BRICS as a dollar alternative, promote a synthetic reserve currency via CBDCs, and steer $130T through green finance—efforts Boyd says have failed as Trump reverses “Green New Deal” policies. She highlights DOJ election-rigging probes, renewed scrutiny of “Russiagate,” anti-fraud prosecutions, voter backlash, and insurgent politics in Los Angeles and London.”

The machine has started,

• Multiple 2020 Election Fraud Investigations in Georgia and Arizona (Margolis)

In recent weeks, Trump officials have been promising that bombshell evidence regarding 2020 election fraud would be coming. Both FBI Director Kash Patel and Monica Crowley, the U.S. government’s chief of protocol, have said as much. On Sunday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche sat down with Maria Bartiromo and confirmed that the Department of Justice has multiple active investigations into election fraud, specifically targeting Arizona and Georgia’s Fulton County.

Blanche didn’t hedge. He didn’t offer the usual bureaucratic non-answer. He said it directly: “Well, there’s a ton of evidence that the election was rigged. That’s not something the DOJ needs to tell you about. There’s been evidence about that for many, many years. What I can tell you is that we have multiple investigations going on in Arizona, in Georgia, in Fulton County, Georgia.”
The questions driving those investigations are fundamental ones that, frankly, should have been asked and answered years ago. Why is it taking so long? Blanche addressed that head-on, too. “They’re very good at hiding misconduct and hiding — hiding what they’re doing,” he said. “And so that’s why we’re very focused on finding out whether the right people voted, whether people who were supposed to vote voted, whether there was one vote cast per voter.”
Blanche acknowledged the frustration building among Americans who’ve been waiting years for accountability. “People will say to me, how long has it taken? Why is it taking so long?” he said. “And the reality, the answer to that is because it takes a lot of work to uncover what happened in 2020.” This makes sense. Democrats put a lot of effort into perpetuating the myth that the 2020 election was “the most secure election in history,” and went to great lengths to silence those who dared even to question the official narrative.
Obviously, those responsible for the kind of shenanigans we saw take place in 2020 aren’t just going to leave the evidence lying around. It takes, as Blanche put it, “good old-fashioned law enforcement police work” to get the job done. And we all know that had President Donald Trump not won the 2024 election, there wouldn’t even be an investigation. The Biden DOJ spent four years telling Americans there was nothing to see here. The Trump DOJ is at least willing to look. Whether these investigations produce indictments, a public report, or something else entirely, but FBI Director Kash Patel did say last month that accountability was coming. “We are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you, it’s coming soon,” Patel said.
And Blanche made a promise. “I assure you, I assure the American people that as soon as we have something to say for it, whether it’s charges, whether it’s a report, whether it’s the results of an investigation, the American people will learn about what we’ve uncovered.” Trump promised us that he’d get answers about what really happened in 2020, and you can bet that is one of the main reasons they tried so hard to put him in prison before the election. The truth is coming out, and they can’t do a thing about it.

The bitterest guy. Sore loser.

• ‘Smartest Guy’ In the Belatedly Realizes Trump’s Relevance (Morrissey)

True enough. But to be fair, Politico only realized it belatedly, too.

Donald Trump finally got his revenge on Bill Cassidy this weekend. The incumbent Senator tried to survive a primary challenge with Trump pushing voters to give him the boot over Cassidy’s impeachment removal vote in January 2021. Instead, Cassidy came in a distant third to Julia Letlow and John Fleming, not even breaking into six figures in vote totals: Sen. Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict President Donald Trump on impeachment charges in 2021, has lost his Republican primary in Louisiana, as two challengers who had aligned with Trump advanced to a runoff.
Rep. Julia Letlow, who had Trump’s endorsement in the race, will face state Treasurer John Fleming in a June 27 primary runoff, NBC News projects. Cassidy’s loss further cements Trump’s grip on the GOP as the president looks to exact revenge against Republicans who have crossed him in the past. And it also means another Republican who voted to convict Trump during his 2021 impeachment will not be returning to Congress next year. Cassidy offered a bitter valediction to his political career, and also complained about being “attacked on the internet”:
“Let me just set the record straight, our country is not about one individual,” Cassidy later added. “It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And it is the welfare of my people and my state and my country and our Constitution, to which I am loyal. And if someone doesn’t understand that, and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they are about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.” Cassidy also noted that he has been “attacked on the internet.”
“Insults only bother me if they come from somebody of character and integrity, and I find that people of character and integrity don’t spend their time attacking people on the internet,” Cassidy said. Ahem. Being “attacked on the internet” comes with the territory, and not just for politicians in elections, either. If Cassidy is this sensitive, he should return to practicing medicine. Unsurprisingly, this did not dissuade Trump from sharing his joy at Cassidy’s failure:
Bill Cassidy, after falsely using his “relationship” with me during his political career, and winning Elections because of it, voted to impeach me on preposterous charges that were fake then, and now, are criminally insane! His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now a part of legend, and it’s nice to see that his political career is OVER! I’d like to thank the Great People of the State of Louisiana, and this Big Victory will only make me work even harder for your success, and all that comes with it. I LOVE YOU ALL. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP.
Cassidy spent five years insisting that the vote was old news. Voters just reached the same conclusion about Cassidy. Once again, this demonstrates the pull that Trump has with Republican voters – not just a small subset of GOP voters, but the party’s mainstream. Not even Cassidy’s “massive war chest” immunized him from accountability, Politico noted, another belated recognition of that outlet of the same lesson Cassidy just learned:
It’s a massive warning sign for any Republicans who’ve provoked the president’s wrath: Trump’s revenge campaign has already mobilized voters in both Indiana, where he successfully ousted several state GOP senators over redistricting, and Saturday night in Louisiana. Tuesday’s primaries in Georgia and Kentucky, where Rep. Thomas Massie is up for reelection and he’s picked sides in the open Senate race, will be another test. Now, the president is entering those races with the wind at his back.
Cassidy’s distant third-place finish marks the end of his tenure in the Senate, one that was doomed by his vote to convict Trump on impeachment charges related to the Jan. 6 insurrection five years ago. That decision ostracized him from Louisiana’s rabidly conservative base and set up two strong primary challengers in Rep. Julia Letlow — the Trump-endorsed candidate — and MAGA-friendly state Treasurer John Fleming. Up until polls closed, Cassidy maintained that his massive war chest, his record in Congress and a high turnout of non-party voters would be enough to save him. I
n the end, it was not. “For a man with such a formidable intellect, his political strategy was breathtakingly dense,” said Lionel Rainey, a Louisiana GOP strategist, who is unaffiliated with any of the campaigns. “History will remember Bill Cassidy as the absolute smartest guy in the political morgue.”

I can see the Dems losing bitterly. What are their strengths? Not being Trump?

• Democrats Face Midterm Disappointment (Daniel McCarthy)

As they look to the midterm elections, Republicans have reason to worry — but not despair. They’re going to be fighting uphill all the way to hold onto their majority in the House, which they currently control by the razor-thin margin of just six seats. That includes one member, California Rep. Kevin Kiley, who officially left the GOP but still caucuses with the party. “Fragile” hardly does justice to the state of the GOP’s House majority. Democrats look at President Donald Trump’s approval ratings and exult: As of early May, exactly six months before the midterms, Trump’s approval in the RealClearPolitics polling averages was an anemic 40.7%, and since then polls have shown him slipping further.

Democrats took more than 40 House seats from the GOP in the 2018 midterms, when Trump’s numbers were a little better: RealClear’s aggregate notched him at 43.6% approval the day before the election. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries is just counting down the days until he becomes speaker. What could go wrong? Two things might yet thwart Jeffries’ ambitions. One is the Supreme Court, which has overturned the race-based approach to drawing congressional districts that long served to protect Democratic incumbents and carve out blue seats in red states. The court also slapped down Democrats’ attempts to get the federal judiciary to toss out a Virginia Supreme Court decision that killed their dreams of gerrymandering away four Republican seats in that state.
As things stand, when all the mid-decade redistricting across the country is finished, Republicans stand to gain up to 10 House seats. Though they have to remember what they’re actually getting is more Republican-leaning district maps — they still have to close the deal with voters. But even if they do, 10 more seats won’t stop a wave like the one that swept away the Republican House majority Trump enjoyed at the start of his first term. Yet the second barrier Democrats will have to overcome is that voters just don’t behave the way they used to: For nearly a quarter of a century, the American public exhibited wild swings in party preference in House elections, creating midterm waves in 1994, 2006, 2010 and 2018.
But 2022 broke the pattern: Joe Biden’s aggregate approval in the polls was at 42.2%, and Republicans expected a massive swing in their direction — yet they didn’t get it, just as Democrats got no boost in the House two years earlier despite their success in the 2020 presidential election. Biden claimed record numbers of voters in his race, yet Democrats actually lost seats in the House that year. Trump’s victory in 2024 also didn’t bring about much change in the House; Republicans lost two seats.nnIn other words, the last three elections — in 2020, 2022 and 2024 — have told a tale of surprising stability, with only small adjustments to the numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the House, leading to nerve-rackingly narrow margins of control for each party.
Jeffries should be careful what he wishes for. He might wind up with only a slender majority, one that could be lost if too many geriatric Democrats die in office. As of a year ago, more than 50 House Democrats were over the age of 70. Three have since died. Republicans don’t have quite as many elderly members in the House, but so small is the GOP majority that even a single maverick member like Thomas Massie can threaten to derail major legislation or trigger new elections for speaker. Pain has forced Republicans to get serious, however, and Trump has been relentless about imposing discipline on the party. Massie can attest to that, as can the five Republican state senators who lost their primaries on May 5 after Trump condemned them for opposing a plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts to give the GOP a greater edge.
This is another reason to think Republicans have a fighting chance in November: Despite the headlines in hostile media, the Republican Party is remarkably unified behind Trump, who can end the careers of state senators in Indiana or a United States senator like Bill Cassidy in Louisiana. Trump can do that because — and only because — the voters are with him. If House elections have indeed reached a rough equilibrium since 2020, there will be no wave, and even a pickup of just eight to 10 seats through redistricting could save the Republican majority by the skin of its teeth.
Democrats are counting on this November being a replay of 2018, or George W. Bush’s disastrous second midterms in 2006. But look to the primaries so far for a clue: This is a very different Republican Party, and it’s well-adapted for the political landscape Trump has remade; in an era of close elections, it’s a party that can win.

Time to spare.

• As Student Scores Plummet, Teachers’ Union Head Rants Against Trump (Salgado)

While student scores continued to hit horrifying lows across America’s public schools, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union boss Randi Weingarten is prioritizing anti-Trump and pro-illegal alien propaganda.

Weingarten, who said she cried as she voted for Kamala Harris and who demanded huge amounts of taxpayer money to reopen schools during the COVID-19 lockdowns before not using that money on reopening, has a serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Her Bluesky account sounds like a full-time political activist’s, and she mostly seems to mention education as connected and secondary to her woke politics. For example, on May 15, she wrote, “In my new video, I talk about the big fights in front of us: making life more affordable and standing up to attacks on voting rights.” She’s not interested in raising test scores or improving literacy.
For example, here is just one message from May 16: “The Trump administration is now targeting people here legally through DACA, deporting them from the only country many have known as home, separating them from their families and forcing them out of their jobs. It’s cruel—Dreamers deserve a pathway to citizenship. Back on May 13, using a report from extremely biased NPR as “proof,” Weingarten ranted, “New evidence shows that Trump’s extreme immigration crackdown has hurt local economies and job growth. It’s time to rein in the chaos and violence ICE is causing in our communities.” This is why ICE agents face increased violence.
And the deranged union boss was outraged that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Democrats’ last-ditch efforts to gerrymander the state of Virginia and erase Republicans’ voice there altogether. Trying to frame Republicans’ efforts to reverse racial gerrymandering as either equivalent or inferior to one of the most egregious maps in American history, Weingarten griped, “So SCOTUS enables some states to move so quickly they suspend elections to gerrymander but refuses to allow a voter approved plan to go forward . What’s the difference? Which party is in power.”
Again complaining about the SCOTUS anti-racial gerrymandering decisions, she posted, “Retirees had questions about how we we have a democracy in light of of terrible court decisions like Callais and Citizens United. We talked, of course about voting. Energy like this gives me hope. We’re gearing up for an election cycle like no other and these activists are ready.” You might have noticed by now that she often has glaring grammatical and punctuation errors in her posts. She’s almost as illiterate as her students.
Speaking of which, on May 13, Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research admitted, “Compared with a decade earlier, reading scores were down last year in 83 percent of school districts where data was available. Math scores were down in 70 percent.” Last fall, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found “just 35% of high school seniors were proficient in reading” and the “math score for 12th-graders was even worse, with just 22% achieving proficiency.” Weingarten is so busy ranting against Trump that she is stultifying an entire generation.

FYI.

• We’ve Been Taking Down Some Really Bad Guys Lately (Anderson)

Donald Trump’s plan to clean up the Western Hemisphere is going pretty well. If you need proof of that, just take a look at the list of bad guys we’ve rounded up and who are now in U.S. custody as of the past week or so.

Alex Saab (Nicolás Maduro’s Bagman)
I’ve written a great deal about Alex Saab in the past, so I don’t want to rehash all the details of who he is, but for those who don’t know, he’s Maduro’s bagman. He’s quite a powerful guy, and he’s been accused of things like money laundering, sanctions evasion, and corruption schemes benefiting the Maduro regime in the past. At one point, he was actually in U.S. custody. However, the Joe Bide administration sent him back to Venezuela in exchange for Maduro’s good behavior. Seriously. Maduro promised Biden that he’d hold free and fair 2024 elections if he’d release Saab and other related criminals back into Venezuelan custody.
Spoiler alert: There were no free and fair 2024 elections. And to be fair, Maduro also released some U.S. hostages as part of the deal, but if you’ll recall, last summer, Trump and Rubio, with some help from El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, had Maduro release all U.S. hostages in exchange for, well, nothing. But I digress. So, on Saturday, the Venezuelan regime still in place “deported” (they did not use the word “extradited,” even though that’s what it was) Saab — who is actually from Colombia — to the United States.
Venezuela’s Administrative Service of Identification, Migration, and Foreigners Affairs (SAIME) released a statement, saying it made the decision because of implications “in the commission of various crimes in the United States of America — a matter that is public, notorious, and widely reported.” Actually, it did so because Delcy Rodríguez does what the Trump administration tells her to do, like a good little pet. She’s also been scrubbing past praise of Saab from her X account. According to the Miami Herald, the U.S. views Saab as a “potentially crucial witness capable of providing detailed insight into the financial architecture that sustained Maduro’s inner circle for years.” He will now face renewed criminal proceedings.
Jose Enrique Martínez Flores (Senior Tren de Aragua Leader)
Jose Enrique Martínez Flores, aka “Chuqui,” may only be 24 years old, but according to U.S. officials, he’s the Tren de Aragua (TdA) leader that oversees criminal operations, including drug trafficking, extortion, prostitution, and murder in Colombia. In case you forgot, TdA is the Venezuelan prison gang that is now a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) with a presence in the United States. Maduro sent many of them here (and to other countries in the Western Hemisphere) to create chaos in our communities and was using them as his own little army of sorts, even though he denied that they existed.
Anyway, this guy had been arrested in Colombia in March and was extradited to the United States, landing in Houston on May 14. He’s apparently the highest-ranking TdA member ever brought to justice and the first charged with terrorism or related offenses due to the FTO designation. He made his first court appearance last week and pled “not guilty” to all charges.
Gerardo Mérida Sánchez and Enrique Díaz Vega (Sinaloa State Officials)
Last month, I reported that “a federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York unsealed a 34-page indictment charging Rubén Rocha Moya and nine other current or former high-ranking Mexican officials with drug trafficking and weapons offenses.” They were accused of partnering with the “Los Chapitos” faction of the Sinaloa Cartel (the sons of El Chapo) to help smuggle massive quantities of fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine into the U.S.
Rocha Moya was the big gun. He’s the governor of Sinaloa, one of the most dangerous and violent states in Mexico, and, of course, the home base for the Sinaloa cartel. While Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum basically responded to the indictments with “nothing to see here,” at least two of those officials are now in U.S. custody, after having turned themselves in, presumably in hopes of ratting everyone else out and getting off easy.
The first is Gerardo Mérida Sánchez, a retired military general and the former secretary of public security for Sinaloa state. On May 11, he crossed the border into Arizona, was taken into custody by U.S. Marshals, and flown to New York. He was the first to turn himself in and has pleaded “not guilty” to charges including narcotics importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices. He faces a minimum of 40 years in prison (he’s currently 66 years old).
The second is Enrique Díaz Vega, a former secretary of administration and finance for Sinaloa and a close ally of Rocha Moya. Reports say that he was in Europe when he decided to surrender and flew to New York, where he was taken into custody on May 15. The 50-year-old faces the same charges and sentencing. None of these guys are small fish. They’re men who have propped up the widespread organized crime that plagues the Americas, and, hopefully, they’re just a small sample of what’s to come. It’s nice having a president who actually punishes criminals.

Cloe to: “A profit-maximizing demon from hell.”

To be continued.

• Judge Dismisses Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit After Jury Reaches Verdict (ZH)

Update: Musk to appeal

***
A nine-person federal jury has sided with OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Microsoft, determining that Elon Musk filed his high-profile lawsuit too late under the statute of limitations. The verdict effectively ends Musk’s claims that OpenAI abandoned its founding nonprofit mission to benefit humanity. The jury unanimously concluded that Musk knew or should have known about OpenAI’s shift toward a for-profit model and major Microsoft partnerships years earlier – potentially as far back as 2019–2021, making his August 2024 filing untimely. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in turn accepted the advisory jury’s finding on this threshold issue and dismissed the case.
Musk, a co-founder who contributed roughly $38–44 million in OpenAI’s early days, alleged that the company betrayed its original charitable trust by pursuing massive profits and commercial deals, particularly with Microsoft. He sought up to $150 billion in damages or “ill-gotten gains,” the removal of Altman and Brockman from leadership, and a restructuring to restore the nonprofit focus on safe, humanity-benefiting AI. OpenAI countered that Musk was fully aware of the company’s evolving plans (including for-profit elements he himself had once advocated), waited until after launching his competing xAI venture in 2023, and was motivated by competitive rivalry rather than genuine concern for the mission. They described the suit as “sour grapes.”

“. . . we are witnessing mass formation in real time, where the group delusion becomes the only permissible reality.” LH Grey on X

• The Too-Long Goodbye (James Howard Kunstler)

Last week, Stephen Colbert celebrated his May 21 departure from late-night TV by French-kissing his fellow late-night soul-mate hosts goodbye, perhaps to honor the French origins of the Woke political ideology that guided his rocket flight to fame — Michel Foucault (1926–1984), who argued that power was all that mattered and that you could talk any absurdity about sex, mental illness, and criminality into mass belief. . . Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), who argued that reality depends on how you feel about it. . . Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998), who denounced truth per se in favor of your truth. . . and Gilles Deleuze, father of gender-fluidity.

So, bonne nuit and au revoir, Monsieur Colbert, and don’t let the CBS screen door bump your ass on the way out. Few public figures in our time have done as much damage to the collective mental health of our country than Colbert did in his late-night operations. For instance, the dance routine, broadcast circa April 2021, titled “The Vax-Scene,” when “Joe Biden” and Dr. Fauci rolled out the mRNA products that would eventually maim or kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Colbert did the shimmy in front of a chorus line costumed as syringes capering to a musical arrangement of the old Latin hit, Tequila (original, by The Champs, 1958). His ignorance about what actually was at stake was surpassed only by his Cheshire Cat caliber smugness. So, what you see in this video is the rectified essence of the demonic idiocy that still animates the Democratic Party. Save it and watch it often to remind yourself what the nation has been battling for so many years.

I was actually a guest on Colbert’s show years ago in its early evening incarnation when the running gag was Colbert pretending to be a right-winger. In the green room before the show, his handlers told me to “not try to be funny because that’s Stephen’s job.” I had just published a novel about what life in America might be like after the collapse of our techno-industrial economy (World Made by Hand). Colbert treated that as a joke, too, of course. He already had the remarkable ability for finding comedy in all the wrong places. By the time Covid came along, he was no longer a pretend conservative; he was an out-front Democratic Party / Deep State propaganda tool.
It remains to be seen how the party can possibly survive the revelations-to-come of its monumental criminality. Sunday morning, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche turned up on Maria Bartiromo’s public affairs show. Maria was in a testy mood, repeatedly telling Mr. Blanche that America has lost patience bigly over the complete lack of “accountability” for the various seditions and treasons launched against the public since 2016, in particular, the obvious treachery so many witnessed in the 2020 election.
Mr. Blanche replied, ““Well, there’s a ton of evidence that the election was rigged. That’s not something the DOJ needs to tell you about. There’s been evidence about that for many, many years. What I can tell you is that we have multiple investigations going on in Arizona, in Georgia — in Fulton County, Georgia. And that’s exactly what we’re looking at.”
Quite so: evidence for many years, by the truckload, and indeed it was only a month or so ago that the FBI turned up at the Fulton County, GA, election records depository building and seized a truckload of ballots and other material related to the Big Switcheroo that the election workers there pulled off overnight on Nov 3, 2020 —because “broken water mains [toilets, that is],” and all. Mr. Blanche might not need to tell the irascible Maria B about that, but eventually he will have to tell the whole country what happened in Fulton County, GA, and Maricopa County, AZ, and Antrim County, MI, and Milwaukee County, WI, and Philadelphia. . . .
It remains to be seen how the stolen 2020 election business might be rolled into the “grand conspiracy” case being pursued in the grand jury convened at Fort Pierce, Florida. It will probably be a major entrée in the smorgasbord of prosecutable turpitudes presently under consideration. Also remains to be seen how half the country that still calls itself “Left” or “Progressive” or “registered Democrat” will greet the news that “Joe Biden” did not win that crooked election, but rather, their bête noire, Donald Trump, won. And not by a slim margin, but by a ton.

Germany started it.

• Germany Fears Next Migration Wave (ZH)

With Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez legalizing what could amount to as many as 1.6 million migrants, other EU member states are getting worried, and not just neighboring France. While the Socialist prime minister’s announcement originally aimed to naturalize some 500,000 migrants by handing them residency permits and work permits, German authorities estimate that there could be as many as 850,000 applicants in Spain, writes Bild. Leaked internal Spanish police documents have already put this estimated number even higher, at 1.6 million.

Since the announcement in mid-April, hordes of undocumented migrants have been overwhelming local offices across the country, with nearly 130,000 applications in the first week alone. Remix News posted videos of these crowds. French conservatives sounded the alarm early on, with National Rally leader Jordan Bardella slamming the ability for residence permits to freely move around the EU. “I believe that free movement within the Schengen Area should be reserved exclusively for nationals of European countries. Obtaining a residence permit in Spain, for example, should not allow free movement throughout all European Union countries,” he wrote.
Now, Germany’s Foreign Office in Berlin has stated: “We are closely monitoring the situation and are in contact with Spain.” A spokesperson for the Interior Ministry also sought to clarify that a Schengen residence permit does not, in principle, authorize employment in Germany. Having one allows you to enter Germany and stay for a maximum of three months at a time. The domestic policy spokesman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, Alexander Throm (CDU), also expressed his concerns, according to Bild: “Such mass legalization sends a devastating signal to the world and creates an incalculable pull effect.”
Police union representative Manuel Ostermann has also warned of potential consequences given that many entering Europe are attracted to German jobs and benefits. “If the Spanish minority government fails, and a future government reduces payments or terminates residency permits, many of the migrants will continue their journey to Germany and remain here. Whether permitted or not,” he warned. Of course, jobs in Germany are already becoming scarce, including over 120,000 industrial jobs being shed last year, and after years of mass immigration, the German economy continues to go from weakness ot weakness.
Germany has already had problems with secondary migration from Greece for years. Last April, the country’s Federal Administrative Court authorized migrant deportations to Greece for the first time in years. Ostermann is now warning: “The migration crisis is not over. Germany must therefore consistently eliminate the remaining pull factors,” he says, adding that Germany should abolish “excessive financial incentives” and replace them with the principle of “bread and butter.”

If you’re not Christian, you are Muslim. There is no third choice.

• Secretary Marco Rubio Delivers Message of National Faith (CTH)

Those of dark whispered voices are shrieking loudly today, directing their soulless vessels to shout opposition to the Christian rededication of our nation. They listen to the voices of betrayal telling them to shriek about “freedom of religion” as noted in the constitution, yet their arguments are twisted around the false premise that does not exist, “freedom from religion.” Our constitution does not block the expression of religion; it blocks the favoring of one expression over another. Freedom of religion is entirely different than freedom from religion, though both represent a moral choice.

https://twitter.com/WR4NYGov/status/2056140342014115902?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/2056105680294297797?s=20

Elon Musk just described the future of AI in a single sentence.

Musk: “A profit-maximizing demon from hell.”

That’s not a metaphor.

That’s a blueprint.

He wasn’t describing science fiction.

He was describing what happens when the only thing AI is trained to maximize is… pic.twitter.com/aRXKAJUf4o
— Dustin (@r0ck3t23) May 18, 2026

The Gigabay is one of the most massive and insanely productive pieces of infrastructure being built on Earth right now

Currently rising at Kennedy Space Center, it makes entire aerospace hangars look tiny in comparison

And it’s all being built for one almost unbelievable goal:… pic.twitter.com/CyCXUR1Hb8
— X Freeze (@XFreeze) May 17, 2026

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/2056170982784602538?s=20

The complexity of the human brain and its functions in a neat infographic map

[zoomable version: https://t.co/ADEhDeTkmx] pic.twitter.com/DI0gQaywHu
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 18, 2026

https://twitter.com/sulekhat95/status/2055986390564061634?s=20

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Debt Rattle May 12 2026

May 122026

May 12, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:03 am Finance Tagged with: AOC, ceasefire, Durov, GOP, Iran, Khameini, midterms, Putin, TDS, Trump, WWIII, Zelensky 53 Responses »

Henri Matisse The Dessert – Harmony in Red 1908

• Trump to Iran: Time’s Up (Robert Spencer)

• Trump: Iran Ceasefire ‘On Life Support’ (JTN)

• Trump Mulls Military Action As Ceasefire On “Life Support” (ZH)

• Dear Mr. President: Just Finish the Mullahs Already (Stephen Green)

• Khamenei Orders Iran’s Army To ‘Continue Decisive Operations’ (Cradle)

• Confused About Iran? Here’s What U.S. Victory Looks Like. (Victoria Taft)

• EU Prepares For ‘Potential’ Talks With Putin As US Slowly Reduces Troops (ZH)

• Putin’s Failure as a World Leader has Cleared the Path to WW III (PCR)

• The Earth Moves Just a Bit (James Howard Kunstler)

• Durov Slams French Hypocrisy Over X Crackdown (RT)

• Um… Did the GOP Just Win the Midterms? (Stephen Green)

• Zelensky Touts That 20 Countries Seek Ukraine Drone Deals (ZH)

• White House Identifies Treatment Course for TDS Sufferers (CTH)

• Trump Floats Making Venezuela The 51st State (ZH)

• “You Just Can’t Earn a Billion Dollars”: AOC (Turley)

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2053517163177169095?s=20 https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2053838729467371690?s=20

We have the evidence and the documents that prove Obama and his administration, including Hillary Clinton and our own intelligence community committed treason and ran a coup on President Trump to steal the 2016 election.

1. Hillary Clinton greenlights the plan to tie Trump to… pic.twitter.com/fncRuQdWyW
— The SCIF (@TheSCIF) May 10, 2026

https://twitter.com/Real_RobN/status/2053635138765062154?s=20

Trump just reposted this. pic.twitter.com/j9loQ1e1ql
— johnny maga (@johnnymaga) May 11, 2026

Barack Hussein Obama wiretapping Trump Tower during the 2016 election was a million times worse than anything Nixon did during Watergate. It is time to arrest the Renegade. pic.twitter.com/qefWDZAxlW
— I Love America News (@ILA_NewsX) May 9, 2026

https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/2053546881050169600?s=20

Bankrupting the insurance Cartels. Something has to be done. pic.twitter.com/fDvVgcQpNw
— Johnny Midnight ⚡️ (@its_The_Dr) May 11, 2026

I’m a big fan of Marco Rubio now—this is easily the best Catholic political speech I’ve heard from someone

video: CIT pic.twitter.com/hI0E0Y0taP
— Sachin Jose (@Sachinettiyil) May 10, 2026

This is simply unreal. What happened in Germany? Has the left virus completely eaten their minds?

How on earth is it possible to not be willing to defend one's country and family? pic.twitter.com/wPedD5gNvy
— Michael A. Arouet (@MichaelAArouet) May 10, 2026

“I don’t like it — TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

• Trump to Iran: Time’s Up (Robert Spencer)

“Iran,” said President Donald Trump in a Truth Social post early on Sunday afternoon, “has been playing games with the United States, and the rest of the World, for 47 years (DELAY, DELAY, DELAY!),” and there is no doubt that his assessment is true, particularly in regard to the present on-and-off negotiations. Now, however, Trump has issued an ominous warning that the surviving leaders of the Islamic Republic would be wise to take seriously, which doesn’t at all mean that they will do so.

The leaders of the Islamic Republic, whoever they may be, have been playing a delaying game with Trump with the peace talks, and that’s essentially all that those talks were or ever could be. This is clear from the very fact that Iran is an Islamic republic that strives to adhere to Islamic principles and laws in all of its dealings. Islamic law allows for a truce between a Muslim force and a non-Muslim one only under two circumstances: if the non-Muslim force is about to convert to Islam, which is obviously not in play here (although it could be sooner than anyone expects), and if the Muslim force is losing the war, and needs time to gather strength to fight again more effectively.
There is no scenario in Islamic law in which a Muslim force and a non-Muslim one sign a treaty for a lasting peace, lay down their arms, and coexist. The assumption among Western policymakers that the Islamic Republic of Iran would do such a thing under any circumstances is based on those policymakers’ willful ignorance regarding Islamic law, and fond assumption that everyone in the world thinks just the way they do. Trump went on in his Truth Social post to skewer a pair of his predecessors for showering the Islamic Republic with American largesse in pursuit of exactly that chimerical peaceful coexistence:
“…and then finally hit “pay dirt” when Barack Hussein Obama became President. He was not only good to them, he was great, actually going to their side, jettisoning Israel, and all other Allies, and giving Iran a major and very powerful new lease on life. Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and 1.7 Billion Dollars in green cash, flown into Tehran, was handed to them on a silver platter. Every Bank in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland was emptied out — It was so much money that when it arrived, the Iranian Thugs had no idea what to do with it. They had never seen money like this, and never will again. It was taken off the plane in suitcases and satchels, and the Iranians couldn’t believe their luck. They finally found the greatest SUCKER of them all, in the form of a weak and stupid American President. He was a disaster as our “Leader,” but not as bad as Sleepy Joe Biden!”
Trump was right about Obama giving the Islamic Republic a “very powerful new lease on life.” Without the financial boost that Obama gave to the mullahs, they likely would not have survived the nationwide protests that swept Iran several times since Obama’s billions arrived. Those protests were ruthlessly suppressed, and the money for that suppression came from the United States. Adding insult to injury for the long-suffering people of Iran, Old Joe Biden sent them $10 billion. All this cash has kept the bloodthirsty Islamic regime alive. Trump continued:
“For 47 years the Iranians have been “tapping” us along, keeping us waiting, killing our people with their roadside bombs, destroying protests, and recently wiping out 42,000 innocent, unarmed protestors, and laughing at our now GREAT AGAIN Country. They will be laughing no longer! President DONALD J. TRUMP” Just over two hours after posting this, Trump added: “I have just read the response from Iran’s so-called ‘Representatives.’ I don’t like it — TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
What Trump will do now is anybody’s guess, but one thing is certain: the Islamic Republic will keep on behaving belligerently and aggressively toward the United States and Israel as long as it continues to exist. It cannot end its hostility to either country without ceasing to be an Islamic republic. It hates the U.S. because free society and representative government is the foremost competitor to the Sharia-based society that it wishes to export, and it hates Israel because the Qur’an designates the Jews as the “most vehement in hostility” to the Muslims (5:82).
And as long as Iran is losing, it will continue to delay. Trump is correct to call them out. Now is the time to act.

“I didn’t even waste my time reading all of it. It’s on life support..”

• Trump: Iran Ceasefire ‘On Life Support’ (JTN)

President Donald Trump on Monday stated that the ceasefire with Iran was “on life support” amid a growing diplomatic deadline between Tehran and Washington and the exchange of live rounds across the Persian Gulf. It’s unbelievably weak. After reading that garbage they sent over? I didn’t even waste my time reading all of it. It’s on life support,” he told reporters. “I would say the ceasefire is on massive life support, where the doctor walks in and says, ‘sir, your loved one has approximately 1% chance of living.'”

Trump’s remarks came from the Oval Office during an unrelated event. He also lamented the difficulties of dealing with Iran, saying they agreed to commitments and then backed out. He rejected the Iranian peace proposal over the weekend, calling it “totally unacceptable.” Earlier this month, Iran and the United Arab Emirates exchanged fire across the Persian Gulf, despite the ceasefire, with Iran launching missiles toward UAE territory and striking at least one industrial oil facility.

Iran act like they’re winning.

“Everything we proposed in the text was reasonable and generous.” However, US officials continue to insist on their “unreasonable demands,” Baghaei stressed. He described that Iran’s demands for the war to stop, for the US to lift its blockade, and the release Iran’s frozen assets, remain legitimate..”

• Trump Mulls Military Action As Ceasefire On “Life Support” (ZH)

President Trump is meeting with his national security team Monday to discuss the way forward in the Iran war, including possibly resuming military action, after negotiations with the countrydeadlocked on Sunday, three U.S. officials told Axios. U.S. officials say Trump wants a deal to end the war, but Iran’s rejection of many of his demands and refusal to make meaningful concessions on its nuclear program puts the military option back on the table. This sent oil prices back to the highs of the day…

President Trump also told Fox, that he sees a 1% chance of an Iran deal materializing and succeeding, as even the ceasefire is one of “the weakest, on life support”: President Donald Trump called out the “piece of garbage” peace proposal from Iran on Monday from the Oval Office, saying only “stupid people” in Iran are questioning his resolve in guaranteeing Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. The latest Iranian proposal reneged on a past vow to give up enriched uranium. None of this bodes well for the prospect of the Strait of Hormuz opening up anytime soon. Oil prices have reflected general pessimism at the start of this week.
Trump Might Fully Restart Project Freedom
Fox News is reporting that President Trump is considering renewing Project Freedom, pushing oil up. According to the developing story: President Donald Trump has stated in an interview with Fox News that he is considering renewing Project Freedom, a military operation originally launched to secure the passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz. This operation, involving significant U.S. naval assets, had been paused amid diplomatic efforts with Iran. The initial pause was influenced by diplomatic progress mediated by Pakistan, although recent developments suggest a potential escalation.
However, the reality is that the de facto US naval blockade has remained in place. The Iranians last week fired on US warships which were escorting foreign vessels through the strait. Since then there’s been an uneasy calm amid stalled negotiations. There’s really no movement on either side. Trump indicated in the fresh comments that all of this could be part of a larger operation, and strangely a bit of a contradictory stance: he said of Iran’s “hardline leaders” that “they are going to fold” and that “I will deal with them until they make a deal”. Of course, the very label of ‘hardline’ would suggest the opposite.
The same Fox correspondent was told by Trump that forcibly retrieving Iran’s ‘nuclear dust’ is still on the table: It is clear there remains a huge gap between the positions of Washington and Tehran, after the past days saw proposal and counterproposal submitted via Pakistan, with the White House issuing its final response over the weekend, as President Trump called it ‘unacceptable’.
According to new Monday words from Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, “Everything we proposed in the text was reasonable and generous.” However, US officials continue to insist on their “unreasonable demands,” Baghaei stressed. He described that Iran’s demands for the war to stop, for the US to lift its blockade, and the release Iran’s frozen assets, remain legitimate. Further, Tehran is demanding safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, along with establishing security in the region and in Lebanon.
Senior Iranian military official Mohsen Rezaee to Tasnim: There Is No Clear Prospect for a Political Agreement With the United States n”Unfortunately, the US continues to insist on its one-sided view,” Baghaei added of the “reasonable, generous offer” built around Iran’s national interests. Iran has strongly suggested that the US is actually too influenced by driving Israeli interests, not American priorities. But per WSJ, Washington’s focus remains on the nuclear issue, which Iran considers a non-starter in negotiations: “The president on Sunday said a multipage response that Iran sent to the U.S. proposal to end the war, which didn’t include commitments about Tehran’s nuclear program, was unacceptable,” the publication writes.

Do the mullahs still have any say? Or is it now really the IRGC?

• Dear Mr. President: Just Finish the Mullahs Already (Stephen Green)

“When you set out to take Vienna,” Napoleon advised, “take Vienna.” When President Donald Trump initiated the current round of hostilities in the 47-year-old Iran War on February 28, observers had no way to tell whether Trump had merely ordered U.S. forces to inflict more heavy damage to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions, or if he was determined to force regime change.

Lately, it looks like neither. As PJ Media’s own Robert Spencer noted on Sunday, “There is no scenario in Islamic law in which a Muslim force and a non-Muslim one sign a treaty for a lasting peace, lay down their arms, and coexist.” There comes a point where even Trump’s so-much-winning art-of-the-deal negotiating tactics come up against this hard reality, and it looks increasingly like that’s where we are.
Look, I love the idea of Trump doing to Tehran what he did to Caracas back in January, and removing the problem leader, then making peace with the much more pliable survivors. But it’s clear by now that either no such people exist in the Islamic Republic, or the government is too fractured or leaderless to comply. Either way, the fiery-but-mostly-peaceful ceasefire may have run its course. The man himself said on Sunday that the regime “will be laughing no longer!” at the U.S., but that’s not the way it looks to those of us watching from the outside.
This exchange between my Red State colleague Bonchie and another X user explains where I arrived over the weekend: In the interest of fairness, let’s look at the flip side, because there’s also the global picture that Oil Price analyst Irina Slav reported on this weekend. The short version is that China is hurt more by the growing oil crisis than the U.S. is. If temporarily higher gas prices are the price of ending the Islamic Republic and hurting the CCP, too, then I’d think of them as a worthwhile investment.
Then again, midterm voters are likely less sanguine about gas prices than I am, and political considerations are real. Or as another X user put it, “We either prove we can open the straits now or deal with it being closed in October.” It may well be that Trump is simply running out the clock on Tehran’s finances and oil storage issues that could go critical as soon as this week. If that’s the ploy, and it works, then please forgive my itchy trigger finger. But the more I think about what desperate actions the regime might take in either one of those circumstances, the more convinced I become that waiting them out could prove to be a huge mistake.
There are two clocks ticking. One on the Islamic Republic, the other on America’s patience with the war’s economic fallout. It’s always looked like Tehran’s clock will run out first, but after 10 weeks, the time might have come to force a decision instead. Did Trump set out to take out the regime? He’s been typically coy about his actual endgame, but whatever the goal was on February 28, maybe now Trump needs to finish the job.

Khameini jr. “orders”? Who listens?

• Khamenei Orders Iran’s Army To ‘Continue Decisive Operations’ (Cradle)

Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has ordered the country’s forces to continue military operations against the US and Israel, according to a report by Iranian public broadcaster IRIB released Sunday. The order came during a meeting between Khamenei and Major General Ali Abdollahi, the commander of the Iranian army’s Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters. “During this meeting, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, His Eminence Ayatollah Sayyed Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei, while expressing appreciation for the brave and valiant fighters and the country’s powerful armed forces, issued new directives and guidance for continuing operations and confronting enemies decisively,” the report said.

Abdollahi also “presented a report on the readiness of the armed forces” during the meeting, IRIB added. The report comes after two months of speculation and unverified media claims about the Supreme Leader’s status. Western news outlets like The Guardian and The Times had claimed earlier in the war that Khamenei was in a coma following the US-Israeli strikes that assassinated his father. Reports also claimed that he fled to Russia. Mazaher Hosseini, head of protocol in the office of Iran’s supreme leader, recently stated that Khamenei was healing from minor injuries he sustained and “is now in complete health.”

“Thank God, he is in good health. The enemy is spreading all kinds of rumors and false claims. They want to see him and find him, but people should be patient and not rush. He will speak to you when the time is right,” the Iranian official stated. The IRIB report came a day after CNN cited US intelligence as saying that Khamenei “is playing a critical role in shaping war strategy alongside senior Iranian officials.” It also comes days after Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said he met with the supreme leader. “What struck me most during this meeting was the vision and the humble and sincere approach of the supreme leader of the Islamic Revolution,” he said.
Tehran has sent out its response to a new US proposal for a ceasefire via Pakistan, according to state media. The US has maintained an illegal blockade of Iranian ports since the ceasefire began. Washington violated the truce days ago by bombing Iran’s coast and attacking two vessels. Iranian forces targeted two US military vessels in response. The next day, skirmishes broke out between Iranian and US forces in the Strait of Hormuz. Spokesperson for the Iranian parliament’s Foreign Policy and National Security Committee, Ebrahim Rezaei, said on Sunday that Tehran will strike US military bases and vessels in response to any new violations from Washington – stressing that “restraint has come to an end.”

“..maximum victory for the U.S. would look like, in addition to the other tiers of victory. “Regime change … empowering the Iranian people and giving us an Iran that could be a friend in the future..”

• Confused About Iran? Here’s What U.S. Victory Looks Like. (Victoria Taft)

The Trump Administration is the most transparent in the history of the country, but keeping up with the torturous talks with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is getting harder all the time. It started off clearly enough, but since this Iran campaign went into negotiation mode with the leftover leaders of the IRGC, it’s been as if we’re “looking through a glass, darkly,” as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians. From claims of kamikazi dolphins, to on-and-off-again negotiations, claims of full air superiority, use of autonomous ships, to the question of whether we can call it a “war,” there’s been confusion about what is going on in the Iran conflict and the subsequent talks. Some of this confusion is on purpose, no doubt, to confound the IRGC leftovers, but people like me who try to keep up are, well, frustrated.

The Iranian leftover leaders are conducting what is obviously a stall strategy, of course, and President Trump posted on Truth Social over the weekend that he knows what they’re doing, “DELAY, DELAY, DELAY!” he wrote. I asked a subject matter expert, Edmund Fitton-Brown — a former UK ambassador to Yemen and former UN negotiator with Al Qaeda and the Taliban — to explain if those talks can get us to something we can call “victory.” The Iran conflict is something I tackle on Tuesdays in my Adult in the Room Podcast livestream, and I asked the senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies to explain things to me.
In the interview, Fitton-Brown explained that “[Trump] is really serious about peace, but you don’t get peace with people who want to kill you.” However, there are three tiers of achievable “peace,” and they are “minimum victory, medium victory, and … maximum victory.” You can see the entire exchange at 22:20 of this video below, but here’s a distilled version of his theory. “Minimum is the straightforward moves, open [Hormuz], no Iranian toll, complete reassertion of… the law of the sea and freedom of navigation,” he told me. “[W]e need the Iranians to acknowledge that they can’t enrich uranium in the future,” he said. “Those are the minimum conditions.”
The Hormuz takeover, though not completely unexpected, gave the Iranians another leverage point they didn’t have before. Fitton-Brown said he’d negotiate for more, of course. “Medium conditions for success would be to get the Iranians to agree that they will not resume their procurement and manufacture of ballistic missiles so that so that we don’t have this constant threat to Israel that has destabilized the Middle East,” and that sounds even better. He continued, “Iranians would acknowledge that they have to reign in their proxies. They can’t just keep waging war on their neighbors using the Houthis, the Hezballah, Iraqi militias and Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”
Minimum plus Medium equals a better deal. Here’s what he says maximum victory for the U.S. would look like, in addition to the other tiers of victory. “Regime change … empowering the Iranian people and giving us an Iran that could be a friend in the future,” he told me. He says they’ve been anything but that in the past 47 years. “We have allowed the Iranians for 47 years to chant death to America. And that should never have been allowed. Right from the start, we should have said to them, you know, if you say that, then you cannot be allowed to have a kind of civilized relationship with us,” he stated. He’d keep sanctions going until “they realized there was a real cost to [saying] it.” The IRGC gets a vote, too. Now the Iranian nuke czar says Trump’s number one goal, the Islamist’s nuclear program, will not be part of any negotiations.

Mohammad Eslami, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, told a parliamentary security committee session that nuclear technology will not be part of any negotiations and that enrichment is off the table entirely. Reported by committee spokesman Ebrahim Rezaei. pic.twitter.com/bEAVOmNTBD
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) May 11, 2026

Fitton-Brown says, “The lesson is to take people at their word.”
Maybe it’s time to bring back the B-2s.
Watch my interview below.

Europe has a long way to fall.

• EU Prepares For ‘Potential’ Talks With Putin As US Slowly Reduces Troops (ZH)

A recent report in Financial Times indicates the European Union is preparing for “potential” future talks with Russia and President Vladimir Putin at a moment of extreme doubts over both US military commitments and Russia’s intentions in Ukraine. Putin himself during his V-Day speech Saturday hinted for the first time that the conflict may be ‘coming to an end’: “I think that the matter is coming to an end,” Putin told reporters of the Russia-Ukraine war, Europe s deadliest conflict since World War II.

The Russian leader, however, added he would be willing to meet Zelensky only after the terms of a peace agreement had already been settled. The Kremlin had rejected US President Donald Trump’s August 2025 offer to hold a trilateral meeting with Zelenskyy, Putin and Trump. “This should be the final point, not the negotiations themselves,” Putin said after the Victory Day, which marks Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 in World War II. Also on Saturday, António Costa, the president of the European Council, said to a press conference the EU will only talk to Putin at the “right moment”. Costa ultimately sees “potential” for direct EU engagement with Putin.
“We need in the right moment to have talks with Russia to address our common issues with security,” the EU president had said. “We don’t want to disturb the initiative led by President Trump,” said Costa at a ‘Europe Day’ celebration in Brussels. He also spoke of preparations aimed at being “ready to do what we need to do” regarding Europe’s security. And separately an EU official said: “There will be a moment when the EU will need to speak to Russia because it’s an existential issue for Europe. Now it’s not the time.”= President Trump has recently blasted NATO as a “paper tiger” (though it wasn’t the first time) and has said the US is withdrawing 5,000 American troops from Germany.
In response, European governments have accelerated discussions on deeper EU military coordination, including joint defense initiatives which bypass US protection. Currently, the three-day Ukraine ceasefire announced and backed by President Trump appears to have held throughout the weekend, as no drone attacks have been registered on Moscow or other parts of the country. Trump had presented this as a window and opportunity to achieve a more permanent truce, and Putin is without doubt seizing on the initiative, but surely wants a final settlement in line with Kremlin aims in Ukraine.

In 1999, Putin took over a desperate, despondent, bankrupt country from Yeltsin. Life expectancy among men was in their 50s. Ask them now how they feel about Putin. Not as a failure, I guarantee you.

• Putin’s Failure as a World Leader has Cleared the Path to WW III (PCR)

Igor Girkin regrets that Putin’s pusillanimous behavior has humiliated Russia before the world.

“We — as an entire country — have been humiliated before the whole world by our astonishing inability not only to defend our status as a Great Power (something that had remained unquestioned for Russia for centuries), but even to uphold ordinary national interests. We allow ‘neutral’ states to seize our ships and cargo without the slightest response; we supply (at a discount) oil, gas, and other essential resources to states openly producing missiles and drones that rain down daily on Russian soldiers and civilians; we are ‘passionately friendly’ with neighbors openly laying claim to Russian territory; and in the end, amid triumphant shouting, endless boasting, and equally endless lies from state media, we are unable to defeat an enemy that 10 years ago was pitiful both militarily and socioeconomically — but which we ourselves allowed to grow stronger through our own insane (downright idiotic) actions and inaction.
“And there is much more besides…“We tolerate these idiots in power in the hope that they will ‘come to their senses’ and finally (if only out of self-preservation) defend Russia from external enemies — but the further things go, the more these idiots behave like cowards, while continuing to profit shamelessly from the difficult and unsuccessful war they themselves are losing. “So why should anyone respect us as a country? Who would genuinely ally themselves with obvious losers?”
In 2007 when Russian President Putin spoke at the Munich Security Conference it looked as if the fear of the American Zionist neoconservatives had been realized that a country sufficiently strong to stand as a barrier to Washington’s hegemony had appeared on the scene. Putin declared that Russia did not accept Washington’s unilateralism. Not long after he drove the American trained and equipped Georgian Army out of South Ossetia. Next he threw down the gauntlet with his unequivocal statement that “Russia will never again fight a war on its own territory.” Putin presented Russia to the world as a barrier to US imperialism and looting of the world.
The Israeli-American Zionist neoconservatives decided to fight back. They saw Russia’s weakness in Putin’s desire for peace and good relations. The Zionists correctly read this weakness as an opportunity to seize Ukraine, which Washington had already broken out of Russia and created as an independent state when the Soviet Union collapsed politically. The American Zionists reasoned correctly that Putin would regard Russia’s intervention against their coup as a propaganda advantage for Washington to portray Russia as a revanchist state bent on recovering the Soviet empire and then adding all of Europe. As Putin’s goal was mutual trust and beneficial business relationships, he stood aside, not understanding that the Zionist intent was to use Ukraine in a proxy war against Russia in the expectation of destabilizing Russia.
The American Zionists are achieving their goal. Increasingly, Russians are expressing discontent with Putin’s prevention of the Russian military from winning the conflict initiated by Washington. More and more Russians are speaking out strongly. Drones and missiles supplied by Washington and NATO now hit deep into Russia. They hit Russian energy production facilities, reducing the energy flow. They hit Russian energy export facilities, reducing the ability to export energy. They hit civilian residential housing killing Russian civilians. EU countries of zero military potential seize Russian oil tankers on the high seas. The humiliations go on and on, and Putin accepts them to the disgrace of Russia.

“Operation Epic Fury was the loud one. Operation Economic Fury is the quiet one. . . . While the carriers were on television, Treasury was doing the actual demolition.” —Jesús Enrique Rosas on X

• The Earth Moves Just a Bit (James Howard Kunstler)

Expect a consequential week. The Persian Gulf remains closed and colossal oil slicks leak out of Kharg Island while Iran blusters and stomps its feet. No one can even try to buy its oil anymore, not even China. The sanctions are too onerous. Iran’s wells must be shut in now. Imagine how the production chiefs out in the oil fields are howling at their insane IRGC overseers. Iran has no economy left operating. Iran’s domestic security force, the Basij (Sâzmân-e Basij-e Mostaz’afin, or “Mobilization of the Oppressed”) is strangling anyone who expresses discontent in the streets, not a good look for a regime that can’t survive without the pretense of popular support.

Late Sunday, the US President rejected Tehran’s latest conditions for peace out of hand. They are trying to jerk the whole world around, even while they whirl around the drain. Despite what you read in The New York Times — Iran’s US-based chief cheerleader — it is probably a matter of days now before capitulation. The ball is in America’s court this morning, a real hanging lob shot. The return is apt to be hard. Of course, whatever official utterances come out of Iran, you must discount by about 99.9-percent. For now, there is nothing but the morning fog of suspense.
But strange doings are a’foot elsewhere. You might have noticed that the UK’s labor government got drubbed in local elections, losing nearly 1,500 council seats, a humiliating repudiation. It’s a matter of days before PM Keir Starmer will have to hang it up. His possible replacements are utterly unknown to Americans — Angela Rayner, a former Deputy PM, Energy Secretary Ed Milliband, Health Sec’y Wes Streeting — and any of them is just a place-holder for the election’s main winner Nigel Farage of the Reform Party, which exists wholly outside the age-old British political transect of Labour / Tories.
The Labour Party, you see, is lately as loathsome in the altogether to British voters as its current avatar, Sir Keir (Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, KCB), whose latest act was to extend social welfare benefits to the additional wives of poly-marital Muslims. Way to go! Why not just travel the island empire from town-to-town and slap every indigenous Briton in the face? And the Tories (putative Conservatives), well, just fuggeddabowdem. Sir Keir’s Tory predecessor as PM, Rishi Sunak, screwed the pooch for his party into the next twenty years allowing net Third World migration to hit record highs while the kingdom crumbled.
The way it works over there, Sir Keir or whoever takes over from him, asks King Charles to dissolve Parliament, and you get a sudden national election short of Parliament’s regular five-year term. And so, sometime in the months ahead, Nigel Farage will become Prime Minister and things will change-up bigly in Britain. Mr. Farage will have to contend, among other things, with Donald Trump’s dismantling of whatever was left of Britain’s stealth neo-colonial command of global finance through the British banking system.
he question really is: can Farage arrest his country’s sickening slide into becoming an Islamic caliphate, with all the Third World bells and whistles? Can he possibly even start shipping the most recent arrivals back to where they came from? Can he do what Mr. Trump is attempting in the USA and turn the UK back to an economy based on the actual production of goods rather than financial finaglery?

“France is illegally harvesting its citizens’ data, while accusing social media platforms of doing the same, the entrepreneur has alleged ..”

• Durov Slams French Hypocrisy Over X Crackdown (RT)

Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov has accused France of hypocrisy after prosecutors expanded a criminal investigation into Elon Musk’s X. Durov said French authorities were violating citizens’ privacy while accusing the social media platform of similar conduct. The entrepreneur made the remarks on Sunday, just days after the Paris prosecutor’s office announced that it would seek new charges against X over alleged illegal sexual deepfakes made by the platform’s Grok AI, as well as unlawful data extraction and other crimes.

“The French government is accusing X of the very things the French government itself is doing,” Durov tweeted. The French government is panicking. They know a major political shift in 2027 will expose their misdeeds – so they’re trying to silence free speech platforms under whatever pretext they think they can get away with.He called on the international community to back X against what he called the French state’s “immoral assault” on the social media app.
French investigators initially launched their investigation of X and Grok in January, alleging that the platforms’ algorithms were biased and accusing the company of illegal data gathering and of possessing and spreading sexualized deepfakes created by its AI, including images involving minors. The tech mogul has denied any wrongdoing and dismissed the legal action as a “political attack.” Last month, the US Department of Justice reportedly denied a request from French prosecutors to cooperate in the investigation. US President Donald Trump’s administration has long been critical of what it has called attacks on free speech and political opposition in the EU and UK.
Durov’s Telegram has also faced legal troubles in France. The entrepreneur was arrested at a Paris airport in 2024 and indicted on a dozen charges after French prosecutors accused him of being complicit in crimes committed using his social media platform. Durov has since been allowed to leave France, despite the ongoing investigation. The entrepreneur has repeatedly called the arrest absurd and condemned crackdowns on social media networks as a concerted attack on free speech.

“You ask for miracles, Theo? I give you the Virginia Democrats.” —Hans Gruber, possibly

• Um… Did the GOP Just Win the Midterms? (Stephen Green)

You probably know that I’m not exactly up on the GOP’s chances of holding the House in November, but there’s a glimmer of light ahead, thanks in no small part to overreach by Virginia Democrats — and Republicans finally wising up. Over the weekend, Roger Kimball looked at the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision and declared that “the decision will net Republicans some 8-12 additional House seats in the midterms. In other words, Republicans will not only hold the House; they will also expand their majority.”

Reporting for the (extremely) left-wing Mother Jones, Ari Berman called the decision “devastating” for Democrats, but also noted that “the only silver lining for those harmed may be that the ruling came be too late to have a major impact on the 2026 midterm elections.” “Candidate filing deadlines have passed in most Southern states; primary elections have been held already in North Carolina, Texas, and Mississippi; and Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia have mailed ballots for upcoming May primaries.” That’s six deep-red states out of play for 2026 redistricting, so it isn’t that Roger’s numbers are wrong, but they might be premature. Don’t get me wrong — I pray he’s right.
So for the moment, the GOP’s odds remain too long for comfort. Democrats are comfortably ahead on the 2026 generic congressional ballot, typically the best indicator of what happens on election day. The RealClearPolitics average has them up by 5.6 points. Overcoming a number like that requires the kind of enthusiasm that, frankly, much of the Trump electorate just doesn’t enjoy right now. The Iran War — while totally necessary, they were about to get nukes — has gas prices uncomfortably close to Biden-era highs. Food prices, particularly beef, remain stubbornly high. And the GOP Congress refuses to do a damn thing about election integrity. I’m looking at you, Sen. John Thune.
That last one is a real problem, for reasons both practical (election integrity, duh) and political (Trump voters need this win). We sent the GOP to Congress to undo the damage done to our election system, and they have yet to deliver. You had one job. But sometimes — as we learned from watching Hans Gruber make the FBI sing to his tune in Die Hard — knowing the other guy’s procedure is a yuge part of winning. Which brings us to Virginia, Indiana, and the GOP’s improved chances come November.
By now, you know what happened in Virginia. State Democrats — led by non-former CIA spook Gov. Abigail Spanberger — did what they’re now basically compelled to do, and broke every law on their way to gerrymandering the GOP into oblivion. Then the state Supreme Court knocked them down and declared the illegal referendum void. And Another Thing: Please note that the Virginia Supreme Court did not say that Democrats can’t gerrymander the GOP into oblivion. It just said you actually have to follow the law of the land to do it. At the next court-approved opportunity, you can be sure they’ll get it done.
In Indiana, GOP voters took one look at the new rules and voted out every RINO they could in the state’s primary election last week. Most of the Republican state senators who blocked Indiana’s congressional redraw got hammered by Trump-backed challengers, and Gov. Mike Braun is pushing again for redistricting. If successful, that could net the Republicans one or two more seats. Altogether, in states where it isn’t already too late, and including states like Florida that have already redistricted, Republicans could redraw themselves between 11 and 14 seats before the midterms. Is that enough to overcome the generic congressional ballot deficit? There’s just no way to know this far out, although if Sen. Thune would stop posturing on X long enough to pass the Save Act, I’d bet next month’s car payment that the GOP holds the House.
Grrrr.
Looking ahead, however, 2028 looks really good.

Ukraine is all about money, Russia is not.

• Zelensky Touts That 20 Countries Seek Ukraine Drone Deals (ZH)

Ukraine is emerging as a global drone export powerhouse, coming fresh off vast experience gained in over four years of war with Russia – or at least that’s the image Kiev is seeking to present to the world. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday that nearly 20 countries are pursuing drone agreements with Ukraine, with four deals already finalized. Agreements already confirmed include deals with Germany, Norway and the Netherlands, alongside long-term security partnerships with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates which were inked in late March as Zelensky personally toured the Gulf, even amid the ongoing Iran war, according to Reuters.

Zelensky has been offering Ukraine’s services and drone supplies to Gulf countries as a cheaper, effective alternative to dwindling and costly American-supplied anti-air defenses. “Nearly 20 countries are currently involved at various stages: 4 agreements have already been signed, and the first contracts under these agreements are now being prepared,” Zelensky has newly proclaimed on X. “Ukraine has already started to receive the necessary volume of fuel thanks to the agreements,” Zelensky also stated. Interestingly, he’s also of late been pitching being a supplier of battlefield robots, as we’ve detailed before.
Starting in April, Zelensky had hailed that Ukrainian personnel were able to help partners build effective air defenses using interceptor drones to combat Iranian Shaheds. Low-cost interceptor drones deployed by Ukraine are among the most effective ways to combat the inexpensive $20,000 Shaheds, as a war of attrition makes little economic sense when interceptor missiles cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.
Ukraine has had four years to develop low-cost one-way attack drones and interceptors during its war with Russia. Now, this technology is clearly being exported across multiple theaters in Eurasia. Zelensky did not identify the countries or the exact interceptor drones used in his comments at the time, but it is possible that Octopus-100 autonomous interceptor drones were deployed. The past couple months have seen Zelensky touring around proclaiming Ukraine’s ability to fill defense tech sector gaps for allied countries:

Zelensky:

If Ukraine, Türkiye, Norway, and the UK were EU members, you would have the strongest army in the world.

It would become the strongest alliance in the world.

Together, these countries and the EU have smart engineers, the best technologies, the best drones,… pic.twitter.com/xFRe5nVz5Z
— Clash Report (@clashreport) April 21, 2026

He said Ukraine had deployed hundreds of experts to the Gulf area, and, in return, has received weapons to protect its energy assets as well as financial support. After the Trump White House began signaling a significant drawdown in direct military aid to Ukraine and to Europe more broadly, the Zelensky administration began launching more creative means to ensure ongoing funding for the war with Russia. Support from EU countries, however, doesn’t look to have wavered.

Growacet.

• White House Identifies Treatment Course for TDS Sufferers (CTH)

The White House has identified a treatment course for those suffering from acute cases of TDS. In many cases the issue can be treated by moderate changes in behavior or lifestyle:

For more severe or intense cases of TDS, like the Carlson strain, the prescription below is also an option.

Inviting outrage.

• Trump Floats Making Venezuela The 51st State (ZH)

First Canada, then Greenland… and now Venezuela?

President Donald Trump said Monday he is seriously considering annexing the South American nation as the 51st U.S. state, citing the country’s vast oil reserves and what he described as strong local support for his leadership. In a telephone interview with Fox News anchor John Roberts, Trump mused that he is weighing the move for a nation that holds an estimated $40 trillion in oil resources. “Venezuela loves Trump,” the president told the reporter.
The suggestion comes months after U.S. forces conducted a military operation in Venezuela in January that resulted in the capture of longtime President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The couple was extradited to the U.S. to face narco-terrorism and weapons charges, effectively ending more than a decade of socialist rule that had transformed one of Latin America’s richest economies into an economic disaster marked by hyperinflation, mass emigration and the breakdown of public services.
Rather than installing opposition figure María Corina Machado, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, as the new leader, the Trump administration supported the installation of Delcy Rodríguez—Maduro’s former vice president—as interim president. Trump has described the arrangement as “spectacular” and predicted a rapid economic turnaround. Rodríguez’s government has moved swiftly on economic reforms. Within weeks of taking power, it enacted legislation opening the oil sector to privatization, dismantling core elements of the Chavista model that had dominated for more than two decades.
Meanwhile, commercial activity has accelerated thanks to Chevron, which signed two agreements expanding its participation in a joint venture with state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela SA in the Orinoco Oil Belt, Reuters reported at the time. Venezuelan oil output is already rising.
PDVSA reported production of 1.095 million barrels a day last month, up 75,000 barrels a day from February, with Oil Minister Paula Henao setting a target of 1.3 million barrels a day by year-end. Trump administration officials have been candid about the financial stakes. A White House spokesman called the first $500 million portion of an approximately $2 billion oil-supply agreement a “historic energy deal,” CBS News reported at the time. Trump has said the U.S. would rebuild Venezuela “in a very profitable way,” adding, “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil.”

“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) came up with the best reason to tax billionaires: They do not actually exist…”

• “You Just Can’t Earn a Billion Dollars”: AOC (Turley)

This week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) came up with the best reason to tax billionaires: They do not actually exist. On a podcast, Ocasio-Cortez declared with all the certainty of a freshman in a Smith College political science course that the notion of a self-made billionaire is simply a fantasy, because “you just can’t earn” a billion dollars. It is only the latest in a series of socialist fables that are being dressed up as economic facts. The difference is that this fable, if told often enough, could become true. In suggesting that true billionaires are a capitalist myth, Ocasio-Cortez is suggesting that people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos really did not earn their wealth and, therefore, it is really not their money.

“There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.” In other words, you can only make a billion dollars through theft and exploitation rather than actual entrepreneurial enterprise. This statement comes as support builds for the California billionaires’ tax which, even before it has a chance to pass in November, has already cost the state trillions due to an exodus of these billionaires.
In my book, “Rage and the Republic,” I discuss common myths spread by the left to fuel economic factionalism. One common myth is that the “wealthy do not pay their fair share of taxes.” In truth, the top ten percent of taxpayers pay the vast majority of taxes in the U.S. In the book, I also dispel the claim that most millionaires inherited their wealth or came from privileged backgrounds. These myths are designed to make redistribution schemes more palatable. And Democrats are ramping up the “eat-the-rich” rhetoric ahead of the midterms in pushing both millionaire and billionaire taxes. Democrats from Washington to Virginia are pushing millionaire taxes, and the mere conversation has already set off a stampede of high-earning taxpayers to red states like Texas and Florida, which have no state income tax.
It was also evident in this week’s California gubernatorial debate. Candidate Katie Porter (D) said she opposes the billionaire’s tax because it would not go far enough. Porter then pressed the only billionaire in the group, Tom Steyer, who has been moving to the far left to grab voters in the wake of the departure of former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) as a candidate. Steyer said that he supports the billionaire tax but would want to go even further.Steyer has spent a fortune of his own money on this race, apparently to convince Democratic primary voters that he is some kind of red billionaire in the mold of a George Soros or Neville Roy Singham. Good luck with that — after spending roughly $150 million of his own money, Steyer is still languishing between 12 and 18 percent support.
Of course, Steyer was not asked if he believes that real billionaires such as himself exist. Yet he has already apologized for making considerable money on private prisons, including those used to hold undocumented immigrants. Ironically, in finance, a “unicorn” is a company worth more than $1 billion dollars, a term coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee to capture the rare and almost magical status of such enterprises Conversely, Ocasio-Cortez’s unicorn myth is part of a general denial of economic realities that has taken hold on the left. The cost of these policies is borne by workers, who are being left to eat soundbites.
Democrats have sold voters on raising minimum wages as high as $30 per hour, even though such policies cost thousands of jobs. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg bragged about blocking a merger of JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, claiming that it would create cheaper flights and better jobs. Spirit has now been forced to close its doors, causing the loss of thousands of flights and jobs. A rising generation of voters is eagerly devouring soundbites and promises of the “warmth of collectivism” from figures like New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani. From promises of free buses to state-run grocery stores, voters are buying the same threadbare socialist schtick.
That was on display this week as socialist Seattle mayor Katie Wilson laughed when asked about the millionaires fleeing the city over rising taxes and crime. She delighted the crowd by mocking the departing millionaires with two words: “Like, bye!” The last laugh, however, rests with those fleeing a city facing a projected deficit of $114 million. As Wilson faces major cuts in the city budget, she gleefully mocks those whose tax dollars the city will desperately need to close this gap if it is to maintain public services.
Ironically, Wilson and other Democrats are quickly making their myth a reality. Soon, there will be no billionaire unicorns roaming the land. Even millionaires may become scarce, as these wealthy citizens move to less hostile states with less delusional leaders. The solution to this exodus is equally predictable. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who has campaigned for a billionaire tax in his state while representing Silicon Valley, has also joined with socialist Bernie Sanders to push for a national billionaire’s tax — an effort to guarantee that there is no place to hide. This is the same approach that tanked the French economy under François Mitterrand after the wealthy fled that nation.
These are not, however, a time for economics or history. It is the time of fables. Ocasio-Cortez has thrived in the land of socialist unicorns. She can even attend the ultra-rich Met Gala wearing an expensive “Eat-the-Rich” gown. Like her dress, it is fashionable to deny that billionaires created their wealth. It is your money for the taking. The result is that billionaires and even millionaires in states like New York may go the way of unicorns, fanciful creatures that once thrived in a land of jobs and growth.

U.S. Senator John Kennedy is now publicly demanding that Barack Hussein Obama return $120 million that he allegedly earned through ownership related to “Obamacare.”

“He allocated money under his own laws using taxpayer-generated prestige,” Kennedy said, calling it “an abuse of… pic.twitter.com/E0TYsFUEpq
— JOSH DUNLAP (@JDunlap1974) May 11, 2026

https://twitter.com/warDaniel47/status/2053414597722300913?s=20

ONE DAY BEFORE the hantavirus fear campaign began…WHO pandemic treaty talks COLLAPSED prompting Tedros to warn the next pandemic was "a matter ⁠of when, not if."

Then suddenly… ONE DAY LATER… the cruise ship hantavirus media frenzy exploded.

Don't fall for the Bill… https://t.co/GvEJfdqn1K pic.twitter.com/4dpZTGcmwd
— Nicolas Hulscher, MPH (@NicHulscher) May 10, 2026

Hantavirus – cruise ship – and false narratives galore!

My scientific and medical opinion as a scientist who did research on Hantavirus is that an inquiry into Dr Bix is warranted
Please share massively – accurate info –

1. First and foremost we studied Hantavirus in my lab for… https://t.co/wWbNY53lWi pic.twitter.com/3fwpnCXsQM
— Martin Zizi (@MartinZ_uncut) May 11, 2026

https://twitter.com/ChildrensHD/status/2053612044860199013?s=20

The Department of War celebrates the launch of https://t.co/odnX2WDaGO as a major milestone in government transparency. In just 12 hours, the site has received 340 MILLION hits from Americans and truth seekers worldwide seeking unfiltered UAP information.

This overwhelming…
— Sean Parnell (@SeanParnellASW) May 9, 2026

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Debt Rattle April 8 2026

Apr 082026

April 8, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:50 am Finance Tagged with: AI, Andreesen, ceasefire, defiance, foldable phones, Iran, leverage, Markwayne Mullin, midterms, sanctuary cities, Trump 73 Responses »

Emil Nolde Half Moon Over The Sea 1945

• Trump Announces a Ceasefire (Sarah Anderson)

• President Trump, Iran Agree To 2-Week Ceasefire (ZH)

• President Trump Threatened Iran, the Democrats Blinked (Tim O’Brien)

• Trump Threatens To ‘Take Out Entire Country Of Iran’ (ZH)

• Defiance Without Leverage: Tehran’s Fatal Miscalculation (David Manney)

• Trump: ‘A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight’ (Catherine Salgado)

• The New York Times Says We Lost the War (Scott Pinsker)

• German ‘Militaristic Frenzy’ Could End In Tragedy – Zakharova (RT)

• Foldable Apple iPhone Hits Engineering Snags, Raising Risk Of Delays (ZH)

• Here’s How Bad the Midterms Situation for the Democrats Really Is (Margolis)

• Mullin Drops a Bombshell on Sanctuary Cities (Matt Margolis)

• Marc Andreessen Calls AI Job-Loss Fears ‘Fake’, Expects Employment Gains (ZH)

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2041488240062906637?s=20

Ukrainian sources confirm: 4,000 Ukrainian coup specialists have already been transferred to Hungary.

They plan to seize buildings in Budapest, organize riots, and refuse to recognize PM Viktor Orbán's victory.

Ukraine is interfering in Hungarian elections… and we know why. pic.twitter.com/LHTMAwdCgb
— Garbage Human (@GarbageHuman24) April 7, 2026

Elon Musk just said it plainly:

“Government can’t keep up with AI — it’s moving 10 times faster than them, maybe more.
The one thing they can do is just issue people money.”

He pointed to COVID checks and Trump’s recent $1,776 military payments as examples. In short: expect… pic.twitter.com/lI4BPkYN8u
— Camus (@newstart_2024) April 6, 2026

https://twitter.com/maggiewise111/status/2041472711365403054?s=20

When I've previously shared this exact figure, I was told that it was Islamophobic to do so. Is it? pic.twitter.com/lk0deVakTQ
— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) April 6, 2026

Germany WAKES UP as AfD’s Alice Weidel drops the bomb…

“Within 100 days…we will CLOSE THE BORDERS, CUT ALL MIGRANT SUBSIDIES…and we’ll launch the LARGEST DEPORTATIONS IN HISTORY!”

After years of no-go hellholes… the migrant invasion ends NOW.

Remigration or death. pic.twitter.com/4igaYwjp26
— Liz Churchill (@liz_churchill10) April 6, 2026

Prince William preaches that Islam is the ‘Religion of Peace’ that other Faiths must learn from.

He’s the same gutless Royal as his father…ditching Christianity while Britain burns under grooming gangs and stabbings.

Defender of the Faith?

More like Defender of the Invaders. pic.twitter.com/uArgPgfOXv
— Liz Churchill (@liz_churchill10) April 5, 2026

Trump might claim it is a normal negotiation. Though it’s not for everyone.

Then again, some of the language coming out of Tehran sounds like they studied and imitated Trump. And he knows it.

Then again again, we don’t know who speaks for Iran. Is it a mullah? The IRGC?

To be sure, everyone’s threatening battles they don’t want.

• Trump Announces a Ceasefire (Sarah Anderson)

UPDATE: 8:08 p.m. EST: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says Iran will allow safe passage for maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz for two weeks, provided there is coordination with Iran’s armed forces.

pic.twitter.com/lVrOBtjEiq
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 7, 2026

Original article

Well, it doesn’t look like he’ll be destroying any civilizations on Tuesday night. Donald Trump has announced, via his Truth Social account, that there will be a two-week ceasefire with Iran, subject to “complete, immediate, and safe” opening of the Strait of Hormuz. He said that Iran has proposed a 10-point peace plan — he called the plan significant but “not good enough” on Monday — and he now believes it’s “a workable basis on which to negotiate.” The two-week ceasefire period will allow an agreement to be finalized. He also said that it’s an “honor to have this long-term problem close to resolution.” Here’s his full statement.
“Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East. We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated. On behalf of the United States of America, as President, and also representing the Countries of the Middle East, it is an Honor to have this Longterm problem close to resolution.
Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
This comes after Trump issued a strong warning for Iran earlier on Tuesday, stating, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” He continued: “However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”
As my colleague Rick Moran reported earlier, “Iran rejected a ceasefire proposal by Pakistan on Monday, which would have included the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.” Obviously, some last-minute diplomacy has taken place, but whether it will hold remains to be seen.
https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/2041649076500869158
Fox News’ Laura Ingraham says she spoke to Trump just after he announced the ceasefire and claims he is “extremely serious” and “cautiously but seriously optimistic.” He also said the negotiations were incredibly complex and he doesn’t want anything to jeopardize them.

“This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE!”

• President Trump, Iran Agree To 2-Week Ceasefire (ZH)

Building on the conversations leaked all day, it appears President Trump has withdrawn his threat to end Iranian civilization as they know it…

“Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Long-term PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East.
We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated.On behalf of the United States of America, as President, and also representing the Countries of the Middle East, it is an Honor to have this Long-term problem close to resolution. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Additionally, CNN reports that Israel has agree to suspend bombing while talks are ongoing.
Alayna Treene (@alaynatreene) Israel is a part of the two-week ceasefire Trump agreed to just an hour and a half before his deadline, a senior White House official tells CNN. Israel has agreed to also suspend its bombing campaign while negotiations continue, the official said. And the most important variable, Iran, is also on the same page, and accepts Pakistan’s two-week ceasefire proposal with the deal approved by the New Supreme Leaders, according to Iran’s Foreign Minster, Aragchi. More importantly, Iran has said that safe passage via Hormuz “possible” for two weeks.

Talks between the US and Iran will start on Friday, although Iran was quick to note that it will engage in talks with complete distrust.
* * *
The reaction is as you would expect.
Oil plunged (WTI -16%)…

Stocks spiked (S&P Futs +2%)…

Gold ($4800) and Bitcoin ($72500) are soaring.
Treasury yields and the dollar are tumbling. …well it wouldn’t be Tuesday without TACOs.
Last Ditch Peace Effort by Pakistan Prime Minister With just hours until Trump’s self declared deadline wherein he said a “whole civilization will die tonight” – Pakistan’s leader and host of mediation efforts, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, has tried to introduce a last minute olive branch, hoping that the US will avoid its decimation campaign:
“I earnestly request President Trump to extend the deadline for two weeks. Pakistan, in all sincerity, requests the Iranian brothers to open Strait of Hormuz for a corresponding period of two weeks as a goodwill gesture. We also urge all warring parties to observe a ceasefire everywhere for two weeks to allow diplomacy to achieve conclusive termination of war, in the interest of long-term peace and stability in the region.”
Will Trump latch on to this plea and last minute effort of good will? The sides are aware of the proposal:
TEHRAN IS POSITIVELY REVIEWING PAKISTAN’S REQUEST FOR A TWO-WEEK CEASEFIRE: SENIOR IRANIAN OFFICIAL
TRUMP IS AWARE OF PAKISTAN’S PROPOSAL: AXIOS CITING LEAVITT
Diplomatic efforts for peaceful settlement of the ongoing war in the Middle East are progressing steadily, strongly and powerfully with the potential to lead to substantive results in near future. To allow diplomacy to run its course, I earnestly request President Trump to extend… — Shehbaz Sharif (@CMShehbaz) April 7, 2026
In the meantime, some fresh statements via state Tasnim:
“If Trump wants to fall into a hole with his madness, we have prepared a black hole for him from which it will be impossible for him to get out”, Tasnim reports citing an Iranian military source “Have prepared good surprises for Trump’s possible madness; One of them is the addition of Aramco oil facilities, Yanba oil facilities and the Fujairah pipeline to Iran’s goals, and in case of Trump’s crime, Iran will not hesitate to impose heavy costs on America and its partners.” “Trump thinks that with these threats the strait will be opened and the price of oil will go down! He doesn’t know that if he carries out his threat, he will have to wait for the oil price of $200 in the coming days.”

Talk about being caught with your pants down your ankles.

• President Trump Threatened Iran, the Democrats Blinked (Tim O’Brien)

By now you’ve seen the reports of the latest threat President Donald Trump made against Iran. My colleague Catherine Salgado detailed: President Donald Trump made a dramatic threat on Tuesday morning as his deadline approaches for the terrorist Iranian regime to surrender or face bigger and more devastating strikes than ever from the United States and Israel. ‘A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,’ Trump began in explosive style in his April 7 Truth Social post. He had threatened on Easter Sunday to bring such terrible retribution against the terrorist Iranian regime that its tyrants would think they were in hell, and it appears that since talks are unsurprisingly going nowhere, he will execute his threat.

Before that, our colleague Rick Moran covered the president’s description of what would happen to Iran if it continued to rebuff his attempts to negotiate and arrive at a diplomatic solution to the current situation in Iran. ‘We have a plan where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night. Where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding, and never to be used again. I mean complete demolition by 12 o’clock, and it will happen over a period of four hours if we wanted to,’ Trump said. “We don’t want that to happen. Iran rejected a ceasefire proposal by Pakistan on Monday, which would have included the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, they offered a 10-point ceasefire proposal of their own that no one is taking seriously.
It would seem Iran got Trump’s message and has now returned to the bargaining table, agreeing to a two-week ceasefire one day after rejecting it. Our Sarah Anderson has the latest. I’d say that Trump’s tough talk, most likely backed up by the very credible threat real action against what remains of Iranian leadership, worked. Don’t tell that to the Democrats. Before Iran flinched, the Democrats outright panicked. Some of it was fake and by design, but a good bit of it was honest-to-goodness panic. Their scripted, AstroTurfed narrative has gone full 25th Amendment and “war crimes.” Keep in mind tat all of these accusations are about something Trump threatened to do but has not done. Question: Is it a war crime if you just talk about it on social media?
The Democrats always attack Trump and the right for things they imagine but that never happened, but when it comes to things that have happened, if it doesn’t benefit them, they ignore it. Like the time a few weeks ago when the legacy media all but ignored Iran slaughtering some 40,000 actual peaceful protesters. So, when I tell you the left flinched, let’s start with RINO Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

The President’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight” cannot be excused away as an attempt to gain leverage in negotiations with Iran.

This type of rhetoric is an affront to the ideals our nation has sought to uphold and promote around the world for nearly 250…
— Sen. Lisa Murkowski (@lisamurkowski) April 7, 2026

After watching what the Iranian regime just did to its own people, she had the gall to put the entire onus on the victims of Iranian oppression to rise up. The gun-less people of Iran. What are they supposed to do to overthrow that regime? Stage a sit-in? Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) got the memo. His X post is representative of a large number of Democrats in Congress and the Senate, and in the media.

I'm officially calling for the Cabinet to remove Trump from office under the 25th Amendment. If they can't, Congress must return from recess today and begin impeachment proceedings.

Read my full statement below.https://t.co/WmoVZgs6wi
— Mike Quigley (@RepMikeQuigley) April 7, 2026

Now that Trump has effectively induced the Iranian regime to talk, will Quigley step up and admit that Trump is speaking the only language the murderous leadership of that country understands? Of course not. Quigley will do what all leftists are doing, which is to notice Trump’s rhetoric and then ignore it or downplay it when it works. Worse, some will try to get away with saying that Iran came back to the bargaining table in spite of Trump’s threats, not because of them, even when the exact opposite is true.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) is always good for repeating the left’s focus-grouped messaging, and he delivered here.

We need to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump.

Threatening war crimes is a blatant violation of our constitution and the Geneva Conventions. pic.twitter.com/31F3BkA9kR
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) April 7, 2026

He made sure to include both the 25th Amendment and the “war crimes” narratives because Trump said a thing. Meanwhile, speaking of the 25th Amendment, while Khanna wants to use it to get Trump out of office, I guess we’re to believe Khanna couldn’t see President Joe Biden’s mental decline days before that disastrous debate performance with Trump, which helped force him to drop out of the race in 2024.

Joe Biden decimated Paul Ryan in the 2012 Vice Presidential debate and defeated Trump in two debates in 2020. He brings resilience and grit and understands a campaign is a marathon. That's why he'll win. pic.twitter.com/S1cuFPIu2L
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) June 21, 2024

You can always tell which messages are contrived by who delivers them on the Democrat side. Khanna is one. Others include Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who by the way, couldn’t pass this opportunity up.

The President is threatening to destroy an entire civilization.

Congress must finally reclaim its war power from this increasingly dangerous president.

Before he creates more chaos and destruction.

Before more servicemembers get killed. pic.twitter.com/uz9m67aL2F
— Adam Schiff (@SenAdamSchiff) April 7, 2026

In Congress, Iran could have no better friend that Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). See if you notice a pattern emerging. Could it be that someone told these Democrats what to say, and that these aren’t things they thought up on their own?

After bombing a school and massacring young girls, the war criminal in the White House is threatening genocide.

It's time to invoke the 25th Amendment. This maniac should be removed from office. pic.twitter.com/Mm7iC3xqdP
— Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (@RepRashida) April 7, 2026

In the process:

• Trump Threatens To ‘Take Out Entire Country Of Iran’ (ZH)

US-Israeli strikes have been on a noticeable uptick against Iranian institutions of higher learning over the last days. This has included a large-scale aerial assault on Tehran’s Sharif University, which is often dubbed the “MIT of Iran”. After this attack, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi threatened Iranian retaliation, warning “aggressors will see our might.” He said several other universities have also been struck over the last days. One regional report (Al Jazeera) says that at least 30 Iranian colleges and universities have suffered damage amid the ongoing attacks.

Neither the US nor Israel divulged the reasons behind attacking university campuses. Many of the students at these very campuses were involved in the January protests. The US claims to be “helping” the protesters through the Trump-ordered massive bombing campaign. Shahid Beheshti University in northern Tehran was attacked last Friday. It issued a statement saying: “This hostile act not only targets the security of academics and the country’s scientific environment, but is also a clear attack on reason, research, and freedom of thought.”
Trump Threatens Iran’s Decimation By Midnight Tues If No Deal
Having already spoken to reporters earlier in the day (before, during, and after the Easter Egg party), discussing ceasefire proposals (‘not good enough’) and his desire to ‘take the oil’, President Trump took the lectern in the White House Briefing Room at 1pm ET to discuss the rescue of the downed airmen over the weekend. President Trump centered his remarks on the weekend search-and-rescue operation for downed airmen, highlighting its success while condemning the leak of details surrounding the mission. “Rescue leak is a national security concern,” he said, adding that authorities “will examine media firm that reported rescue leak.” He further declared, “we have to find that leaker, that’s a sick person,” and warning of potential legal action, as he “threatens to jail journalist over leak,” before adding, “The left will love that!”
He then pivoted to a more aggressive stance on Iran, stating, “Iran can be taken out in one night, maybe tomorrow,” and doubling down with, “entire country of Iran could be taken out in one night.” He also at one point said, “we won.” Pete Hegseth then stepped in and reinforced the escalation, stating, “today will be largest volume of strikes on Iran,” and warning, “tomorrow’s strikes on Iran will be more than today.” During the Q&A session, Trump signaled undisclosed strategy, saying, “I have the best plan of all, won’t tell you what it is,” while insisting, “we didn’t do this for regime change.” He described Iran’s leadership shift in stark terms: “new regime is smarter, sharper, less radical.”
Vital infrastructure attacks already in progress… He also addressed the Iranian public directly, stating, “Iranians should rise up, but the consequences are great,” while claiming, “Iranians want us to keep bombing,” and adding, “Iranian people are willing to suffer for freedom.” He also emphasized that “free traffic of oil” in the Hormuz Strait “must in the Iran deal”. He has warned that “every bridge” and power plant will be decimated by midnight tomorrow night if the Iranians don’t accept a ceasefire deal. This followed a report from The Wall Street Journal that the US military is making preparations for potential strikes on energy targets in Iran, according to multiple U.S. officials – as President Trump ratchets up his demand for Tehran to open the Strait of Hormuz – sending oil prices significantly higher…

The US and Israel are carrying out intense bombing raids on Iran’s South Pars petrochemical complex, which accounts for 85% of the country’s production in this sector.
The damage is massive, yet the complex covers 54,000 hectares and would require many days of sustained heavy… pic.twitter.com/9CB00VZNJ3
— Patricia Marins (@pati_marins64) April 6, 2026

That military planners are pulling out existing lists of potential targets to provide the president options if he decides to attack energy infrastructure (according to WSJ sources), this should not be new news for traders (but the market is so sensitive), since Trump has ramped up his threats to do just that in recent days, telling The Wall Street Journal on Sunday that he would destroy all of Iran’s power plants if the regime doesn’t agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday evening.
IRGC Intel Chief Taken Out; Israel Suffers Heavy Casualties The head of the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was killed in a Monday airstrike, according to confirmation in Iranian media. IRGC-linked Tasnim News Agency reported that the IRGC Public Relations Department confirmed Monday that Major General Majid Khademi was killed earlier in the day during an attack by US and Israeli forces. However, Tasnim did not disclose the location of the strike.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) earlier stated on X that Khademi was one of the IRGC’s most senior commanders with decades of experience. “Khademi worked to advance terrorist attacks worldwide, and was responsible for monitoring Iranian civilians as part of the regime’s suppression of internal protests,” it claimed.RFE/RL reported that Khademi assumed the post last summer after Mohammad Kazemi was killed in Israeli strikes during the 12-day war. Before that, he led the Intelligence Protection Organization of the Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics. Iran is now vowing to enact vengeance on Israel for his death.
Meanwhile Sunday into Monday saw significant casualties in Israel, after the IRGC claimed in a statement carried by state media that Iranian forces had targeted an oil refinery in Haifa. But instead, it appears that the missile slammed directly into a residential building, killing at least four Israelis. Search and rescue teams have spent some 18 hours pouring through the ruins of the complex, recovering two bodies early Monday after an initial two had been found. The casualties could climb amid ongoing recovery efforts. Another regional source stated that “Over 160 Israelis have been transferred to hospitals over the past 24 hours, Israel’s Health Ministry said on Monday.”

“And if they don’t, they’ll have no bridges. They’ll have no power plants. They’ll have no anything.”

• Defiance Without Leverage: Tehran’s Fatal Miscalculation (David Manney)

Iranian leaders rejected a United States proposal for a long ceasefire delivered through Pakistani intermediaries on April 5. Iran communicated its response through Pakistan, signaling that it is unwilling to accept a temporary pause in hostilities. “We won’t merely accept a ceasefire,” Mojtaba Ferdousi Pour, head of Iran’s diplomatic mission in Cairo, said in remarks to the Associated Press. “We only accept an end to the war with guarantees that we won’t be attacked again.” At the White House, Trump said Iran is making a mistake by rejecting the proposal. “They just don’t want to say ‘uncle,’” Trump told reporters. “They don’t want to cry, as the expression goes, ‘uncle,’ but they will. And if they don’t, they’ll have no bridges. They’ll have no power plants. They’ll have no anything.

“I won’t go further because there are other things that are worse than those two.” The offer called for a 45-day pause in fighting and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical energy corridors. Tehran responded with a 10-point counterproposal, demanding a permanent end to hostilities, full security guarantees, sanctions relief, and control over the Strait. Mojaba Ferdousi Pour, head of Iran’s diplomatic mission in Cairo, stated that Iran would accept nothing short of a definitive halt to military action. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi delivered the counter-demands and positioned Tehran as seeking “peace with dignity.”
According to IRNA, Tehran’s proposal includes 10 provisions, such as ending regional conflicts, ensuring safe navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, lifting economic sanctions, and initiating reconstruction efforts. Iranian and Omani officials are working on a framework to manage shipping through the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz, a critical global energy corridor. Tensions escalated further as Israel launched strikes on Iran’s South Pars natural gas field—the world’s largest, shared with Qatar—targeting a major source of the country’s revenue.The attack also killed two senior commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Israel described the strike as an effort to weaken Iran’s economic capacity, although it appeared separate from the U.S. ultimatum.
The development raises doubts about the viability of a proposed 45-day cease-fire amid rapidly intensifying hostilities. The framework, however, required the United States and Israel to surrender military leverage already demonstrated on the battlefield. President Donald Trump made his position unmistakable, speaking the day after the rescue of a downed American airman, warning that Iran could be “taken out in one night” if escalation continues. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stood beside him and confirmed that recent operations inflicted heavy losses on Iranian naval vessels and missile infrastructure.
It’s an obvious strategic imbalance: American forces maintain air dominance, precision strike capability, and maritime superiority in the region. Iranian naval units have already suffered substantial losses. Missile facilities have been degraded; shipping lanes remain vulnerable to further disruption if Tehran continues hostilities. Instead of accepting a pause that would’ve allowed regrouping and diplomatic maneuvering, Iran’s leadership demanded sweeping concessions.
Mojtaba Khamenei was selected by Iran’s Assembly of Experts on March 8 and is the “current” supreme leader of Iran, succeeding his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was directly targeted on February 28, the beginning of Operation Epic Fury.
Mojtaba’s supposed approval or rejection of diplomatic overtures (he may be hooked up to medical machinery) signals that hardliners within Iran’s leadership continue to favor a posture of defiance in the face of U.S. pressure. The supreme leader has the final say on major foreign and security decisions under Iran’s constitutional system, and Mojtaba’s stance suggests Tehran believes firm resistance strengthens internal unity and extracts better terms at the negotiating table.

“.. but unfortunately, their regime is satanically stubborn.”

• Trump: ‘A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight’ (Catherine Salgado)

President Donald Trump made a dramatic threat on Tuesday morning as his deadline approaches for the terrorist Iranian regime to surrender or face bigger and more devastating strikes than ever from the United States and Israel. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump began in explosive style in his April 7 Truth Social post. He had threatened on Easter Sunday to bring such terrible retribution against the terrorist Iranian regime that its tyrants would think they were in hell, and it appears that since talks are unsurprisingly going nowhere, he will execute his threat.

After having issued his formidable warning Tuesday, Trump continued, “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.” Referring to the current regime’s lengthy record of tyranny and terror, Trump ended his statement, “47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”
The message is somewhat cryptic, and it doesn’t clarify whether the regime change is to happen after tonight, or whether Trump thinks it has already begun. Hopefully, it is the former, because we cannot trust a single member of the government that has proudly made “death to America” and “death to Israel” its favorite slogans for half a century. The leader who was the negotiator with America, Mohammad Ghalibaf, is still swearing vengeance. Some members of the government might be willing to agree to terms made by the great Satan, but that does not mean they will live up to those terms. After all, the Islamic concept of taqiyya endorses lies to non-Muslims for the sake of accomplishing Jihad.
Of course, Trump had already issued a more specific and definite threat against Iran’s murderous regime, as my colleague Rick Moran reported earlier. After insisting the “entire country could be taken out in one night, and it might be tomorrow night,” Trump wrote, “We have a plan where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night.” He expatiated, “Where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding, and never to be used again. I mean complete demolition by 12 o’clock, and it will happen over a period of four hours if we wanted to. We don’t want that to happen.”
Naturally, America wants to leave infrastructure for the much-oppressed Persian people, but unfortunately, their regime is satanically stubborn. As we learned during WWII with a similarly genocidal regime — imperial Japan — sometimes peace comes only after massive devastation and unconditional surrender. The Iranian regime has been attacking Americans directly or through proxies for almost 50 years now. We have long been at war — the murderous mullahs did not leave us that choice. But while we didn’t get to choose when the war began, Americans can choose how the war will end. May Trump eliminate the threat of the Islamic regime once and for all.

“The Times regrets the error. Want more?”

• The New York Times Says We Lost the War (Scott Pinsker)

At least it’s colorful: The Gray Lady just gave us the green light to wave the white flag.Running in the April 7 edition of The New York Times: “The Iran War Is Turning Iran Into a Major World Power.” The author, Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, offers the following thesis:
1) Iran will keep control of the Strait of Hormuz for “months or years,” and there’s nothing militarily we can do about it. (Sorry, guys.)
2) The U.S. and Europe are now in decline — and the axis of China, Russia, and Iran is ascending.
3) Iran will emerge as a “new major world power” and the “fourth center of global power” (the other three: America, China, Russia).
But before we pulverize Professor Pape’s preposterously pessimistic proposal, here’s an earlier example of The New York Times’ piercing wisdom, courtesy of author Hans Mahncke:

The story behind the New York Times’ 1903 claim that human flight was between one and ten million years away is even worse than it looks.

Once you understand the backstory, you realize that the New York Times story is not really about flight at all but about how elites and… https://t.co/6JlRT1nja8
— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) April 5, 2026

It’s an X post about a New York Times story from 1903: “Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly.” (And if that story sounds familiar, it’s because beloved PJ Media alum and/or Supreme Leader Editor Paula Bolyard wrote about it in 2024. From Mahncke: “The New York Times did not dismiss the possibility of powered flight at random. There was a very specific reason behind it. At the time, America’s most prominent scientific authority, Smithsonian Secretary Samuel Langley, had been showered with large amounts of taxpayer funding to build an aircraft, the Langley Aerodrome. Despite all the money, institutional backing, and elite prestige, Langley and his team could not get it to fly, culminating in a series of very public failures, the last on December 8, 1903.”
So when the New York Times declared that flight was millions of years away, what it was really saying was that if the most credentialed and well-funded “experts” cannot do it, then it cannot be done. A mere nine days later, the elites’ proclamation of impossibility lay in ruins. Two totally unknown bicycle mechanics from Ohio achieved the first powered flight using improvised parts, a few hundred dollars of their own money, and sheer persistence. From stupid ideas that crash and burn to lame-brained theories that never get off the ground, there’s a long and illustrious history of the Gray Lady getting caught red-handed practicing yellow journalism.
In fact, in honor of Artemis, there’s also this doozy from Jan. 13, 1920, when The New York Times insisted that rockets cannot function in space: That professor [Robert] Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution [from which Goddard held a grant to research rocket flight], does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools. [emphasis added]
It was only AFTER Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins left the surly bonds of earth — on a rocket, by the way — that the Times offered a correction: “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. […] The Times regrets the error. Want more?

“Berlin should not forget the lessons of World War II, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman has said.“

Russia has not forgotten.

• German ‘Militaristic Frenzy’ Could End In Tragedy – Zakharova (RT)

Germany’s continued military buildup could lead to another tragedy on a global scale, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has warned. Last week, German media reported that male citizens who remain abroad for more than three months without prior approval could face penalties in line with a new requirement under the Military Service Modernization Act. The rule, which came into force on January 1, 2026, obliges German males between the ages of 17 and 45 to obtain permission before leaving the country for an extended period. The Defense Ministry said the measure is intended to maintain a reliable registry of individuals eligible for military service.

In a post on Telegram on Monday, Zakharova noted that previously German men were required to register before going abroad only during a “state of tension” or a “state of defense,” but that the measure has now been expanded to peacetime “as part of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s strategy of militarizing the country.” Germany recently moved to reintroduce lottery-based conscription as Berlin is looking to increase the number of its active troops from 180,000 to more than 260,000 by 2035. The spokeswoman suggested that “in the heat of militaristic frenzy, Germany has completely forgotten the lessons of history.” “
The last time the German political elite set out to make their country ‘the main military power in Europe,’ it ended in tragedy for all of humanity,” Zakharova said, referring to the Second World War, in which between 60 to 65 million people are estimated to have been killed. Following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, Germany launched a massive military buildup, with reported plans of spending more than €500 billion (around $580 billion) on defense by 2029. According to officials in Berlin, the armed forces must be “war-ready” for a potential conflict with Russia by that date. Moscow has repeatedly rejected as “nonsense” claims of it harboring any aggressive plans against the European members of NATO, saying that they are only being made by Western politicians to scare the population and justify increased military spending.

Up in the air. Free promotion.

• Foldable Apple iPhone Hits Engineering Snags, Raising Risk Of Delays (ZH)

Hours after Nikkei Asia reported that Apple’s first foldable iPhone could face delays in mass production, Bloomberg pushed back on the report, citing sources who say the foldable iPhone remains on track for a September debut alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max. Apple shares fell as much as 5.1% in the U.S. cash session after the Nikkei report raised concerns about engineering test issues with the new device, potentially delaying mass production.

Initial production could be heavily constrained by the complexity of the foldable phone, but Bloomberg’s sources suggest Apple is still aiming to put it on store shelves within the same launch window as the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max. Bloomberg’s report, countering Nikkei Asia’s earlier story, fits a familiar pattern of information operations, and Apple was likely not thrilled with the stock’s performance after the overnight note. Polymarket odds of the foldable iPhone launching before 2027 stood at around 81% as of early Tuesday afternoon, up from 75% during the overnight hours.
Apple is about 8 years late to the foldable smartphone space, with Samsung’s Galaxy Fold released in October 2018. Now, Tim Cook’s big launch of Apple’s first foldable smartphone could face “delays in its mass production and product shipment schedule,” according to new Nikkei Asia sources deep within the handset supply chain. Supply chain sources told the Japanese business outlet that the complexity of the new foldable iPhone is causing engineering problems during early testing, and these issues could delay mass production and shipments by months.

Some suppliers have already been warned that component production schedules could be pushed back. “It’s true that more issues than expected have emerged during the early test production phase, and additional time will be needed to resolve them and make necessary adjustments. … The current situation could put the mass production timeline at risk,” one of those sources said. The source added, “April will mark a crucial stage of the engineering verification test, and this month through early May is extremely critical.”
Nikkei previously reported that Apple adjusted its iPhone launch strategy for 2026, pushing back production of base model iPhones to early 2027 to prioritize production of premium models, including foldable iPhones. This move is intended to allocate constrained supplies of memory chips and other key components more efficiently. Another person in the handset supply chain said the potential schedule delay has very little to do with memory chips, but rather with “engineering challenges” for Apple’s first foldable iPhone: “Apple and the supply chain are working under a tight timeline, and the current solutions are not enough to completely solve the engineering challenges. More time is needed.”

They have no-one.

• Here’s How Bad the Midterms Situation for the Democrats Really Is (Margolis)

Conventional wisdom says that Democrats are going to have a good year in the midterms. In fact, Democrats think a six-point lead in the generic congressional ballot is something to feel good about. Maybe they should take a closer look at the numbers before popping the champagne because the truth is that it looks like Democrats are blowing it. And you don’t have to take my word for it either. CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten broke it down on Monday, and the picture for Democrats is a lot less rosy than party leadership would probably like to admit.Yes, they’re ahead — but only barely. Given historical precedent and the current political environment, they should be running away with it. But they’re not.

“This lead is historically low for Democrats at this point with a Republican president,” Enten said. “On average, their lead’s actually slightly less. It’s five points. That’s less than it was back in 2018 when it was eight points and way less than it was during the 2006 cycle when it was 11 points.” Five points. Now, I don’t exactly trust the approval rating polls showing that President Donald Trump at -20 or -30, but still, with numbers like that, Democrats should be crushing the GOP in the general congressional ballot, but they’re not.”You’d make the argument, Democrats should be way ahead, and they’re just only sort of slightly ahead,” Enten pointed out.
It’s not just me saying that. What does this mean in practical terms? Host John Berman noted that five points might be enough to flip the House, which operates on razor-thin margins. But the Senate? That’s a completely different story. Democrats really want to flip the Senate because they think that if they do, they can impeach President Trump next year and convict him.”I think five points is enough to take back the House,” Enten said. “But in the Senate, five points is almost certainly not enough if you apply it to the Senate map.”
The map is brutal for Democrats. Even in a scenario where Republicans hold only states Trump won by more than 10 points, the GOP still comes out ahead 51-49. Democrats would flip North Carolina and Maine, sure, but Ohio, Texas, and Alaska would stay red. Trump won all three by double digits, and Enten pointed to a sobering historical pattern to explain why that matters so much.
“During the Trump era, look at this, flip the Senate seat, midterm and presidential years, states the other party won by ten plus points in the last presidential election, zero, zero, zero times did a party flip those states.” Then there’s the favorability problem, which might be the most damaging data point of all. In 2018, Democrats led Republicans on net favorability by 12 points. In 2006, they led by 18. Today? Republicans are actually ahead by five points on net favorability. Berman tried to soften it slightly, noting that both parties are deeply unpopular with voters right now. Enten wasn’t having it.
“Democrats are even more unpopular than Republicans,” he pointed out. That’s the core of the problem. Democrats are running behind every relevant benchmark from their two big wave election cycles in an environment that should theoretically be handing them a massive structural advantage. A six-point generic ballot lead sounds decent until you realize it’s probably not enough to take the Senate, too. And that puts a huge dent in their plans for the second half of Trump’s term.

Very clear”

“.. without CBP, there can be no customs clearance. Without customs clearance, you can’t accept international arrivals.”

• Mullin Drops a Bombshell on Sanctuary Cities (Matt Margolis)

Freshly confirmed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has wasted no time making his presence felt. Just days into the job, he sat down with Fox News host Bret Baier Monday night and floated an idea so simple and so devastating that it’s a wonder nobody tried it sooner: Pull Customs and Border Protection officers out of international airports in sanctuary cities. Remember, without CBP, there can be no customs clearance. Without customs clearance, you can’t accept international arrivals.

The math isn’t complicated. If Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia, Newark, and New Orleans want to play sanctuary politics, they can explain to thousands of stranded international travelers why their city’s ideological grandstanding just shut down their airport. I love it. I knew Mullin was onto something huge when I watched the interview.”If they are a sanctuary city, should they really be processing customs into their city?” he asked. “Seriously, if they are a sanctuary city and they are receiving international flights, and we’re asking them to partner with us at the airport, but once they walk out of the airport, they’re not going to enforce immigration policy? Maybe we need to have a really hard look at that because we need to focus on cities that want to work with us.”
It’s hard to argue with the logic. These cities actively obstruct federal immigration enforcement, refuse cooperation with ICE, and then expect no consequences?Let’s face it: The time for playing nice has long expired. The DHS shutdown is pushing toward two months, and Democrats show zero interest in negotiating in good faith. They’re demanding absurd reforms for ICE that would effectively kneecap immigration enforcement. And that just isn’t going to happen. Mullin clearly didn’t take the job to play nice with those who’ve declared war on federal immigration law. Democrats were practically giddy when Kristi Noem got fired. They may want to pump the brakes on that celebration because Mullin looks like he’s ready to make her tenure look tame by comparison.
Mullin’s sanctuary city proposal makes perfect sense, and should get Democrats in these cities to reconsider just how far they really want to fight the federal government. Cities that use their local governments as shields against federal immigration law have long operated without real consequences, and Mullin just put consequences on the table. Whether the proposal moves forward depends on how serious the administration is about turning up the pressure. I think they are very serious. But even floating it sends a message: the days of sanctuary cities not suffering consequences for violating federal law are over. Let’s not forget, it was Democrats who created this standoff. They’re the ones who are putting national security at risk over a policy dispute. This is a situation of their own making, and Mullin just handed them the bill.

He’s someone I would listen to.

• Marc Andreessen Calls AI Job-Loss Fears ‘Fake’, Expects Employment Gains (ZH)

It is not the first time that the venture capital guru has questioned some of the fundamentally dystopian scenarios being proposition in an AI world. In February, we noted that amid an armada of dystopian futurists, projecting linear thoughts into a future of ‘AI uber alles’, Marc Andreessen stands as a beacon of potential utopian light, seeing a future that looks very different and very positive for young and old alike. In a brief few minutes, the co-founder of Netscape and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) believes instead that we are living through a unique (and most incredible) time in history with the rise of AI coming right as human civilization needs it… “we’re going to have AI and robots precisely when we actually need them [with populations shrinking] to keep the economy from actually shrinking.”

"This is the biggest technological revolution of my life. This is clearly bigger than the internet. The comps on this are things like the microprocessor and the steam engine and electricity."—@pmarca pic.twitter.com/WMv6UqUwIe
— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) April 6, 2026

Simply put, Andreessen says that fears of AI-driven mass job loss are overly simplistic. After decades of unusually slow technological change and low job churn, AI could restore historical productivity levels (exemplified by the period from 1870-1930), sparking opportunity, innovation, and net job growth rather than displacement. Declining populations and reduced immigration will make human labor increasingly valuable. AI’s timing is “miraculous”, Andreessen exclaims, preventing economic shrinkage from depopulation. In even radical scenarios, explosive productivity leads to output gluts, collapsing prices, and massive real-wealth gains – equivalent to “giant raises” for everyone – while making safety-nets more affordable.
Whether incremental or transformative, Andreessen sees the outcome as fundamentally positive economic news. Of course, he does have a lot of skin in this game… Building on that, CoinTelegraph’s Christina Comben reports that Andreessen said artificial intelligence will spark a “massive jobs boom,” dismissing fears of widespread job losses as “all fake” in a Sunday post on X. His optimism contrasts with a March US jobs report showing unemployment holding steady at 4.3%, while the number of people unemployed for 27 weeks or more rose by 322,000 over the past year.
Andreesen shared a Business Insider report showing a sharp rise in tech job openings in 2026, with more than 67,000 software engineering roles, a twofold increase from 2023, and argued that employers had recovered from post-pandemic hiring corrections and the interest rate spike. “The ‘AI job loss’ narratives are all fake,” he wrote. “AI = massive ramp in productivity = massive ramp in demand = massive jobs boom. Watch.” Andreessen is one of Silicon Valley’s most influential investors, a co-founder of Netscape and venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is also a major backer of US crypto and AI companies.

https://twitter.com/JoshHall2024/status/2041502407750758533?s=20 https://twitter.com/ed_fin/status/2041250524285084128?s=20

In 1974, only 52 years ago, the Muslim barbarian Turks invaded Cyprus and committed crimes against Greeks that the human mind cannot comprehend and the whole world never heard about them. Mass murders of civilians were carried out systematically by the Turkish army. Not only… https://t.co/dpV1G0cBwa pic.twitter.com/aHDsSzSdSx
— Homer Pavlos (@HomerPavlos) April 7, 2026

https://twitter.com/maximumpain333/status/2041335149309431863?s=20

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Debt Rattle November 9 2022

Nov 092022

November 9, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:20 am Finance Tagged with: BRICS, EU, Eurasia, midterms, Poland, RSV, START, trolls 86 Responses »

Rembrandt van Rijn Portrait of Rembrandt with gorget 1629

• Super-States in Core Eurasian Geopolitics (Straight-Bat)

• Moscow Suggests How Many Countries Want To Join BRICS (RT)

• US and Russia To Hold Nuclear Talks (RT)

• Why Does The Western Narrative Sound So Stupid And Unrealistic? (Romatzki)

• American Pundits Have Got It Backwards About China (Blankenship)

• American Voters Don’t Need Russian Trolls To Tell Them How Bad Things Are (RB)

• Russian Oil Exports Surging (RT)

• Poland Draws A Line In The Sand With The EU (Remix)

• EU ‘Sucking Gas Away’ From Poorer Countries (RT)

• What Do You Run On….. (Denninger)

• Germany Faces Sharp Drop In Real Income (RT)

• Polish Ex-PM Links Low Birth Rates To Women Drinking (RT)

• Will You Survive The ‘Tripledemic’? (Mercola)

• COVID-19 Conspiracies Are a Gateway to Other Conspiracy Theories (SAlert)

It didn’t seem useful to address the midterms here and now, given the time it will take to count the votes. But at the same time, the voting sucks almost all of the air out of the media. A strange feeling. Nobody talks about Ukraine today.

What I did gather so far is that there was no Red Wave, and Trump endorsements did poorly. While Ron DeSantis won bigly. Which will lead to some head scratching. But overall, prepare for a lot of speculation and likely court cases. The country is divided like never before.

Von Der Leyen is under investigation

MEP Christine Anderson explains that Ursula Von Der Leyen is under investigation for what took place between her and the drug companies like Pfizer…This is serious. pic.twitter.com/29RE4guATF

— june slater (Chief Gammon) (@juneslater17) November 8, 2022

“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.”
~ Dalai Lama

“..rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral..”

• Super-States in Core Eurasian Geopolitics (Straight-Bat)

I have been deliberating on the question whether core Eurasia could really be treated as the ‘heartland’, control of which is a prerequisite to exercise total control over the world? Before one could sincerely take up the issue for a discussion, he/she must be able to grasp the definition of ‘core Eurasia’. Geologically, ‘Eurasia’ is a tectonic plate that lies under much of Europe and Asia. However, there is no well-defined geographic boundary of ‘core Eurasia’ in international politics. The European (geopolitical) strategists and Asian intellectuals converge on this subject remarkably well — the landmass that lies between Pacific Ocean in the east and river Vistula plus Carpathian mountain range in the west, and between Arctic Ocean in the north to the line joining Arabian Sea coast-Himalayan mountain range-South China Sea coast in the south can be termed as ‘core Eurasia’.

This particular question has a definite answer – ‘core Eurasia’ indeed can be assumed as heartland because of two reasons. Firstly, the countries that dot the entire landscape of core Eurasia are not only home to 25% of the global population currently but has enough arable land, water, and forest resources for a healthy and continuous population growth. Secondly, the entire landmass of core Eurasia hold deposits of minerals, fossil fuels, rare earth, and gems in disproportionately high quantities compared to its share of total surface area of earth. Hence, the human civilization can grow, sustain, and flourish as a stand-alone phenomenon in core Eurasia even if civilizations in other regions of the world fail to sustain – this, in my opinion, is the single most important characteristic of core Eurasia why it may be considered as the ‘heartland’.

Readers who are conversant with the works of geopolitics pundits like Brzezinski will easily conclude that I don’t subscribe to Brzezinski’s thought on this issue which was centred around ‘exercising power to control the world’ as he noted, “The control over Eurasia would almost automatically entails Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent.”

More than a dozen. Among them: Algeria, Argentina, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Egypt, Afghanistan.

• Moscow Suggests How Many Countries Want To Join BRICS (RT)

More than a dozen countries have expressed an interest in joining the BRICS group, which incorporates some of the world’s major emerging economies, as the bloc gains more global standing, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday. Speaking at a meeting with his Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Lavrov indicated that membership of the BRICS bloc is in high demand. “The interest in this global association is very, very high and continues to grow,”he said. He confirmed that “more than a dozen” countries are eager to join, including Algeria, Argentina, and Iran. However, Lavrov continued, before accepting any new members, BRICS intends to reach an agreement on criteria and principles for further potential expansion.

“Given that applications are already being submitted officially, we, of course, expect that harmonization of the criteria and principles for the expansion of BRICS won’t take too long,” he said. BRICS is an international socio-economic and political forum, which incorporates Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It accounts for over 40% of the global population and nearly a quarter of the world’s GDP. The Russian Foreign Minister’s comments come after Algeria applied to become a member of the group, following applications by Iran and Argentina. Algeria’s bid came after Russian President Vladimir Putin called for stronger ties with Middle Eastern and North African countries, arguing that they are playing an “increasingly significant role” in the formation of the “multipolar system of international relations.” The bloc is also expected to consider adding Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Egypt and Afghanistan.

New START.

• US and Russia To Hold Nuclear Talks (RT)

American and Russian diplomats will meet to discuss the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty “in the near future,” US State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters on Tuesday. Earlier, Bloomberg and Kommersant cited sources to report that a meeting of the Bilateral Consultative Commission (BCC) may soon be held in Egypt. “We have agreed that the BCC will meet in the near future. Under the terms of the New START treaty, the work of the BCC is confidential, but we do hope for a constructive session,” Price said at a press briefing. The US believes in the “transformative power of diplomacy and dialogue” but is “clear-eyed and realistic” about what it can accomplish when it comes to Russia, Price added.

The conversations are “focused on risk-reduction” but Washington wants to ensure that the ability to pass messages back and forth with Moscow “does not atrophy.” “If there is, and it sounds like there will be, a meeting of the BCC, that is a good thing,” Price added, before correcting himself to say that the meeting will definitely happen. While Price would not name the venue for the meeting, Bloomberg mentioned Cairo as the neutral location more acceptable to Russia than Geneva, since Switzerland has joined the US and EU sanctions against Moscow over the Ukraine conflict. The New START is the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between the US and Russia, set to expire in 2026 unless renewed. The BCC last met in October 2021.

Moscow suspended the inspection regime under the treaty in August, citing Western sanctions that have prevented Russian inspectors from doing their work in the US, thus putting Washington at an unfair advantage. The Russian Foreign Ministry said the inspections would continue once the principle of parity and equality is restored. Inspections had previously been disrupted by lockdowns in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“They are just towing the line, even selling their souls and reputations just to prevent their cancellation.”

• Why Does The Western Narrative Sound So Stupid And Unrealistic? (Romatzki)

Reference is constantly made to WW2 , the Cuban Missile Crises, etc. However that was a different world and era where people and leaders still had Values, Religions was strong, Families were strong, where Integrity, Honour, Patriotism, etc. … had meaning ….. a proper culture. This has all been destroyed. By whom? That is a debatable point, but it did happen. Society has been transformed and the Western Culture has been destroyed. There is now very little left of the original culture of the 1950/1960/1970/1980 and before. The family concept is being destroyed. Fewer Children are born, people marry less, Feminism is pushed, Affirmative actions is pushed, Homosexuality is rampant and encouraged, Gender identity is driven to the absurd.,

Science is destroyed by money, etc. Religion has been destroyed by the introduction of other cultures and religions into society. Inter-race marriages have been promoted and encouraged. And then … Wokeness and Cancel Culture has become dominant. With the loss in a stable anchor, derived from one’s family and culture, who can resist these dominant forces? People have become isolated and vulnerable and easy to manipulate. Integrity is thrown out of the window and now everybody is for himself. Gone are the days were one would stand up for his values and deny a job, money or position. All of it has now become monetised and self preservation is the order of the day. Money has played the corruptible factor.

Money and wokeness has become the driving forces of the population. Cancel Culture and Social media have become the tools. Given the facts above, who can then NOT understand why the Western Commentators spew the fake news and ridiculous narratives? In my assessment I believe it is Selfish Interests, Lack of strong Values, Money, Fear of being Cancelled and a lack of proper Information derived from reality, that drives the Western commentators to create such “devoid of reality” narratives. They are just towing the line, even selling their souls and reputations just to prevent their cancellation.

“The US is the most cartoonishly nationalistic country in the history of our species..”

• American Pundits Have Got It Backwards About China (Blankenship)

In recent years, but notably in the wake of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) 20th National Congress that just concluded at the end of October, Western writers have rushed to accuse Beijing of becoming anti-Western. This is seen in several examples by Western writers, such as the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos or a quintessential China-blaming piece recently published by the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman. In his article, titled “How China Lost America,” Friedman says that there are four trends in China that have soured the US-China relationship: market manipulation, hyper-nationalism, aggressive foreign policy and Beijing’s “zero-Covid” policy. But he does not elaborate these points to any convincible degree and fails to acknowledge the extent to which Washington’s own policies are to blame for China’s perceived turn from the West.

First of all, a lot of what is called intellectual property theft (which Friedman mentions in his piece) is just ordinary intellectual diffusion. The FBI started an entire ‘China Initiative’ to investigate such instances in top US universities and companies – and it came up almost completely empty-handed to the point that it had to be shut down for devolving into a vehicle for anti-Asian racism. This also doesn’t even acknowledge the extent of the US’ own market manipulation, namely through the sheer influence that its multinationals have in creating trade and economic policy, or its promiscuous use of unilateral sanctions. The US also routinely violates its World Trade Organization (WTO) duties in its trade war against Beijing. The organization even allowedChina to impose duties on $645 million worth of imports over US trade malpractice in January.

For an American to call China hyper-nationalist is laughable. The US is the most cartoonishly nationalistic country in the history of our species: children in most public schools are required to swear a ‘pledge of allegiance’ to the flag every morning, Americans only know one language on average and the American flag is draped everywhere in the country. Chinese people are, on balance, much less chauvinistic and more open-minded. Likewise, it’s hard to take insinuations of Beijing’s supposed “aggressive” foreign policy seriously either. The People’s Republic of China has never started a war since its inception and has not been involved in a proxy war in decades. Compare that to the fact that the US has been at war for nearly every single year of its existence since 1776. It is actually America’s aggressive foreign policy that is prompting resistance from Beijing.

Finally, on the zero-Covid point, this is just sensible policy. Virtually every country in the world has caved into public pressure to relax Covid-related restrictions. That’s fairly understandable because of how ineffective they were in most countries. But that doesn’t change the fact that Covid-19 is an extremely deadly and debilitating disease that is continuing to kill many people and leave many more disabled. If one could choose to eliminate Covid-19 from society, then why wouldn’t they? Thankfully, China has effectively used its technology to do just this – and it works. A January report by Citigroup, based on three surveys conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce China, the EU Chamber of Commerce China and the Japan External Trade Organization, found that China is their favorite investment destination. Among the top reasons listed was the country’s supply-chain resilience and the effectiveness of its Covid-19 controls.

Robert Bridge, published on RT and only RT. So for those who can’t access RT, the whole article.

• American Voters Don’t Need Russian Trolls To Tell Them How Bad Things Are (RB)

As US voters head to the polls for the much-anticipated Midterms, talk of Russian trolls monkeying with US democracy is back in the news. But does the country really need Russia’s help in “stoking anger” among the electorate? If the hyper-liberal New York Times can be taken at face value just two days before an epic election, Russia’s underground army of trolls is, once again, attempting to seed the minds of malleable US voters to the Kremlin’s advantage. If those charges sounded outlandish in 2016, when the Democrats accused Russian ‘influencers’ of denying Hillary Clinton the presidency, they seem doubly so today. The Times reported that the goal of the reactivated Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg is to “stoke anger among conservative voters and to undermine trust in the American electoral system.

”Judging by the looks of things, the Russians are a bit late to the party. It would be hard to name another period in US politics when the level of anger and distrust has been so extreme, and that is something the Russian trolls, despite their supposed superhuman abilities, can’t take credit for. Take inflation, for example, the single most pressing issue among US voters. It doesn’t require any sort of Russian mind-bending operation to inform Americans that the economic situation is deteriorating before their eyes, and has been ever since Biden entered office. They only need to look at their food and utility bills each month, and the price at the gas pump, to feel fury for what the Biden administration has done to the economy in a shockingly short period of time. Any effort to blame these negative sentiments on “the Russians” is just another way of the Democrats saying that soaring prices is “disinformation”and unworthy of your attention.

The Times mentions another point of contention among US voters, particularly the Republicans, and that is the blank-check powers that have been awarded to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. Citing the work of “cybersecurity researchers,” the article alleges that the Russian influence campaign “appears intended to undermine the Biden administration’s extensive military assistance to Ukraine.”Again, here is an issue that has already been undermined by the Republicans ever since the Democrats commenced with their proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, a massively hazardous venture where no expense is considered too great. On this point, the Democrats are able to claim, much like in 2016, that the Russians and the Republicans are working in collusion, this time against Kiev. The Russians are anxious to see US military spending on Ukraine come to an end as all of those sophisticated weapons are only prolonging the conflict.

Meanwhile, some of the Republicans campaigned on promises to terminate funding to the Zelensky regime and divert those billions of dollars to national security projects, like fortifying their own border and fighting crime. It would be a mistake to think that Americans are not acutely aware of the issues now dividing the country. Every day, social media users can see for themselves everything they need to know about crime, inflation, transgender issues, and the border, to name just a few of the hot-button issues dividing the country. To suggest that Russian trolls are required to “stoke conservative anger” is to grossly underestimate the political intelligence of the average US voter, who appears better informed than ever before. The fact is, the Democrats are afraid of being wiped out in a landslide come Tuesday. Conjuring up the ghost of Russia interference at the 11th hour reveals their insecurity and will provide them some partial excuse in the event of a blowout.

With regards to these latest accusations of election interference, Moscow is understandably losing its patience. It requires either a certain lack of self-awareness, or an astonishing excess of arrogance, for the United States to lecture any country on the question of meddling. After all, in the case of Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election, we’re talking about a mere $150,000 spent on several thousand Facebook ads, many of which had no political message whatsoever. When it is considered that US presidential elections have turned into multi-billion-dollar pageants, with no expense spared on campaign attack ads, it is hard to imagine that Russia’s severely limited campaign had any effect whatsoever (it needs emphasis that not even Facebook is entirely sure where the posts originated from. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, would only say they “likely operated out of Russia”).

Now compare that to the way the United States “meddles” in the affairs of foreign countries, like Ukraine. In November 2013, after the government of President Viktor Yanukovich opted in favor of closer ties with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union instead of the EU, protests broke out in the country. How did the United States respond? Not with internet trolls, that’s for sure. It dispatched high-ranking US officials to Kiev, like Senator John McCain and Assistant US Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, where they agitated the masses against the democratically elected government. On the question of who would ultimately govern the splintered country, Nuland was overheard in a phone call with the US ambassador to Ukraine handpicking the eligible candidates.

Once again, the United States proved that there are rules for itself and rules for the rest of the world, and increasingly it is the American people who must pay the price for that supreme arrogance.

Seaborne, that is.

• Russian Oil Exports Surging (RT)

Shipments of Russian seaborne crude surged to 3.6 million barrels per day last week, reaching the highest since early June, while the less volatile four-week average is the highest since August, Bloomberg reported on Monday. A total of 34 tankers were loaded with some 25.2 million barrels of Russian crude oil in the week to November 4, according to vessel-tracking data and port agent reports, as quoted by the media. That’s up by 3.2 million barrels. The exports were ramped up more than a month before the EU sanctions, supported by the G7 nations and Australia, kick in on December 5. The penalties will see Western companies banned from providing insurance and other services to vessels loaded with Russian crude, unless the cargo is purchased below a yet-to-be-agreed price cap.

The biggest increase, in both volume and percentage terms, was reportedly recorded in shipments from the Arctic terminal of Murmansk. Cargoes carrying Russian oil are becoming more cagey about their destinations, according to Bloomberg. The agency noted a big jump in vessels showing their next destination as Port Said or the Suez Canal, and a drop in the volume on tankers indicating that they’re headed to India. The media highlighted that many more ships carrying crude are leaving Russian ports without signaling a final port of discharge. Russia’s revenues from crude-export duty reportedly rose by $16 million to $149 million in the seven days to November 4, with the four-week average income also increasing, gaining $6 million to $134 million.

“The National Recovery Fund for Poland involves €24 billion in grants and €11.5 billion in loans, but it is just one type of fund that Poland has yet to receive from Brussels.”

• Poland Draws A Line In The Sand With The EU (Remix)

The Polish government says it will make no further concessions to the European Union in order to unlock tens of billions in EU funding, arguing that Poland has fulfilled all its obligations and Brussels owes them the money. “Poland fulfilled all conditions set by the European Commission regarding the payment of the Recovery Funds it is due,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said. He added that “he does not intend to answer any comments from Brussels on the matter.” Brussels, for its part, has threatened Poland with catastrophic funding cuts totaling up to €110 billion; this would hobble the Polish economy, which has suffered due to the global economic downturn, inflation, and the refugee crisis from Ukraine.

In an interview for the conservative Sieci, Duda admitted that he does not believe that trying to fulfill the expectations of “the other side” could bring any results. “I believe that a lot of good will was showcased from the Polish side,” he stated. “And we know very well that there is a group from Poland there that has a policy of contradicting the basic interests of the Polish state and is content when Poland is being harmed by Brussels,” said Poland’s president. He also mentioned the liberal-left representatives who “have seats in the European Commission and want to change the ruling party in Poland at all costs.” According to the latest statements of the Polish authorities, Poland has still not sent a request for a payment of the Recovery Funds to Brussels.

Meanwhile, information has appeared in the public space that the Commission confirmed that Warsaw has fulfilled 15 out of 20 milestones necessary for the payments of the first tranche of funds. The National Recovery Fund for Poland involves €24 billion in grants and €11.5 billion in loans, but it is just one type of fund that Poland has yet to receive from Brussels. In June, the European Commission finally accepted the Polish plan, however, it made the payment of the funds dependent on the fulfillment of the so-called milestones. In the case of Poland, those milestones concern mostly the judicial system. Brussels does not recognize that Poland fulfilled its obligations, so the payment of the National Recovery Fund remains frozen.

“We are borrowing other people’s energy supplies,” Vitol Group Chief Executive Officer Russell Hardy told the media. “It’s not a great thing.”

• EU ‘Sucking Gas Away’ From Poorer Countries (RT)

The EU energy crisis is inevitably leading to energy poverty in developing countries, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday citing an energy analyst at Credit Suisse. “Europe is sucking gas away from other countries whatever the cost,” Saul Kavonic told the media. Despite soaring energy bills, the EU is expected to survive the upcoming heating season, as the bloc members have purchased enough oil and natural gas. However, this comes with a high price tag for the world’s poorest nations that have been cut off from the gas market due to Europe’s ravenous demand. Emerging market countries are reportedly at serious risk of being unable to meet their energy needs. Factory shutdowns, more frequent and longer-lasting power shortages, as well as social unrests are the most likely consequences due to the energy security challenges.

Exporters across Qatar and the US are accepting bids from European buyers seeking to purchase as much fuel as possible to fill their storages. That leaves developing countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Thailand unable to compete on price with Germany and other bigger economies. “We are borrowing other people’s energy supplies,” Vitol Group Chief Executive Officer Russell Hardy told the media. “It’s not a great thing.” According to traders cited by Bloomberg, soaring prices prompted some suppliers to South Asia to simply cancel long-scheduled deliveries in favor of better yields elsewhere. “Suppliers don’t need to focus on securing their LNG to low affordability markets,” Raghav Mathur, an analyst at Wood Mackenzie said, adding that the higher prices they can get on the spot market more than make up for whatever penalties they might pay for shirking planned shipments.

“LNG will belong first to the ‘developed,’ with the leftovers for the ‘developing.’”the expert said, adding that this dynamic is likely to hold for years. The European Union is struggling with an energy crisis as a result of the reduction of imports from Russia. Earlier, the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said that it took the bloc eight months to replace two-thirds of Russian gas supplies. She added that the EU had significantly diversified the range of foreign suppliers, but that had “been costly.”

“Biden claims inflation is not his fault and he’s bringing it down by spending more deficit money. This is mathematically impossible, incidentally.”

• What Do You Run On….. (Denninger)

…. when you have nothing to run on? Let’s just be straight here, ok — neither party, when you get down to it, has anything to run on. But: When you’re in the left seat, and the plane crashes, its your fault. That’s just how the cookie crumbles. Just as an example the “authorities” won’t release the surveillance or body camera tapes from the Paul Pelosi assault. Why not? The only reason not to is that what’s there renders irrevocably false the story told thus far. In what way? I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. If the footage documents the affidavit “as told” then there’s no reason not to release it as it will cement the case not only in court but in public opinion as well. Therefore it clearly doesn’t. Biden claims inflation is not his fault and he’s bringing it down by spending more deficit money. This is mathematically impossible, incidentally.

He either doesn’t know this or he’s lying. It matters not which it is; he ran on and promoted blowing more money around so he has no place to hide. Biden told us all that if you took the Covid shots you would not get covid. He said that conclusively. He lied; his top advisor, Birx, has stated in public she knew this was not true before he took office. Therefore either he hired her and is responsible or she told him and he deliberately lied. Either way: He’s in the left seat, he had opportunity to not lie, thus he owns it. On Biden’s watch Ukraine and Russia went to war. Biden has poured tens of billions of dollars and weapons not only in munitions into Ukraine he’s paying the salaries of their people with our money. The total at this point is well over $100 billion, which is a quite-material part of the fiscal deficit.

By what authority? Well, Congress appears to be ok with it, aren’t they? Indeed. Who controls Congress? Uh huh. Oh, spending more money than you take in causes inflation? Well, prosecuting this war over there is part of it then, on purpose. Again, sit in the left seat, you’re responsible when there’s a smoking hole in the ground and nothing larger than a quarter can be identified. There have been a couple of million people streaming into our nation illegally over the last two years. Inflationary? You bet. What’s worse? The guy who is accused of attacking Pelosi is here illegally and has been for years. How many others have been victimized by criminals who were here illegally? Remember “A Girl in Iowa” anyone? Sit in the left seat, it’s your problem, especially when you sue, as Biden has done, to block Arizona and others from sealing said border.

Biden has declared war on carbon-based fuels. Refiners are closing and have on his watch and will not restart because he has made clear that any investment in them is a zero. It is his expressed intent to destroy said investment so nobody will make it. Do you light $100 bills on fire for fun? Neither does anyone else, so if you think gas or diesel prices are coming down on a durable basis exactly how when there is no increase in refining capacity coming online to meet demand? You can’t build an electric car without carbon-based fuels and in fact to build and operate one requires more carbon-based fuel than just refining and burning the gasoline. This is fact and yet Biden does not care if you get screwed.

Germany faces many problems. A drop in income is not the worst.

• Germany Faces Sharp Drop In Real Income (RT)

The German economy is expected to lose billions of euros by the end of 2023 due to skyrocketing energy prices, the Ifo Center for Macroeconomics said in a report published on Tuesday. According to the forecast, real income loss will reach €110 billion ($110 billion) during the 2021-2023 period, which equals 3% of Germany’s annual economic output. “The only time this figure was higher was during the second oil crisis of 1979-81, when the loss in economic output was 4%,” said Timo Wollmershaeuser, senior economist at Ifo. The surge in energy prices is expected to take a heavy toll on the German economy this year, with an anticipated €64 billion loss, or 1.8% of the country’s output.

The estimated loss for 2021 exceeded €35 billion, and a €9 billion drop is expected for 2023, according to Ifo. German citizens will continue to feel the impact of the energy crisis over the next few years with a drop in real incomes, Wollmershaeuser warned, adding that losing Russia as the main energy supplier will result in long-term high oil and gas prices. He also predicted that Germany will not wean itself off energy imports “overnight” as the country has long been dependent on external supplies. In late October, Ifo predicted that the German economy would contract by 0.6% in the fourth quarter. According to an Economy Ministry forecast, Germany will see growth of 1.4% this year and a 0.4% slump next year.

Stunning.

• Polish Ex-PM Links Low Birth Rates To Women Drinking (RT)

The leader of Poland’s ruling conservative Law and Justice Party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has claimed that women are choosing not to have children because they drink too much. The former prime minister made the remarks on Saturday during a trip to Elk, a city in northeastern Poland. Reflecting on the country’s low birth rate, Kaczynski said “cultural factors”contribute to a woman’s decisions on childbearing, and “it is sometimes necessary to say bitter things openly.” “If, for example, it is maintained that, until the age of 25, young women drink as much as men of their age, there will be no children,” Kaczynski said. “Remember that a man, in order to become an alcoholic, has to drink excessively for 20 years on average… while a woman has to do it for only two years.” “I say this seriously,” the conservative politician stated, adding that he knew a doctor who “managed to cure a third of his male alcoholic patients, but no women.”

“I really am a sincere supporter of women’s equality, but I’m not in favor of women pretending to be men and men pretending to be women because it is something completely different,”Kaczynski said. “This is a typical statement from a patriarchal grandpa during a traditional Polish wedding,” said Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus, a legislator from the New Left party, dismissing Kaczynski’s words as “foolish.” Her fellow MP Urszula Paslawska said she does not know “whether to laugh or to cry.” Another New Left lawmaker, Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bak, argued that alcohol affects the fertility of both men and women. “In order to have children, other issues need to be solved, and Kaczynski is silent on them,” she said. “There is a shortage of two million housing units in Poland, so young people have to live with their parents.” She added that women, including mothers, need better protection in their jobs and in the labor market.

RSV [respiratory syncytial virus] is the flavor of the day for Big Pharma.

• Will You Survive The ‘Tripledemic’? (Mercola)

As predicted, “health experts” are starting to call for voluntary indoor masking again,(11) even though all the evidence garnered over the past three years confirms what we already knew in 2020, which is that face masks do nothing to stop viral infections. And, as before, in the absence of actual scientific evidence the narrative focuses instead on virtue. Masking up is said to be a way to protect everyone,(12) so just “do your part” and wear it, even though, in reality, it protects no one. The same goes for vaccination. Both the flu vaccine and the COVID shots are proven ineffective, yet the recommendation(13) to get them continues. And this season, you’re expected to get both! The fact that RSV [respiratory syncytial virus] is now being highlighted as a severe risk is understandable in light of the fact that the first-ever RSV vaccines are now in the pipeline.

According to CNN,(14) four different RSV shots are “nearing review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration” and more than a dozen others are in trials. This includes a “long-acting injection” specifically for babies, to be given “right after birth” to protect them from RSV “for as long as six months.” If that’s not a perfect example of how the media tries to change the perception of the basic meaning of a term, I don’t know what is. Six months is hardly long-acting! Historically, most vaccines have at least offered antibody-only “protection” for years, not months. Please recognize all vaccines fail to use cellular immunity to protect you, which is far more important than humoral antibody protection. This extremely short duration of antibody-only protection appears to be a hallmark of mRNA technology however, and indeed, at least some of these new RSV shots are mRNA based.

Moderna has announced it is working on an mRNA jab for RSV, which is scheduled for release in 2023.(15) They’re also working on a combination mRNA jab for COVID, RSV and the flu. (Ultimately, Moderna wants to create an annual mRNA shot that covers all of the top 10 viruses that result in hospitalizations each year.[16]) Janssen is also working on an RSV shot using an adenovirus vector, the same technology used in its COVID shot, while Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) are testing “protein subunit” RSV vaccines for pregnant women and seniors.(17) According to Forbes,(18) Pfizer announced November 1, 2022, that it is ready to seek FDA authorization for its RSV vaccine. In clinical trials this shot was given to pregnant mothers and the efficacy was measured not by whether it prevented RSV, but by severity of the infection in hospitalized babies during their first months of life.(19)

Pretend science. What insane nonsense.

• COVID-19 Conspiracies Are a Gateway to Other Conspiracy Theories (SAlert)

Thinking that the COVID-19 pandemic is in some way a hoax could serve as a ‘gateway’ for individuals to engage with more complex conspiracy theories, claim a team of researchers from Ohio State University in the US. According to a recent analysis of two longitudinal studies that tracked participant beliefs in various theories, mistrust in expertise over real-world events can quickly bloom into a general acceptance of conspiracy theories that aren’t supported by robust evidence. The technical term here is conspiracist ideation, which measures someone’s confidence in explanations of events that rely on the power of groups to manipulate outcomes to an unlikely, if not near impossible degree.

For the study’s purpose, the researchers considered conspiracy theories to be beliefs that aren’t supported by any evidence – and which are actually contradicted by the evidence that does exist. These can be anything from believing the Moon landing was staged to thinking that legitimate elections are rigged. In the case of COVID-19, conspiracy theories include the idea that the pandemic was largely exaggerated by the government or the media, and the belief that the virus was released on purpose by a particular agency for sinister means. “It’s speculative, but it appears that once people adopt one conspiracy belief, it promotes distrust in institutions more generally – it could be government, science, the media, whatever,” says psychologist Russell Fazio, from The Ohio State University.

“Once you start viewing events through that distrustful lens, it’s very easy to adopt additional conspiracy theories.” Two different studies were the focus of the analysis. The first queried 107 participants about their beliefs in June 2020. In December of that year, a second study looked at how individuals who considered COVID-19 to be a hoax progressed in their conspiracist ideation. Statistical analysis showed that those who believed the SARS-CoV-2 virus was deliberately released or that the severity of the COVID-19 outbreaks was exaggerated were also more likely to distrust the official results of the 2020 US election. What’s more, members of the ‘conspiracy minded’ group also tended to show an increase in conspiratorial thinking between June and December.

The second study used publicly available data from 1,037 participants, surveyed between March 2020 and December 2020. Again, belief that the pandemic was a hoax predicted a rise in conspiracist ideation over the course of the year. “If you read interviews or forums frequented by conspiracy theorists, you see a phenomenon where people tend to go down the rabbit hole after something happens in their life that triggers general interest in conspiracy theories,” says psychologist Javier Granados Samayoa, from The Ohio State University. “With COVID-19, there was this large event that people could not control, so how could they make sense of it? One way is by adhering to conspiracy theories.”

Chaplin

Some of Chaplin's friends tried to talk him out of the iconic final speech in

THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940)

One even said the speech would cost him a million dollars at the box office to which Chaplin replied “Well, I don't care if it's five million."

pic.twitter.com/GR9LNoObEs

— Michael Warburton (@MichaelWarbur17) November 7, 2022

“There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward.”
~ Khalil Gibran

Marvin Gaye

If you ever needed to truly comprehend the magnificence of MARVIN GAYE…

…this accapella version of I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE will do the trick. pic.twitter.com/9dr1jmuf5R

— James Leighton (@JamesL1927) November 8, 2022

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Debt Rattle November 8 2022

Nov 082022

November 8, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:10 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, Bottomless Pinocchio, grokking, Highway To Hell, Meta, midterms, rare earth, shamnesty 63 Responses »

Rembrandt van Rijn Self portrait with tousled hair 1629

• WaPo Awards Biden a “Bottomless Pinocchio” (Turley)

• The Pathetic Democratic Pantheon (Victor Davis Hanson)

• Biden Administration Privately Asks US Banks To Keep Working With Russia (RT)

• US Nuclear Forces Chief Says ‘the Big One Is Coming (Antiwar)

• EU Official Reveals How Far Ukraine Is From Membership (RT)

• World Is On ‘Highway To Hell’ – UN Chief (RT)

• The World Is Racing To Break China’s Rare Earth Dominance (AGMM)

• EU and UK Energy Bills Smash Record High (RT)

• Medvedev Names Key Reason For Ukraine Conflict (RT)

• Are You Ready for the Coming U.S. Government Default? (EP)

• How to Beat Propaganda: the Grokking Strategy (Ugo Bardi)

• Low Down on the Showdown (Kunstler)

• House Republicans Allege ‘Weaponization’ of FBI, DOJ (ET)

• Meta Prepares For Large-scale Layoffs (JTN)

• The Unforgivable Request for Shamnesty (Buckley)

• United Airlines Eliminating Seats As Americans Get Fatter (NYP)

Siegfried Sassoon

Trump Biden

LOL President Trump just played a hilarious montage of Joe Biden's dementia moments at his rally in Miami. pic.twitter.com/SLViNk5dos

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 6, 2022

I quit Twitter

I Quit Twitter Because of Elon Musk pic.twitter.com/vsWbssQI2r

— Ryan Long (@ryanlongcomedy) November 7, 2022

Macgregor

“..despite his history as a serial spreader of disinformation, I would still oppose any effort to ban him from social media or even remove his comments…”

• WaPo Awards Biden a “Bottomless Pinocchio” (Turley)

We have been discussing a series of false statements made by President Biden about election law, border agents, Second Amendment, gun capacity, and a variety of personal facts. Now, the Washington Post has awarded President Biden a “bottomless Pinocchio” for his repeating of clearly false facts. For those in the free speech community, it is a highly ironic moment given the President’s recent defense of censorship because citizens need “editors” to tell them what is real and what is not. Indeed, he asked, if we did not censor social media, “how will people know the truth?” President Biden is arguably the most anti-free speech president since John Adams. The President often sounds like the Censor-in-Chief, including claiming that social media companies are “killing people” by not engaging in more robust censorship.

Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler listed various examples of Biden spreading false claims that have been repeatedly and publicly debunked. You draw this rare rebuke if you repeat false statements more than 20 times. That includes his claim on meeting with the Chinese leader: “Folks, I spent a lot of time — more time with Xi Jinping than any other head of state. … I’ve traveled 17,000 miles with him.” The Post also noted how the president claimed that he is responsible for seniors getting an increase in their Social Security checks for the first time in 10 years: “On our watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are going to get the biggest increase in their Social Security checks they’ve gotten.” The Post noted “the reason Social Security payments are going up is because Social Security benefits, under a law passed in 1972, are adjusted every year to keep pace with inflation.”

The President has also continued to claim that the Republicans want to end social security, which the Post has previously declared to be false. Despite his own pattern of false statements (some might call it “disinformation”), the President seems most alarmed that the a single social media platform is moving to restore free speech protections. For years, Twitter has joined companies like Facebook in barring or removing dissenting views in some of these same areas like election reforms. Biden warns that the pubic will simply not know what is true without such editing of the material that they are allowed to read. The President could cite his own history of false statements are an example for his call for greater censorship to protect voters. Yet, despite his history as a serial spreader of disinformation, I would still oppose any effort to ban him from social media or even remove his comments. It is false that Republicans want to end social security but others can counter such bad speech with good speech. Readers can discern what is true and false from their sources and their support. As shown by the President himself, the governing principle remains “caveat emptor,” or buyer beware.

“The Left got their Biden. And yes, he turned over the reins of government to them. And yes, they got their neo-socialism for two years. And yes, they are destroying America as we knew it.”

• The Pathetic Democratic Pantheon (Victor Davis Hanson)

What will Biden not lie about? The death of his son, the circumstances in which his first wife died in a car wreck, the fantasy congressional vote on his student-loan forgiveness scheme? The number of states (Joe says, 54, Obama used to swear there are 57)? The very century we are now in? Where he went to college? Joe, our own Walter Mitty, has variously been a semi-truck driver, an arrested South-African street protestor against apartheid, a surrogate Puerto-Rican child, a black college enrollee, a Ciceronian populist orator, a coal miner’s scion, an honors student, a blue-chip collegiate athlete, a defender against inner-city Corn Poppers, and absolutely ignorant about the Biden family syndicate.

Recall that a non compos mentis Biden was nominated solely as the thin veneer to a hard Left agenda whose avatars were unelectable. Biden was to feign being the colorless, stand-in “moderate” who would “unify” the fractured country, tone down the Trump rhetoric, and let the Trump record sort of proceed on autopilot. Then when he played out that part and won, the leftist minders in this Faustian bargain took over to push through, on a one-vote senatorial margin, the most radical left-wing agenda in U.S. history. Biden, however, took his role too seriously. He reverted to the mean-spirited, pre-senile blowhard Joe—the obnoxious messenger thus now making the noxious message even more toxic. A retiring, silenced, good old Joe from Scranton was the script, not a doddering, incoherent, ”get off my lawn” old man shouting for the need of socialist policies that were the exact opposite of his previously supposed convictions.

The Left got their Biden. And yes, he turned over the reins of government to them. And yes, they got their neo-socialism for two years. And yes, they are destroying America as we knew it. But in doing this, the people had the rare occasion to see fully and experience the nihilist Left. And they are now about to express their loathing for what the Left has wrought. The problem with the ossified Democratic Pantheon is that they are of no use to the Left in the midterms because it is their own radical ideology over the past two years that was finally enacted and wrecked the country. And all the shrieks about abortion, semi-fascists, and democracy dying cannot put back together what they shattered.

Double tongue much?!

• Biden Administration Privately Asks US Banks To Keep Working With Russia (RT)

The Biden administration is privately urging leading US banks like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup to continue doing business with strategic Russian firms despite sanctions imposed on Moscow over the conflict in Ukraine, people familiar with the issue told Bloomberg. Such requests have been made by the Treasury and State Departments as the US government is trying to keep pressure on Russia, but at the same time avoid “a global economic catastrophe,” the news agency reported on Monday. Washington has been asking for services such as US dollar settlements, payment transfers, and trade finance for Russian firms exempt from some aspects of the sanctions, including gas giant Gazprom and fertilizer producers Uralkali and PhosAgro, the sources said.

As a result, the largest American banks are currently being “caught in the push-pull” between the Biden administration and Congress, which insists on harsher measures against Moscow. The sanctions prevent US banks from providing services to blacklisted entities and people, with violations punishable with multibillion-dollar fines. Jamie Dimon the CEO of investment bank JPMorgan Chase was reportedly grilled at a congressional hearing in September over his company allegedly using loopholes in the sanctions regime to keep working with Russia. The banker responded by saying that “we are following the instructions of the American government as they asked us to do it.”

When addressed on the matter by Bloomberg, a Treasury spokesman said that it had issued guidance to banks, clarifying that activities in humanitarian aid, energy, and agriculture are authorized. JPMorgan and Citigroup have declined to comment. “Congress needs to understand this – the US government has not imposed a comprehensive embargo with Russia, there’s still pockets of business that are allowed,” Nnedinma Ifudu Nweke, an attorney specializing in US economic sanctions at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, pointed out. The Treasury “will continue to have meetings to educate banks on those pockets of allowable transactions, especially in the humanitarian space,” Nweke added.

“..Richard had previously warned that the risk of nuclear war with Russia and China is a “real possibility.”

• US Nuclear Forces Chief Says ‘the Big One Is Coming (Antiwar)

The commander that oversees US nuclear forces delivered an ominous warning at a naval conference last week by calling the war in Ukraine a “warmup” for the “big one” that is to come. “This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” said Navy Adm. Charles Richard, the commander of US Strategic command. “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested [in] a long time.” Richard’s warning came after the US released its new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which reaffirms that the US doctrine allows for the first use of nuclear weapons. The review says that the purpose of the US nuclear arsenal is to “deter strategic attacks, assure allies and partners, and achieve US objectives if deterrence fails.”

The NPR says the US “would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its Allies or partners.” The NPR was released with the 2022 National Defense Strategy that names China as the “most comprehensive and serious challenge” to the US and describes Russia as an “acute threat.” The document, as with the previous 2018 National Defense Strategy, makes clear that the US military is preparing for future conflicts with both China and Russia. As the head of STRATCOM, Richard had previously warned that the risk of nuclear war with Russia and China is a “real possibility.” He said last year that the US military must “shift its principal assumption from ‘nuclear employment is not possible’ to ‘nuclear employment is a very real possibility,’ and act to meet and deter that reality.”

The Nuclear Posture Review calls for the modernization of the nuclear triad, which could cost up to $1.5 trillion, and keeping tensions high with Russia and China helps justify the massive price tag. Richard said last week that the US needs to put more resources into competing with China’s military. Congress is looking to spend big on arming Taiwan, with a plan to give the island $10 billion in military aid included in the Senate’s version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. While done in the name of deterrence, China’s actions and rhetoric make it clear that more US support for Taiwan will make war in the region more likely.

Ukrainian membership is EU suicide. The only sensible voice here:

“Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova [..] wrote on Telegram that Ukraine’s accession will take “as long as the collapse of the EU.”

• EU Official Reveals How Far Ukraine Is From Membership (RT)

Ukraine’s accession to the European Union will take several years, the European commissioner for enlargement and neighborhood policy said on Sunday. In an interview with the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, Oliver Varhelyi said Kiev needs to do “extensive work” to prepare for “participation in the EU internal market and in many other important policy areas.” The commissioner predicted that “the entire preparations for accession will most likely take longer than a year or two.” Varhelyi also stressed that the accession criteria for Ukraine are the same as for any other candidate country. However, Olga Stefanishina, Ukraine’s European Integration Minister, told Welt: “Ukraine is not an ordinary candidate for accession.”

Stefanishina noted that Ukraine started integration reforms under EU supervision before it was granted accession status, and argued that the country can “proceed faster” in its membership bid, especially considering that some of its neighbors and the Baltic countries “have already signaled that quick accession is possible.” On Monday, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, in response to Varhelyi’s remarks, wrote on Telegram that Ukraine’s accession will take “as long as the collapse of the EU.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov earlier described the EU’s decision to provide Ukraine with candidate status “a part of the geopolitical gambit against Russia.”

Ukraine applied to join the 27-nation bloc shortly after Moscow launched its military offensive in late February. In June, Brussels granted Kiev EU candidate status, the first step in the accession process, and stressed that the country must continue structural reforms, fight corruption and reduce “the persistent influence of oligarchs.” Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo made it clear at the time that granting Ukraine EU candidate status was an important “symbolic message” in support of Kiev amid its conflict with Russia. Actual EU membership, however, is still “many years” away, and the country must first meet European standards, he said.

Climate change AC/DC style. Time to kick the UN out of the discussion. What they propose will simply kill off societies and economies.

• World Is On ‘Highway To Hell’ – UN Chief (RT)

“Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish,” Guterres told delegates gathered to discuss how to combat change amid an ongoing military conflict between Russia and Ukraine and rising global inflation and energy shortages. Guterres insisted that the world’s richest and poorest counties must form a pact to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels, singling out China and the United States as two countries that have a “particular responsibility to join efforts to make this pact a reality.” “Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing. Global temperatures keep rising. And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible,” Guterres said, proclaiming that “we are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”

The UN chief’s warnings were seconded by former US vice president Al Gore, who also emphasized the need to end the reliance on fossil fuels. “We must see the so-called ‘dash for gas’ for what it really is: A dash down a bridge to nowhere, leaving the countries of the world facing climate chaos and billions in stranded assets, especially here in Africa,” he said. Guterres also pointed out that the world must achieve net zero emissions by 2050 if the signatories of the 2015 Paris Climate agreement wish to achieve their long-term goal of keeping global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Last week, notorious teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg suggested battling climate change by eliminating capitalism, which she said was defined by “colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the so-called global North.”

Too late. Even if it were doable.

• The World Is Racing To Break China’s Rare Earth Dominance (AGMM)

For the past couple of months, MetalMiner frequently posted about the world’s dependence on China for raw materials used to make rare earth magnets. Aside from the US, countries like Japan, South Korea, Italy, and the Netherlands heavily rely on Chinese rare earth imports. It’s clear why. China boasts extensive rare earth reserves. As the world increases its demand for such products, China managed to develope a powerful monopoly on the global market. So, to prevent China from wielding too much geopolitical power in rare earth trading, it’s becoming crucial to find alternative sources. It’s true that most of the world’s rare earth processing takes place in China. However, many raw rare earth materials are actually extracted from other parts of the globe.

Common sources include Myanmar (Burma), the US, Canada, and Australia. And with demand for rare earth magnets expected to double by 2030, tapping into these supplies has become more important than ever. Fortunately, many nations continue to ramp up their own rare earth production. In Japan, miners have gone to impressive lengths to compete against China in the global rare earth magnet marketplace. In fact, researchers recently explored beneath the Pacific Ocean (right outside of the Ogasawara islands) at a depth of 6,000 meters to excavate materials for rare earth magnets. The Japanese government plans to start excavating these raw rare earth materials as early as April of 2023.

Japan isn’t alone. Australia, another nation abundant in raw materials for rare earth magnets, continues to step up its rare earth mining game. Arafura, a mining project located in Central Australia, recently announced plans to increase investments in its mining endeavors. Many of these take place in the hottest, most sun-parched areas of the nation. But according to Arafura it’s worth it. Apparently, the company sees a huge opportunity due to the large amounts of neodymium and praseodymium located in the region. These elements are frequently used in producing rare earth magnets. Currently, the company claims their mines could satisfy up to 5% of the world’s demand.

Whitney Webb

All This Mining for What? Whitney Webb Explains the End Game for the Electrical Vehicle Movement

If you ask people like Bill Gates … they say, 'All of the world's reserves of lithium, cobalt, and nickel must be completely mined if we even want to get close to the electrical ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/E5nuZcXpfi

— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) November 7, 2022

Peace talks can prevent this.

• EU and UK Energy Bills Smash Record High (RT)

The average retail gas price across the EU and the UK doubled in October compared to the previous month, when it amounted to €0.18 per kilowatt-hour, Bloomberg reported on Monday, citing data from energy consultancy VaasaETT. Electricity costs for consumers have reportedly soared 67% to €0.36 per kilowatt-hour. The surge occurred despite EU governments’ latest attempts to protect households against spiraling energy prices by providing billions in subsidies. EU leaders have pledged more than €550 billion over the past year to help businesses and households tackle the energy crisis. According to Philip Lewis, chief executive officer at VaasaETT, it’s likely household bills would have been even higher if it were not for the financial aid.

On a monthly basis, the average unit rate for electricity reportedly increased 3.4% in October, while that for gas grew by 2.5%. The biggest monthly gains were recorded in Dublin, Ireland, where power rates climbed 44%, while the average gas price in Rome surged 97%. “If we were essentially to have the crisis more or less lasting for another whole year, or more than a year, that cost, of those measures for these governments, is going to be enormous,” Lewis said, as quoted by media. “Eventually customers will forget that those prices are not real prices – they will take them as the norm and then it becomes essentially impossible to remove them,” he added. The EU and Britain are facing a sharp rise in energy prices and record inflation amid anti-Russia sanctions and a policy of abandoning Russian fuel. The situation is expected to lead to energy rationing and shortages across Western Europe.

Nukes. “Ukraine’s threat to resume its nuclear program..”

• Medvedev Names Key Reason For Ukraine Conflict (RT)

Ukraine’s threat to resume its nuclear program was one of the key reasons that forced Russia to launch its military operation in late February, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said on Monday. Writing on the Russian social media network Vkontakte, he argued that the Ukrainian authorities are now “crying bitterly” over their decision to relinquish the nuclear arsenal they inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Kiev made this decision after caving in to “harsh pressure of their current masters in Washington,” Medvedev, who currently serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, stated. He added that all Ukrainian presidents – from the late Leonid Kravchuk to the incumbent Vladimir Zelensky – described the step as a forced one.

However, according to the official, Kiev has made clear that it “would be diabolically happy” to use nukes against Russia and “their own citizens”. “They have been dropping explicit hints about this, threatening to resume the nuclear program. And that was one of the reasons for conducting the special military operation,” he insisted. Medvedev also drew a sharp contract between Ukraine and South Africa, the first country with a nuclear arsenal to voluntarily give it up. He noted that after the collapse of the apartheid regime, the nation’s new democratic authorities “took a responsible and sovereign stance towards their people, neighboring countries and the entire world community”. “And today they do not regret the choice made 30 years ago, they are proud of it and show the way for others by their example,” he added.

Under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine surrendered its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal in exchange for promises from the US, Britain and Russia that they would “provide assistance” to the country in case of aggression. The three states also vowed not to attack Ukraine themselves. However, Russian officials have repeatedly stated that this document was undermined by NATO’s eastward expansion, which threatened Moscow’s vital security interests. Moreover, prior to the start of the Ukraine conflict in late February, Zelenksy signaled that Kiev could give up its decades-old pledge to be a non-nuclear nation and reverse the decision it took to give up its atomic weapons.

“Income taxes, budget deficits, the national debt. These are all real things the average person of moderate means and mental capacity can grasp a hold of, should they care to.”

• Are You Ready for the Coming U.S. Government Default? (EP)

Will there be a pivot, pause, or no pivot? This is the wrong question to be asking. The reality is the major stock market indexes have much farther to fall before the bear market is over, regardless of if the Fed pivots anytime soon. If you recall, the Fed began cutting interest rates in September of 2007. Yet the stock market didn’t bottom out until March of 2009. Similarly, the Fed began cutting interest rates in January of 2001. Still, the stock market didn’t bottom out until October of 2002. Thus, using these two most recent bear markets as a guide, once the Fed finally begins cutting interest rates, which would come after inflation has begun to abate and a period of interest rate pause, the stock market will continue to fall for another 18 to 22 months.

In other words, this bear market may not bottom out until well into 2025. What’s more, the entire dollar based financial system will likely blow up sometime beforehand. How’s that for a grim outlook? Investors, as you can see, are incredibly twisted up by the Fed’s money games, and how they’ve enhanced the peaks and valleys of the stock market. As for workers and voters, many don’t have a clue as to the ramifications for the real, Main Street economy. Here’s why… Fiscal policy, as opposed to monetary policy, is more readily understood by workers and voters. Income taxes, budget deficits, the national debt. These are all real things the average person of moderate means and mental capacity can grasp a hold of, should they care to.

The effects of zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) or quantitative easing (QE), however, are less apparent to the casual observer. Politicians may make superficial remarks about consumer price inflation if they think it will score points with voters. But actual currency debasement policies are rarely mentioned.

Ugo sent a mail: “Mentioning your blog in this post!”

“The Greeks killed Socrates because he was “corrupting the youth” by teaching them to think for themselves.”

And yes, that is what I try to do. Only, I don’t corrupt only the youth. I think bigger.

• How to Beat Propaganda: the Grokking Strategy (Ugo Bardi)

Things change completely when you become a professional. At that stage, you must learn to consult many sources and sift good information from the bad. As a good professional, you listen to everybody and trust nobody. We can describe this attitude by the term “grokking,” invented by sci-fi author Robert Anson Heinlein to indicate the kind of in-depth understanding that professionals have of their field. In Heinlein’s fictional Mars, “to grok” also means “to drink.” You assimilate knowledge just like you assimilate the water you drink. [..] Universities don’t teach you how to grok. Probably, it is because the old saying is true: nothing worth learning can be taught. At least, not in the traditional way. Even good professionals often are completely naive when they leave their specialized field and are exposed to propaganda. Yet, it is not impossible to learn how to grok. It is a recursive affair: you must grok how to grok!

Nowadays, with a tsunami of propaganda submerging all of us, I am discovering that many people I know use the same grokking strategy. Typically, we avoid TV and mainstream media, and we use aggregators, feed readers, and similar ways to access multiple sources. Many people seem to have developed this learning strategy by themselves. Not long ago, my good friend Anastassia showed me how she does it: she has hundreds of telegram channels she follows. She clicks on the titles of posts that seem interesting to her, reading them if they turn out to be really interesting. She doesn’t trust any of them, but she listens to all of them. I have a feeling that there is some correlation between this style of learning and the fact that she is among the brightest persons I know.

Personally, I tend to use feed readers rather than Telegram (I described the method in a previous post), but it is the same idea. In addition, some blogs and sites are structured as aggregators and they will do a good job for you by linking to other sites and sources (a good one that I follow is Raul Ilargi’s “Automatic Earth.”). In any case, you want to be in control of what you receive: so, no Facebook, no Twitter, nothing like that, even search engines are biased. You don’t want others to decide what you see. You listen to everyone, and you trust no one. You want to be in control of the information you receive.

“..damning information about FBI crimes continues to leak out of the woodwork via whistleblowers, while the agency behaves more and more like an American Gestapo.”

• Low Down on the Showdown (Kunstler)

One obvious agent is George Soros, whose many NGOs operate at the fine-grained local level to elect district attorneys who won’t enforce the criminal statutes and state secretaries of state who won’t enforce election laws. Mr. Soros is also deeply implicated, through his Atlantic Council org, in the years-long program to destabilize Ukraine and light the fire for a completely avoidable world war. At least part of the time, George Soros lives in the US. Why his activities are not under investigation by the US Department of Justice probably answers your questions about his hidden influence at the higher levels of government. Bill Gates, the Microsoft tycoon, circulates at the center of the evil nexus where US public health shakes hands with the drug companies.

His money appears to be entangled in the biolab projects around the world engaged in weaponizing disease and then profiting from alleged “vaccines” to defeat it. The Covid-19 project went badly awry, especially the “vaccine” part. He’s been vocal about reducing the world’s population and now appears to have succeeded in helping to prompt a weird medical genocide. Other supporting outside players range from the barely plausible Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum, which has implanted leaders and managers all over Western Civ inculcated in his Great Reset effort to wreck what’s left of industrial society and its cultural armature; to shadowy figures in European banking chattered about but never identified; to the CCP, which has gotten huge benefits from its relatively penny-ante investments in the Biden Family.

On the domestic scene, where covering-up skeins of manifold crimes sets the political tone, Christopher Wray of the FBI must lead the pack of paper-hangers. Under his leadership, beginning in 2017, the agency carried out most of its RussiaGate crimes against a sitting president and did absolutely nothing to investigate the blatant ballot fraud of 2020 that sealed the deal. Even under the shelter of “Joe Biden,” who Mr. Wray helped elect, and the stooge AG, Merrick Garland, damning information about FBI crimes continues to leak out of the woodwork via whistleblowers, while the agency behaves more and more like an American Gestapo.

“..FBI leadership is pressuring line agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism even if the matter does not meet the criteria. ”That’s no mistake, Republicans assert..”

• House Republicans Allege ‘Weaponization’ of FBI, DOJ (ET)

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 4 released a more than 1,000-page report that details whistleblower disclosures about the alleged politicization of federal law enforcement. Specifically, the report focuses on the Department of Justice (DOJ) under Attorney General Merrick Garland and the FBI under Director Christopher Wray. Garland, Republicans said, has been “a willing participant of the Biden Administration’s weaponization of law enforcement.” The FBI too, Republicans assert, “has abused its law-enforcement authorities for apparently political purposes.”Republicans proceeded to cite a list of incidents and whistleblower reports showing how deeply rooted they say the politicization of federal law enforcement has become.

One of the most significant findings of the report showed that the FBI has been encouraging its agents to artificially inflate the number of domestic violent extremism (DVE) incidents. For years, Democrats—including President Joe Biden—have claimed that DVE is one of the greatest threats to U.S. national security. Specifically, Democrats have blamed conservatives and “white supremacists” for most such incidents. During the 116th Congress, Democrats even went so far as to propose legislation that would substantially bolster DOJ resources to combat DVE. “White supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States,” the bill states.According to official FBI numbers, this could very well be taken to be the case. However, the Republicans’ report indicates that Americans may have some reason to pause before accepting the FBI’s numbers on DVE events.

Whistleblowers, Republicans say, “have described how FBI leadership is pressuring line agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism even if the matter does not meet the criteria. ”That’s no mistake, Republicans assert, but instead a targeted effort by federal law enforcement to bolster Democrats’ claims about the threat posed by DVE. “At a time when the Biden Administration maintains that DVE is the ‘greatest threat’ facing the United States, the FBI appears to be complicit in artificially creating the Administration’s political narrative,” the lawmakers wrote.Whistleblowers have reported an environment that pressures agents to rack up DVE case counts. “One whistleblower explained that because agents are not finding enough DVE cases, they are encouraged and incentivized to reclassify matters as DVE cases even though there is minimal, circumstantial evidence to support the reclassification,” the report says.

“Meta had added more than 27,000 employees in 2020 and 2021 and added over 15,000 more during the first nine months of this year..”

• Meta Prepares For Large-scale Layoffs (JTN)

Facebook parent company Meta is reportedly planning to lay off thousands of employees as soon as Wednesday after experiencing rapid growth during the pandemic. Meta, which had more than 87,000 employees in September, has already told workers to cancel nonessential travel starting this week, according to The Wall Street Journal. The workforce reduction would be the first large layoffs in the company’s history. A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment, but pointed to CEO Mark Zuckerburg’s statement that the company would “focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas.”

He said during an earnings call late last month that “we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.” Meta was already planning to cut expenses by at least 10% over the next several months, the Journal reported in September. Meta had added more than 27,000 employees in 2020 and 2021 and added over 15,000 more during the first nine months of this year. Since the beginning of 2022, however, Meta’s stock has fallen more than 70%.

“It was good for woke adults who want to remain children, it was good for the national security-industrial complex, it was good for hiding behind, it was good for expanding societal power. It was not good for people.”

• The Unforgivable Request for Shamnesty (Buckley)

The actions taken by Dr. Emily Oster – who had the astonishing temerity to write the “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty” piece – and her many many over-credentialed, under-educated power mad brethren over the past 30 months cannot be given a pass. What happened during the pandemic was obviously more than a one-off drunken party moment. Having tee many martoonis does not compare to the whirlwind of destruction the COVID reaction caused. Massive educational degradation. Economic devastation, by both the lockdowns and now the continuing fiscal nightmare plaguing the nation caused by continuing federal over-reaction. The critical damage to the development of children’s social skills through hyper-masking and fear-mongering.

The obliteration of the public’s trust in institutions due to their incompetence and deceitfulness during the pandemic. The massive erosion of civil liberties. The direct hardships caused by vaccination mandates, etc. under the false claim of helping one’s neighbor. The explosion of the growth of Wall Street built on the destruction of Main Street. The clear separation of society into two camps – those who could easily prosper during the pandemic and those whose lives were completely upended. The demonization of anyone daring to ask even basic questions about the efficacy of the response, be it the vaccines themselves, the closure of public schools, the origin of the virus, or the absurdity of the useless public theater that made up much of the program. The fissures created throughout society and the harm caused by guillotined relationships amongst family and friends.

The slanders and career chaos endured by prominent actual experts (see the Great Barrington Declaration) and just plain reasonable people like Jennifer Sey for daring to offer different approaches, approaches – such as focusing on the most vulnerable – that had been tested and succeeded before. And still a million people died. And now Oster asks if everyone would just please move on and forget about it? Oster kept her job. Oster got famous. The pandemic was good for Oster. The pandemic was also good for bureaucrats, multi-nationals, putative experts, the mindless media, and internet scolds. It was good for woke adults who want to remain children, it was good for the national security-industrial complex, it was good for hiding behind, it was good for expanding societal power. It was not good for people.

They don’t take these decisions lightly.

• United Airlines Eliminating Seats As Americans Get Fatter (NYP)

United Airlines’ flights are shaping up to most comfortable coach seating in awhile.Between this month and April 30 of next year, the airline will block off up to six seats on its fleet of Boeing 757s, a company spokesperson told the “Live and Let’s Fly” blog.The decision was based on numbers gathered from the Federal Aviation Administration that indicated the average winter weight of female passengers — including their carry-on items — increased from 150 pounds in 2019 to 184 pounds in 2022. Meanwhile, the average male passenger’s winter weight went up, from 190 pounds to 205 pounds, over the same time frame.“The temporary change is a result of the increased average customer winter weights as prescribed by the FAA,” a United spokesperson said of the temporary change.

“To be compliant with the current B757 weight and balance requirements, United will block specific seats between November 1 and April, 30 2023,” it ended. Blocked-off spots will always be middle seats in rows 16 to 40 to equally distribute passengers’ weight on every flight, an official told the blog. A laminated sign will be placed on each seat that is off-limits. Passengers’ physical bodies aren’t the only contributing factor to the uptick in weight. The FAA calculated that people are stuffing more in their carry-on bags — which are not weighed in the United States — thus increasing the overall heft of the cargo. Seasonal items, such as winter coats, are also considered during the colder months. “Live and Let’s Fly” also noted that this policy was in effect last winter and was lifted by spring.

Snowden – former CIA analyst Frank Snepp

The most important video of the year was filmed in 1983. pic.twitter.com/uITMW1tGvk

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 7, 2022

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Debt Rattle November 6 2022

Nov 062022

November 6, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:35 am Finance Tagged with: Beijing, Biden, CNN, Johns Hopkins, midterms, NATO, Nazism, NYT, Scholz, Twitter 64 Responses »

Ivan Shishkin The wilds 1881

• Berlin – Moscow – Beijing (Escobar)

• The End of the Beginning and the Beginning of the End (Batiushka)

• Global Bankers ‘Very Pro-China’ – UBS (RT)

• Russia Seeks Sanctions Waiver To Facilitate Grain Exports (RT)

• The Oil Nationalization Two-Step (Luongo)

• Media Identifies Major Beneficiary Of Ukraine Crisis (RT)

• US Wants Official Of Ukrainian Descent To Run NATO (RT)

• Over 50 Countries Vote Against Anti-Nazism UN Measure (RT)

• The Great Unwind II (Alasdair Macleod)

• Lockdown Lefties Struggle In Governor’s Races, Reopen Righties Win (JTN)

• If Republicans Win On Tuesday, Thank The Election Integrity Movement (Fed.)

• Biden’s Midterms Message Includes False And Misleading Claims (CNN)

• NY Times Report That Biden Exaggerates His Economic Wins Stuns Twitter (Fox)

• Biden Unleashes Tirade Over Musk Restoring Free Speech on Twitter (Turley)

• The Twitter Massacre (MoA)

• Understanding the Reveal Stage of the Pandemic Play – Are We Winning? (LDS)

The Oil Price Cap Idiocy

Tucker Pelosi

Tucker just ended NBC after they got CAUGHT scrubbing the Today Show's Paul Pelosi report raising questions about the attack:

"NBC News has Jeffrey Epstein'ed the entire thing." pic.twitter.com/MohFv4mQ1E

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 5, 2022

Until proven otherwise

"Until Proven Otherwise." – @DrAseemMalhotra pic.twitter.com/Bipui1xoxn

— Texas Kate (@Texas_Kate) November 3, 2022

Pepe sees some optimism. It goes through China.

“..the Scholz caravan went to Beijing to essentially lay down the preparatory steps for working out a peace deal with Russia, with China as privileged messenger..”

• Berlin – Moscow – Beijing (Escobar)

Solid German business sources completely contradict the “message” delivered by the German Council on Foreign Relations on the trip to China. According to these sources, the Scholz caravan went to Beijing to essentially lay down the preparatory steps for working out a peace deal with Russia, with China as privileged messenger. This is – literally – as explosive, geopolitically and geoeconomically, as it gets. As I pointed out in one of my previous columns, Berlin and Moscow were keeping a secret communication back channel – via business interlocutors – right to the minute the usual suspects, in desperation, decided to blow up the Nord Streams. Cue to the now notorious SMS from Liz Truss’s iPhone to Little Tony Blinken, one minute after the explosions: “It’s done.”

There’s more: the Scholz caravan may be trying to start a long and convoluted process of eventually replacing the US with China as a key ally. One should never forget that the top BRI trade/connectivity terminal in the EU is Germany (the Ruhr valley). According to one of the sources, “if this effort is successful, then Germany, China and Russia can ally themselves together and drive the US out of Europe.” Another source provided the cherry on the cake: “Olaf Scholz is being accompanied on this trip by German industrialists who actually control Germany and are not going to sit back watching themselves being destroyed.” Moscow knows very well what the imperial aim is when it comes to the EU reduced to the role of totally dominated – and deindustrialized – vassal, exercising zero sovereignty.

The back channels after all are not lying in tatters on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Additionally, China has not provided any hint that its massive trade with Germany and the EU is about to vanish. Scholz himself, one day before his caravan hit Beijing, stressed to Chinese media that Germany has no intention of decoupling from China, and there’s nothing to justify “the calls by some to isolate China.” In parallel, Xi Jinping and the new Politburo are very much aware of the Kremlin position, reiterated again and again: we always remain open for negotiations, as long as Washington finally decides to talk about the end of unlimited NATO expansion drenched in Russophobia. So to negotiate means the Empire signing on the dotted line of the document it has received from Moscow on December 1st, 2021, focused on “indivisibility of security”. Otherwise there’s nothing to negotiate.

5 May 2024.

• The End of the Beginning and the Beginning of the End (Batiushka)

Many ask how much longer will the US war against Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine last? Some say only another two or three months, others much longer, even five years and more. For my own reasons I say another eighteen months, until 5 May 2024. Whatever you think, it all depends on how much the American neocon/neoliberal elite via their NATO allies, especially the UK, the Zelensky sect and their hired killers (so-called mercenaries – for few Kiev nationalists are now left to fight) want to escalate their war. And they do, which is why it did not all end last March when it could have ended. In other words, how much does the American elite want their subject-peoples, in Northern America, Western Europe and the Ukraine, to suffer?

It appears that the US elite wants them to suffer until they are all dead. But that will not happen, for the worm will turn, long, long before that. Indeed, in today’s energy and water-restricted Ukraine, some worms are already turning. And even some cold and hungry people in Western Europe and Northern America are turning too. What the elite wants, and what the people, especially in the Ukraine, will put up with, are two different things. It could all be ended tomorrow, if the elite wanted. Much more likely, this is going to take quite some time, for the war is not between the Ukraine and Russia, but between the USA and Russia. The Ukraine is merely the battlefield. No, I repeat, wait patiently until May 2024.

“Don’t bet against China and Hong Kong..”

• Global Bankers ‘Very Pro-China’ – UBS (RT)

International investment bankers are bullish about the Chinese economy despite worrying reports by the Western media, the chairman of UBS Bank, Colm Kelleher, said on Wednesday. Kelleher was speaking at the Global Financial Leaders Investment Summit in Hong Kong, which brought together more than 200 bankers and investors from 20 countries, after more than two and a half years of Covid restrictions there. Hong Kong is now reportedly seeking to boost its status as an international financial hub. “We’re not reading the American press, we actually buy the [China] story,” he said, as quoted by the Financial Times. “But it is a bit of waiting for zero-Covid to open up in China to see what will happen.

According to the FT, Kelleher’s reference to the media was “an apparent joke and a nod” to earlier remarks made by Fang Xinghai, the vice chair of the China Securities Regulatory Commission. Fang, along with other Chinese officials, used pre-recorded video interviews to reassure international investors of the country’s economic strength. He told attendees: “I would advise international investors to find out what’s really going on in China and what’s the real intention of our government by themselves. Don’t read too much of the international media.” Fang’s comments, which came after a record sell-off of Chinese equities last week in the wake of President Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power, prompted laughs and applause from the audience. “Don’t bet against China and Hong Kong,” he added.

Last week, the Chinese stock market had its worst day since the 2008 global financial crisis, with the yuan hitting a new 14-year low against the US dollar, as Xi secured his third term and undertook a major leadership reshuffle. The sharp selloff was triggered by concerns that a number of senior officials who have backed market reforms and opening up the economy were missing from the new top team. This sparked investor concerns about the future direction of the country and its relations with the US.

The west doesn’t care about feeding the poor.

• Russia Seeks Sanctions Waiver To Facilitate Grain Exports (RT)

Russia has asked the EU and other Western nations to lift sanctions on state lender Rosselkhozbank, Reuters reported on Saturday, citing sources. According to the news agency, such a move would allow the bank to restore relations with its correspondent banks abroad and process payments for Russian grain and fertilizer exports. Prior to the introduction of anti-Russia sanctions, such payments were serviced by international banks and subsidiaries of Russian banks in Switzerland, the report says. According to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, Rosselkhozbank is currently “servicing the lion’s share” of Russia’s fertilizer and food related transactions. The report did not mention whether Russia has received a response to its appeal. According to Reuters, the request was made during talks on the fate of the Ukrainian grain deal, which expires later this month.

As part of the agreement, reached in July, Western countries were supposed to ease restrictions on Russian agricultural exports. While the sanctions do not directly target these exports, certain curbs on payment processing, shipping and insurance have created obstacles for Russian exporters. Washington has taken steps to convince businesses that there are no sanctions on Russian food exports, a senior State Department official told the news outlet. The department reportedly sent out letters of reassurance to companies seeking proof that their deals with Russia would not violate restrictive measures. Nevertheless, Moscow has repeatedly said that sanctions make agricultural exports next to impossible and has demanded their cancellation. Rosselkhozbank fell under Western sanctions along with Russia’s other largest banks earlier this year, and its assets and correspondent accounts in US dollars and euros were frozen.

Narrative.

• The Oil Nationalization Two-Step (Luongo)

[..] say your goal is to legitimize the state takeover, or advance another step forward the state takeover, of an industry. Let’s use oil and gas for today’s lesson. The first thing you do is manufacture a crisis that will disrupt the supply of the product you want to takeover. In this case, it started with COVID-19, which disrupted far more than just the energy sector. More than 2 million barrels per day of refining capacity was lost world wide thanks to COVID-19. Given the current hostility to new refineres (more on this later), those barrels are not coming back. Don’t forget, that for a “Straussian Two-Step” this big you will have to brainwash and/or gaslight two entire generations into hating themselves for being rich, wasteful, spoiled, alive or worse, just plain white.

So, they are already primed to hate all the things at play here — capitalism, Big Oil, Banks, Old White Guys (rich or poor) — and enrage your useful idiots by pushing their already tenuous hold on reality to the literal breaking point. “I can’t even….” isn’t the most common phrase uttered on Tik-Tok for nothing. That’s the Thesis part. So, when the crisis hits thanks to natural gas disruption you forbid buying of from a particular country… — Hello, Vlad? We’re in a helluva pickle, would you mind invading Ukraine…? Nyet…? Well, we’ll see about that…. — MISSING PAGES FROM THE RETURN OF DR. STRANGELOVE WORKING SCRIPT. … you demonize not only Vlad but the industry itself for price gouging and preying on the widdle guy during a war. There’s a word for this… chutzpah.

Predictably, you then allow your fake political opponents … [enter Cocaine Mitch from Stage Right] … to produce the opposite argument. In this case, the counter is obviously we need free markets to produce oil and gas. The refiners are just responding to the market. That fake opposition, of course, also blames Vlad for this crisis to ensure the market’s champion looks not only patriotic but also suitably bought and paid for by Big Oil, Old White Guys, etc.

“..EU nations have committed to about $230 billion in new weapons purchases since the Russian military offensive against Kiev started..”

• Media Identifies Major Beneficiary Of Ukraine Crisis (RT)

Yahoo News has identified a major beneficiary of the Russia-Ukraine slugfest: the US military industrial complex, which is reaping a windfall even as the bloody conflict causes economic havoc, energy shortages and a looming food crisis around the world. As the media outlet reported on Saturday, EU nations have committed to about $230 billion in new weapons purchases since the Russian military offensive against Kiev started in February. US defense contractors are poised to land the lion’s share of those orders, given their dominance as suppliers to European militaries, Yahoo added. Many European nations turn to US arms makers for more than half of all their weapons purchases. Yahoo cited data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) to show examples of US dominance in European arsenals.

For instance, US-made arms accounted for 95% of the weapons purchases by the Netherlands from 2017 to 2021. The ratios were 83% US weaponry for Norway, 77% for the UK, and 72% for Italy. European weapons imports jumped 19% during the five-year period as then-President Donald Trump prodded his NATO allies to meet their obligations for defense spending. The Ukraine crisis is set to create an even bigger windfall, as President Joe Biden leads an international campaign to flood Ukraine with weapons and the conflict triggers accelerated steps by European nations to bolster their own defenses. “This is certainly the biggest increase in defense spending in Europe since the end of the Cold War,” Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Center for European Reform, told Yahoo. The crisis in Eastern Europe dispelled the notion that war on the continent is no longer possible, he added.

“They’re waking up to the fact that not only is it very possible, but it is happening, and it’s happening not that many miles away from them.” Since Biden took office in January 2021, European countries entered at least the initial stage of negotiations for $33 billion in arms purchases, including $21 billion since February, Yahoo said, citing figures from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. US defense contractors will also benefit from Washington’s massive military aid to Kiev, as the Pentagon races to replenish stocks of artillery pieces, rocket launchers and other weapons. Biden has set aside more than $65 billion in military and economic aid for Ukraine since the conflict began. Russia has warned that the influx of Western weapons will prolong the crisis while making the US and other NATO members de facto participants.

This comes far too close to putting Bandera in charge.

• US Wants Official Of Ukrainian Descent To Run NATO (RT)

The “prime candidate” favored by Washington to replace outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is Chrystia Freeland, currently Canada’s Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, the New York Times reportedon Friday. The bloc reportedly aims to install a woman at its helm for the first time, with other likely contenders being Estonian premier Kaja Kallas, Slovakian President Zuzana Caputova and Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, former president of Croatia, who was also Zagreb’s ambassador to Washington. The “strong contenders”list provided by the NYT corresponds with earlier media reports this year. The selection of a new NATO Secretary General, however, is still months away and “the names that surface first” may not survive the bargaining among the bloc’s members, unnamed NATO officials told the NYT.

Incumbent head of the bloc Stoltenberg was set to leave his post on September 30, but his term was prolonged to late 2023 amid the conflict in Ukraine. The NATO boss might ultimately end up having his tenure extended for another year, one of the officials reportedly suggested. Still, Freeland is believed to be the “prime candidate” for the post of NATO chief, favored by the US itself. “Where any of the candidates come down on support for Ukraine in the war against Russia will be a critical factor,” the paper writes. Freeland, whose mother was Ukrainian, is known to have a strong pro-Ukrainian stance. She is the granddaughter of Michael Chomiak, described by the NYT as a “grateful immigrant to Canada” who was during World War Two a “younger man involved with a Ukrainian nationalist movement that saw the Nazis as useful foils to counter the Soviets.”

The paper didn’t mention, however, that Chomiak was a prominent Ukrainian Nazi collaborator and the editor-in-chief of a Ukrainian-language propaganda daily Krakivs’ki Visti. The outlet, published between 1940 and 1945, was funded directly by Nazi Germany and described by Canadian historian – and Chomiak’s son-in-law – John-Paul Himka as a “vehemently anti-Semitic”publication. Freeland has been extremely ambiguous on her ancestry, not only refusing to condemn her maternal grandparents but somewhat endorsing them instead. In 2015 she wrote an essay called “My Ukraine,” stating that her Nazi collaborator grandparents “saw themselves as political exiles with a responsibility to keep alive the idea of an independent Ukraine.” “That dream persisted into the next generation, and in some cases the generation after that,” Freeland wrote in the essay.

Pretzel: You can’t condemn nazism without also condemning Russia, which fights nazism.

• Over 50 Countries Vote Against Anti-Nazism UN Measure (RT)

A UN resolution opposing the celebration of Nazism and related ideologies has met with significant resistance from the US and other western democracies, with 52 countries voting against it on Friday. The draft resolution “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,” introduced by Russia’s representative to the UN, was adopted with 105 votes in support. In addition to the 52 votes against it, 15 countries abstained from choosing sides.

The resolution expresses profound concern about glorifying Nazism, neo-Nazism and former Waffen SS members, condemning the construction of monuments and the holding of public ceremonies honoring the Third Reich. Introducing the resolution, the Russian delegate referenced an increase in xenophobia, anti-migrant sentiment, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, among other forms of discrimination, as necessitating it. The US and several of its allies attempted to explain their vote against the measure by claiming Russia was exploiting Nazi atrocities to justify its military operation in Ukraine, insisting that to join them in condemning the lionization of Nazis would be letting them get away with weaponizing the Holocaust to serve their nefarious ends.

The UK accused Moscow of “furthering lies and distorting history,” even while acknowledging it was using “legitimate human rights concerns raised by neo-Nazism mobilization” to justify its activities in Ukraine. The US went further, arguing that Russia’s “pretextual use of fighting neo-Nazism undermines genuine attempts to combat neo-Nazism.” And Ukraine claimed Moscow’s anti-Nazism message had “nothing in common with the genuine fight against Nazism and neo-Nazism,” which Kiev stressed it condemned in all forms. Australia, Japan, Liberia and North Macedonia proposed an amendment to clarify that while they were very much anti-Nazi, they were also profoundly anti-Russian.

Their addition “notes with alarm that the Russian Federation has sought to justify its territorial aggression against Ukraine on the purported basis of eliminating neo-Nazism,” reminding everyone that the “pretextual use of neo-Nazism to justify territorial aggression seriously undermines genuine attempts to combat neo-Nazism.” Russia opposed the amendment, accusing the writers of “trying to drive a wedge between states” by dropping it on the committee at the last minute. It was adopted with 63 votes approving, 23 against, and 65 abstaining. Moscow introduced a similar resolution last year, before the military operation in Ukraine had begun but after the US-backed coup had installed a government that allowed neo-Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion and lionized Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator whose Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of Poles and Jews during World War II. The 2021 resolution was opposed by just two states: the US and Ukraine.

Banks have been encouraged to increase risk and leverage. Now that bites.

• The Great Unwind II (Alasdair Macleod)

Imagine, for a moment, that you are the CEO of a commercial bank involved in lending to businesses and with profit centres acting in a range of financial activities. As CEO, you are answerable to the board of directors for the bank’s performance, and ultimately the bank’s shareholders for maintaining and advancing the value of their shares. Furthermore, let us set this imaginary exercise in the present. These are the issues that should keep you awake at night: In common with your competitors, the ratio of your balance sheet assets to total equity is almost the highest in the history of the bank, in many cases for other banks over twenty times leaveraged. Official inflation, measured by the CPI is about ten per cent, and producer prices are rising somewhat faster.

Your central bank expects a return to the 2% target in two- or three-years’ time. But your contacts at the central bank have privately admitted to you that they cannot imagine the circumstances where this would be true without a deep recession. Bond yields are rising, and losses are beginning to impact on the bank’s investments. The bank has relatively little direct exposure to corporate bonds and equities, but they are commonly held as collateral against customer loans. How are higher interest rates impacting the quality of the bank’s loan book? The bank supported its business customers through the covid pandemic, which increased the indebtedness of them all. This exposes the bank to excessive default risk if rates rise further.

The mortgage loan book has been a profitable business for decades. But the bank is beginning to see a material rise in delinquencies. If loan guarantees are not forthcoming from government agencies, the bank may have to shut this activity down. What impact will higher interest rates have on the bank’s derivative exposure? What are the counterparty risks in derivative chains? Derivatives that involve inadequately capitalised counterparties should perhaps be sold on, or where the bank has the option to do so, closed down. The underlying problem is that the conditions that led to the bank becoming increasingly involved in diversified activities, such as investment banking, trading, and investment management have now changed.

Since financial deregulation in the 1980s, the bank has expanded into these profitable areas. The whole industry moved from dealing in credit into generating fee income. The growth in fee income can be directly related to the long-term trend of falling interest rates, which apart from interruptions such as the dot-com excesses and the Lehman crisis, stimulated growth in corporate finance, underwriting, investment management, and trading in financial securities. The expansion of these activities in turn led to a massive expansion of derivative markets, with new instruments being devised, such as credit default and interest rate swaps.

“Don’t mess w people’s kids. It lands differently — and they will hold a grudge.”

• Lockdown Lefties Struggle In Governor’s Races, Reopen Righties Win (JTN)

Some of the Democratic governors most associated with harsh and prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns are facing stiff electoral headwinds in the midterms, while Republicans who endured national scorn by quickly reopening their states are cruising toward reelection. Republicans were already in an advantageous position with voters on crime and the economy, particularly inflation, the top two issues in polling this fall. Education issues, which propelled Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) to victory a year ago, are a leading concern in some races. And while elections tend to focus more on the future than the past, the starkly contrasting performances of lockdown lefties and reopen righties suggests that a reckoning on pandemic policies may be a stealth issue in major governor’s races.

The repercussions of lockdown policies are also felt indirectly in the top issues for voters, from supply-chain problems and inflation driven by COVID relief spending to plummeting test scores and parental outrage over school curricula resulting from remote learning. “Red wave is coming Tuesday,” freespoken sports show host Colin Cowherd tweeted Thursday. “Don’t mess w people’s kids. It lands differently — and they will hold a grudge.” “I lean mostly left, but data clearly proved kids 18 and under were safe,” and yet many were kept out of school, resulting in plunging test scores, rising suicides and “[c]haos for parents,” he continued. “A price will be paid and hopefully a lesson learned.” “Her Excellency the Queen of Michigan,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), “made it illegal … to visit friends, sell paint, mow grass, and golf” while flouting her own unilateral orders, The Spectator wrote in a recent list of “Eight Democrats we all hope lose this November.”

Maher

Bill Maher: "Woke culture… that's one reason why the Republicans are going to do so well in this election." pic.twitter.com/sQASkgpYQp

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) November 4, 2022

No chance it will go smooth.

• If Republicans Win On Tuesday, Thank The Election Integrity Movement (Fed.)

If Republican candidates do as well as expected on Tuesday, they can credit the new, widespread, and coordinated effort to begin securing U.S. elections, helping give candidates the best opportunity possible to win a fair fight in the new voting environment of mail-in balloting. The Republican National Committee, other party entities, and dozens of public interest election nonprofit groups built over the last two years a multimillion-dollar election integrity infrastructure that passed laws improving voter ID and other election security measures, defended those laws from legal attacks by Democrats, and sued states and localities that failed to follow the law. They also recruited, educated, trained, and placed tens of thousands of new election observers and other workers throughout the long midterm voting season.

And they did it all in one of the most hostile propaganda environments on record. The 2020 election was a massive wake-up call for many Americans on the right. In the months leading up to it, Democrats forced through changes to hundreds of laws and processes governing how elections are conducted. The rule-change scheme was run by Marc Elias, a Democrat election attorney who also ran his party’s Russia collusion hoax, which falsely claimed Donald Trump stole the 2016 election by colluding with Russia. Sometimes Democrats’ 2020 changes were instituted legally. Frequently, though, they were effected by other means, such as getting a friendly state or local official to change the rules unilaterally.

The 2020 election plan, some of which was admitted to in a flattering Time magazine story, sought to flood the zone with tens of millions of unsupervised mail-in ballots, historically understood to be riper for fraud and other election irregularities than supervised, in-person voting. The plan also involved the private takeover of government election offices to run Democrat-focused get-out-the-vote operations. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, financed the project, doling out $419 million to two left-wing groups that focused grants and assistance to government offices in the Democrat areas of swing states.

This radical change — “practically a revolution in how people vote,” as Time put it — included the widespread practice of placing ballot drop boxes predominantly in Democrat areas of the country, mailing out unsolicited mail-in ballots or applications for mail-in ballots, using well-funded teams of ballot harvesters both inside and outside of government, lowering and changing the standards for mail-in ballot acceptance, and fixing or “curing” ballots that were improperly filled out. Corporate media and other Democrats claimed the election was the best-run in history. In reality, it was a mess. Big Tech and the media ran coordinated disinformation campaigns to benefit Democrats by suppressing news that hurt the party. Big Tech also deplatformed effective conservative voices and media outlets, suppressed fundraising emails from Republicans, and elevated certain information to help Democrats.

Biden loses both CNN and NYT mere days before the midterms.

• Biden’s Midterms Message Includes False And Misleading Claims (CNN)

Social Security, part 1 Biden said at a Democratic fundraiser in Pennsylvania last week: “On our watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are going to get the biggest increase in their Social Security checks they’ve gotten.” He has also touted the 2023 increase in Social Security payments at other recent events. But Biden’s boasts leave out such critical context that they are highly misleading. He hasn’t explained that the increase in Social Security payments for 2023, 8.7%, is unusually big simply because the inflation rate has been unusually big. A law passed in the 1970s says that Social Security payments must be increased by the same percentage that a certain measure of inflation has increased. It’s called a cost-of-living adjustment.

Social Security, part 2 Biden said at a Democratic rally in Florida on Tuesday: “And on my watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are getting an increase in their Social Security checks.” The claim that the 2023 increase to Social Security payments is the first in 10 years is false. In reality, there has been a cost-of-living increase every year from 2017 onward. There was also an increase every year from 2012 through 2015 before the payment level was kept flat in 2016 because of a lack of inflation. The context around this Biden remark in Florida suggests he might have botched his repeat campaign line about Social Security payments increasing at the same time as Medicare premiums are declining. Regardless of his intentions, though, he was wrong.

A new corporate tax Biden repeatedly suggested in speeches in October and early November that a new law he signed in August, the Inflation Reduction Act, will stop the practice of successful corporations paying no federal corporate income tax. Biden made the claim explicitly in a tweet last week: “Let me give you the facts. In 2020, 55 corporations made $40 billion. And they paid zero in federal taxes. My Inflation Reduction Act puts an end to this.” But “puts an end to this” is an exaggeration. The Inflation Reduction Act will reduce the number of companies on the list of non-payers, but the law will not eliminate the list entirely. That’s because the law’s new 15% alternative corporate minimum tax, on the “book income” companies report to investors, only applies to companies with at least $1 billion in average annual income.

The debt and the deficit Biden said at the Tuesday rally in Florida: “Look, you know, you can hear it from Republicans, ‘My God, that big-spending Democrat Biden. Man, he’s taken us in debt.’ Well, guess what? I reduced the federal deficit this year by $1 trillion $400 billion. One trillion 400 billion dollars. The most in all American history. No one has ever reduced the debt that much. We cut the federal debt in half.” Biden offered a similar narrative at a Thursday rally in New Mexico, this time saying, “We cut the federal debt in half. A fact.” There are two significant problems here. First: Biden conflated the debt and the deficit, which are two different things. It’s not true that Biden has “cut the federal debt in half”; the federal debt (total borrowing plus interest owed) has continued to rise under Biden, exceeding $31 trillion for the first time this October. Rather, it’s the federal deficit – the annual difference between spending and revenue – that was cut in half between fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022. Second, it’s highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for even the reduction in the deficit. Biden doesn’t mention that the primary reason the deficit plummeted in fiscal years 2021 and 2022 was that it had skyrocketed to a record high in 2020 because of emergency pandemic relief spending. It then fell as expected as the spending expired as planned.

“..don’t blame this poor old man it’s not his fault.”

• NY Times Report That Biden Exaggerates His Economic Wins Stuns Twitter (Fox)

Critics of President Biden got a surprise on Friday, as the New York Times published a report grilling the 46th president for making exaggerations about his successes on the economy. Times reporters Alan Rappeport and Jim Tankersley published a piece on Friday titled, “As Elections Approach, Biden Spins His Economic Record,” which claimed that the president’s boasts about his economic achievements were not true. The report began by summing up the White House economic spin, “As President Biden and his administration have told it in recent months, America has the fastest-growing economy in the world, his student debt forgiveness program passed Congress by a vote or two, and Social Security benefits became more generous thanks to his leadership.” The piece declared, “None of that was accurate.”

The report also claimed, “The president, who has long been seen as embellishing the truth, has recently overstated his influence on the economy, or omitted key facts.” It then mentioned an erroneous claim recently made by the White House on Social Security. Quoting Biden and then correcting him, the Times said, “’On my watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are getting an increase in their Social Security checks,’ he declared. The problem: That increase was the result of an automatic cost-of-living increase prompted by the most rapid inflation in 40 years.” The piece added, “Mr. Biden had not done anything to make retirees’ checks bigger — it was just a byproduct of the soaring inflation that the president has vowed to combat.”

The official White House Twitter account made that same claim about Social Security this week, receiving a swift, community-based fact check from Twitter. The White House then took the tweet down. Further skewering Biden, the Times stated, “It is common for presidents to spin economic numbers to improve their pitch to voters,” yet “the president’s cheerleading has increasingly grown to include exaggerations or misstatements about the economy and his policy record.” The piece did insist that Biden’s “economic exaggerations generally pale in comparison to the tales spun by his predecessor, President Donald J. Trump,” though the very fact that a major liberal media outlet would go after Biden on falsehoods, turned heads on social media.

Conservative journalist Michael Caputo encouraged the paper to go further: “Go ahead say it, NYTimes, do it. You can say it: Biden is a liar.” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., tweeted, “I’m suspicious of NYT’s motivation for printing the truth about Biden. It’s out of character for them. Perhaps blaming him and his gaffs for the midterm results is the beginning of the left’s effort to replace him with a different nominee in 2024.” [..] National Review’s Jeff Blehar commented, “don’t blame this poor old man it’s not his fault.”

One week after Musk took over, and 4 days before the midterms, Biden accused Twitter of “spewing lies all across the world”. I don’t recall Biden having said this before, but he must have, right?! Because content moderation hasn’t changed at all yet, as per Musk. Oh, and 60 orgs call on advertizers to withdraw their money. But what exactly made Twitter toxic? Just that Musk mentioned free speech?

There is no way this is not coordinated.

• Biden Unleashes Tirade Over Musk Restoring Free Speech on Twitter (Turley)

Elon Musk has not actually changed the “content moderation” policies at Twitter yet, but President Joe Biden went on a virtual rave on Friday over the prospect of free speech breaking out on a single social media site. As a type of censor-in-chief, Biden has led calls for censorship on social media, which have been largely heeded by companies like Facebook and Twitter. Now Biden is accusing Twitter of “spewing lies all across the world” by seeking to reduce one of the largest censorship systems in history. The President lamented that the influence of the media will be “de minimus.” He is a bit late on that front. President Biden has previously accused social media companies of “killing people” by refusing to impose robust censorship over a wide range of subjects.

Many of those banned or censored were doctors with opposing views on the data and the science related to the pandemic. Some of those doctors were the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a more focused Covid response that targeted the most vulnerable population rather than widespread lockdowns and mandates. Many are now questioning the efficacy and cost of the massive lockdown as well as the real value of masks or the rejection of natural immunities as an alternative to vaccination. Yet, these experts and others were attacked for such views just a year ago. Some found themselves censored on social media for challenging claims of Dr. Fauci and others. The Great Barrington Declaration was not the only viewpoint deemed dangerous.

Those who alleged that the virus may have begun in a lab in China were widely denounced and the views barred from being uttered on social media platforms. It was later learned that a number of leading experts raised this theory with Fauci and others early in the pandemic. We are now seeing increasing evidence of back channels used by government and political figures to maintain a censorship system by surrogate in the social media companies and foreign allies. The President, however, was in full censor-in-chief mode this week, referring to censors as “editors.” He denounced Musk who “goes out and buys an outfit that spews lies all across the world.” He then claimed “There are no editors anymore. There are no editors anymore.” The President added “the ability of newspapers to have much impact is de minimis.”

That last statement seemed to lament the loss of a close and active ally for the Democrats. Neutrality is anathema if you have largely been able to control political and social exchanges on social media. What the President said next. however, was particularly telling and chilling: “How do people know the truth? What do they — how do they make — make a distinction between fact and fiction? There’s so much — so much going on. And we’re in the middle of this.” Indeed, perish the thought that citizens might be left to pursue the truth on their own without the government or surrogates in the media framing it for them. How could we possibly “know the truth” without our social media overlords?

“If one trains the system with badly categorized data it will be badly categorize data. It does not need an extra team to learn that.”

• The Twitter Massacre (MoA)

I am amusing myself with watching the panic some people express over Elon Musk’s cleanup of Twitter. Yesterday 3,700 of its 7,500 workers were fired. That is not good, but the company was losing money and making money is at the core of the capitalist game. Of interest is what functions were eliminated. The Guardian provides this list: From news reports and terminated employees’ announcements, here’s what we know so far about the teams that have been hit by the layoffs of thousands of Twitter employees: • The human rights team has been laid off, according to a now former employee, Shannon Raj Singh, who said the team worked to protect those at risk in global conflicts, including in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Ethiopia. • The ML (machine learning) Ethics, Transparency and Accountability team is gone, according to a tweet of a laid-off manager. • The “internet technology team”, which helps keep the site running, has been cut to “a skeleton crew”, two sources told the Times. • An accessibly experience engineering team has been cut, according to a laid-off engineering manager. • The curation team, responsible for the Moments feature on Twitter, has also been cut, former employees reported.

Twitter’s communications department is almost entirely gone, according to the Verge. Other areas that have been heavily impacted, the Verge reported, include product trust and safety, policy, research and social good. What were these teams actually doing? The human rights team leader gave some hints: Shannon Raj Singh @ShannonRSingh – 17:58 UTC · Nov 4, 2022. “Yesterday was my last day at Twitter: the entire Human Rights team has been cut from the company. sI am enormously proud of the work we did to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, to protect those at-risk in global conflicts & crises including Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, and to defend the needs of those particularly at risk of human rights abuse by virtue of their social media presence, such as journalists & human rights defenders.”

The human rights team was the ‘regime change’ force on Twitter. It intervened in conflicts where the U.S. preferred a certain side. Shannon Raj Singh had previously meddled in Afghan and other countries’ cultures: “Shannon Raj Singh is a Legal Counsel for SAHR, advising a Kabul-based team on sexual violence litigation in Afghanistan, which aims to end the invasive and discriminatory practice of female virginity testing. She is an international criminal law attorney focused on victim-centered responses to mass atrocities. Currently based in The Hague, she has experience working with the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and a number of human rights NGOs in sub-Saharan Africa. She has also practiced as a litigator in the United States, appearing in both state and federal courts and assisting with overseas corruption investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability team was also fired. Machine learning, also glorified as ‘artificial intelligence’, is essentially an (often lousy) pattern recognition system. It can be trained with categorized data and, after that, can categorized other data it gets presented. All one needs to know about its ethics, transparency and accountability is the old IT wisdom ‘garbage in garbage out’. If one trains the system with badly categorized data it will be badly categorize data. It does not need an extra team to learn that. I do not know what the ‘Internet technology team’ was doing but the function obviously still exists. It was merely downsized.

NBC Twitter

Pipeline layoffs: no prob. Twitter layoffs: consternation. pic.twitter.com/sJWds8yjUQ

— James Hirsen (@thejimjams) November 4, 2022

“The SPARS PANDEMIC 2025-2028, published by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security in October 2017..”

“You are the long-term data. You may die in the process but that’s science in the 21st century!”

• Understanding the Reveal Stage of the Pandemic Play – Are We Winning? (LDS)

The SPARS PANDEMIC 2025-2028, published by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security in October 2017, is another of those amazingly prescient, yet “entirely fictional” scenario plans that ended up looking like the blueprint for the actual covid pseudo pandemici. It is in fact the prequel to that other freakishly coincidental pandemic wargame, Event 201, hosted in October 2019 (a few weeks before SARS-COV-2 hit the headlines) by the same institution along with the CIA and the World Economic Forum (WEF). What business does the CIA and its brainchild, the WEF, have going anywhere near public health strategy planning? Absolutely none, unless of course public health strategy is to be used as a nefarious special purpose vehicle for intelligence services and the global corporate oligarchy.

[..] It is a masterclass in absurdity which has its roots in the inherent contradiction in drafting a plan that purports to deal with the inevitable fallout of a manufactured crisis while pretending that the crisis is not manufactured. Its aim is to present failure scenarios to public health spin doctors, referred to as “public health risk communicators”, and invite them to “mentally rehearse responses” to these failures. But, in providing pitiful explanations for all the failure scenarios, it effectively exposes the Medical Counter Measures (MCMs) of a corrupt pseudo pandemic for the sham that they are. Instead of mitigating the consequences of a real pandemic, the MCMs are the very things that perversely create the necessity for narrative spin and psyops.

[..] It is undoubtedly sinister because of its prediction of all the ‘errors’ and ‘mistakes’ that were made in the manufactured covid ‘pandemic’. In the latter sections of the document – the Reveal stage – the planners anticipate fallout from being unable to keep a lid on vaccine injury. Nevertheless, a somewhat happy ending for the pandemic planners is fashioned in their Pandemic Play. So, will they succeed in constructing the reality they desire? In the 2017 playbook, as “claims of adverse side effects beg[i]n to emerge”, the pandemic planners coyly suggest that the demands for the “removal of the liability shield protecting the pharmaceutical companies” will be deflected by the “emergency appropriation of [taxpayer] funds”. Because God forbid that Big Pharma, having siphoned off billions from the taxpayers’ purse for efficiently distributing poison, might then be subjected to the humiliation of footing the bill for the injuries caused by it.

The pandemic planners were also prepared for the ethical quandary of hastily mass injecting an experimental preparation with no long-term safety data. The ‘rare’ side effect rebuttal is alluded to by reference to “relatively few reports of neurological symptoms” while the problem is framed as an overblown social media response. Ultimately the blame is placed squarely at the feet of an ignorant public – those “demand[ing] proof that the vaccines [do] not cause long-term effects” are “displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of scientific research”! You just don’t get it, so let me spell it out to you on behalf of the pandemic planners. You, the entire public, the 5.3 billion people injected so far – you are the subjects of the experiment, and the experiment isn’t over until the CDC, FDA, MHRA et al say it is. You are the long-term data. You may die in the process but that’s science in the 21st century!

Turkey map 2050

You know Turkish elections are around the corner when maps like this show up on tv.
They claim that by 2050 the whole region and beyond will be under Turkish control.
The best part of all this delirium is that a large number of Turks actually believe it, @RTErdogan relies on this pic.twitter.com/musnhCN1jj

— Harry Theocharous (@TheocharousH) November 5, 2022

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Debt Rattle October 21 2022

Oct 212022

October 21, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:05 am Finance Tagged with: Berlusconi, BRICS, China, Kerch Bridge, midterms, Paypal, Saudi, Turkstream, Twitter 80 Responses »

Salvador Dali Llane Beach, Cadaques 1919

• US May End Aid To Ukraine After Midterms – Axios (RT)

• Berlusconi Trashes NATO Narrative On Ukraine (RT)

• Putin’s Gift To Berlusconi May Have Breached EU Sanctions (RT)

• Power Costs In Italy Going Through The Roof (RT)

• Zelensky Denies Kiev’s Role In Crimean Bridge Blast (RT)

• Britain’s Stark Choice Ahead – Transformation or Collapse (Nafeez Ahmed)

• US Slams Turkey-Russia Deal to Form a Natural Gas Hub (GR)

• Xi Gets Ready For The Final Countdown (Escobar)

• ‘Peaceful Modernization’: China’s Offering To The Global South (Escobar)

• Saudi Arabia Is Interested In Joining The BRICS (Telesur)

• Biden Admin Weighs Blocking Twitter Deal On “National Security” Grounds (ZH)

• PayPal Faces House Inquiry On $2,500 ‘Misinformation’ Fine Controversy (JTN)

• How An Illiquid Dollar Ruins The World (Piepenburg)

• It’s Been 2 Years Since 51 Intel Agents Interfered With An Election (Devine)

• One in Every 500 Small Children Who Get Pfizer Vaccine are Hospitalised (DS)

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.
– G.K. Chesterton

Terhes
https://twitter.com/i/status/1583069992605876224

Gaddafi

11 years ago today, Muammar Gaddafi was killed.
3 years before his death, he warned the Arab League:

"An entire Arab Leadership was executed by hanging.

Any one of you might be next.

We are friends of America but one of these days, America may hang us." pic.twitter.com/TZDjvsmO0a

— In Context (@incontextmedia) October 20, 2022

Zakharova
https://twitter.com/i/status/1583048680512180224

Deindustrialization in Europe

– fertilizer down 70%
– aluminum down 50%
– silicon down 27%
– steel down 17%
– paper & packaging down 15%
– 100% of zinc smelters shut or curtailed
– total chem industry set to decline 40%

Due to nat gas shortages

Biden still refuses to help pic.twitter.com/n5y3BLqkyZ

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) October 19, 2022

Amazon books Tucker

Why is Amazon banning books from prominent authors they don’t like? We investigate. pic.twitter.com/hUOAxfwOMI

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 20, 2022

Will the GOP turn its back on Raytheon? Maybe they reckon this cannot be taken any further, that too many impoverished Americans will turn their backs on them. November 8.

• US May End Aid To Ukraine After Midterms – Axios (RT)

The extensive assistance provided by Washington to Ukraine amid its conflict with Russia may be cut if the Republican Party takes control of Congress in the midterm elections on November 8, Axios has reported. Even the harshest critics of Vladimir Putin among the Republicans now acknowledge that there’s been a “noticeable shift away from what was once a broad bipartisan consensus” on providing aid to Kiev, the outlet reported on Wednesday. It cited House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who told Punchbowl News earlier this week: “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine. They just won’t do it. ”Ukraine might be important, but it can’t be the only thing on the agenda of the US administration, he insisted.

Republican Congressman Don Bacon also said he’d “noticed” a decline in support for Ukraine. “You see it a little bit on social media, you see it with some of our members,” he said. Bacon’s colleague Kelly Armstrong told Axios that the mood swing was likely a result of the feedback that the lawmakers had been getting from their constituents. “When people are seeing a 13% increase in grocery prices; energy, utility bills doubling… if you’re a border community and you’re being overrun by migrants and fentanyl, Ukraine is the furthest thing from your mind,” he pointed out. The website also cited a senior House Republican, who claimed that “after the $40 billion [in aid package in May], there were a lot of Republicans saying: ‘This is the last time I’m going to support Ukraine funding.’”

In a comment to Axios, Congressman Jim Banks, who chairs the Republican Study Committee (RSC), pointed out that his party is going to focus on domestic issues after the midterms. “RSC believes you can’t lead abroad when you’re so weak at home. Our GOP agenda in the new majority needs to secure our own border and get America back on our feet by addressing energy cost and inflation,” he explained. Asked to comment on McCarthy’s remarks, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre insisted that the Biden administration would “continue to work with Congress, as we have these past several months, on these efforts and support Ukraine as long as it takes.”Jean-Pierre reminded that this was a“commitment” that Joe Biden made to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

White House aides told Politico on Wednesday that the Biden administration hadn’t warned Kiev about the possibility of US aid coming to an end in the event that Republicans take control of at least one chamber of Congress after the election. However, officials in Kiev are aware that this may happen, they said. The US has been Kiev’s biggest backer since the outbreak of its conflict with Russia in late February, providing Kiev with more than $16.8 billion in military aid, including sophisticated hardware such as HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, M777 howitzers, and combat drones. Moscow has been decrying those weapons deliveries, saying they only prolong the fighting and increase the risk of a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO.

Major threat to Meloni’s new coalition. Just because he’s right.

“Giorgia Meloni, who has been tasked with forming a new Italian government, stated that people who do not share a pro-NATO stance would have no place in her coalition.”

• Berlusconi Trashes NATO Narrative On Ukraine (RT)

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has reportedly claimed that Kiev triggered a conflict with Russia by reneging on a peace plan for eastern Ukraine, a tape provided to the media suggests. In an apparent response to the leak, Giorgia Meloni, who has been tasked with forming a new Italian government, stated that people who do not share a pro-NATO stance would have no place in her coalition. Speaking to members of his Forza Italia party on Tuesday, Berlusconi reportedly offered a viewpoint about the origin of the Ukraine crisis that clashed with the NATO-favored narrative of unprovoked Russian aggression against its neighbor.

Italy is an important member of the US-led alliance and anyone who disagrees with this position will be excluded from government, Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy party, pledged on Wednesday evening, as quoted by the newspaper La Repubblica. In the audio clip, Berlusconi can be heard accusing Kiev of failing for years to uphold a peace deal with the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. When Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky came to power in 2019, he “tripled down” on attacking the regions, the politician stated. Donetsk and Lugansk asked for Moscow’s protection, he continued. Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine in the hope that Zelensky would be overthrown and replaced with “good people of common sense” within a couple of weeks, Berlusconi claimed. The wording resembles what he told the Italian public broadcaster RAI after the September election. During this week’s meeting, Berlusconi allegedly suggested that the conflict in Ukraine could last for over “200 years,”after the country unexpectedly resisted Russia and received money and arms from Western nations to continue the fighting.

In another part of the recording, which was published by the LaPresse news agency, Berlusconi claimed to have received a crate of vodka and a “nice letter” from Putin for his birthday. He added that he responded by sending Lambrusco wine to the Russian leader. After the clip was released, the former prime minister’s party claimed he had been referring to historical contacts with Putin and not recent events. Berlusconi has a long record of friendly relations with Putin, which stretched beyond his tenure as prime minister. The three-time former leader of the Italian government’s participation in the right-wing coalition has resulted in claims that the country could make a foreign policy U-turn and oppose the US-led anti-Russian campaign under Meloni. She repeatedly pledged her support for the EU and NATO after winning the election.

“I responded with 20 bottles of Lambrusco and a similarly sweet letter..”

• Putin’s Gift To Berlusconi May Have Breached EU Sanctions (RT)

A case containing 20 bottles of vodka that Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly sent to former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as a birthday gift may have violated EU sanctions, Der Spiegel reported on Thursday, citing an official comment from the European Commission to the DPA news agency. According to the statement, a spokeswoman for the Commission told the news agency that the April 2022 ban on goods imports from Russia to the EU includes spirits, namely vodka, and does not provide an exemption for gifts. The spokeswoman went on to explain that breaches of the sanctions can be reported to the competent national authorities of member states, or directly to Brussels. The news that Putin had sent the gift to Berlusconi was reported by Italy’s LaPresse news agency earlier this week.

The outlet released an audio recording of the former prime minister’s discussion with members of his party, Forza Italia, at a closed meeting. “I have reconnected with President Putin… He sent me 20 bottles of vodka and a really sweet letter for my birthday. I responded with 20 bottles of Lambrusco and a similarly sweet letter,” Berlusconi was heard saying in the recording. However, Forza Italia representatives later said that the former PM was not referring to his most recent birthday on September 29, 2022, but instead was telling “an old story to lawmakers about an episode that occurred years ago,” which means that EU sanctions may not apply at all. The party representatives added that “Berlusconi denies the news of alleged renewed relations with Vladimir Putin.”

However, later reports emerged, suggesting that the remarks were indeed made this year. The potential scandal comes just weeks after the 86-year-old politician returned to the Italian parliament, nine years after being forced out for alleged tax fraud. Previously, Putin and Berlusconi enjoyed a friendly relationship and often complimented one another. However, Berlusconi has lately been critical of Putin over Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, saying he was disappointed with the Russian leader, who he always considered “a man of democracy and peace.”

How much longer will Italy support NATO and its Ukraine attack?

• Power Costs In Italy Going Through The Roof (RT)

Electricity tariffs in Italy saw record growth last month, exceeding 136% on an annual basis, according to a National Union of Consumers report on Tuesday. The report said that in September, electricity prices came out on top in the ranking of the most expensive goods and services, which the union regularly compiles based on data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). In the category of non-food products, electricity prices were followed by costs for air travel across Europe, which have risen 128% over the past year. Then came intercontinental flights, for which the prices almost doubled (97.4%). Gas tariffs increased by just under 64% in September.As for food products, the ranking was led by vegetable oils (with the exception of olive oil), up by almost 60%.

The prices of butter and rice rose 38% and 26.7% respectively. Other foodstuffs that saw price increases of more than 20% include pasta, canned milk, flour, and basic vegetables. “Only for food and drink, every single Italian family will pay an average of €660 more per year,” the consumer union’s president, Massimiliano Dona, said. He added that families with two children will have to pay €900 ($885) more, and those with three children, €1,075 ($1,057) more.Inflation in Italy climbed to 8.9% in September on an annualized basis, ISTAT data shows. Meanwhile, the ‘consumer basket’ saw a rise of 10.9% over the year. Such a high increase in the price of basic foodstuffs and personal goods has not been recorded in Italy since 1983.

The head of Italian energy think tank Nomisma Energia said this week that Italy, along with the rest of Europe, is experiencing an energy shock of unprecedented magnitude, as electricity prices have almost doubled. According to him, Italians should be ready for rationing during the coldest winter months. He also urged households to make use of alternative methods of heating, such as burning firewood and pellets, though he added that prices for these are also up.

Russia knows who did it.

• Zelensky Denies Kiev’s Role In Crimean Bridge Blast (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has denied “ordering” the bombing of the Crimean Bridge linking the peninsula to mainland Russia. The president made the remarks during an interview with the Canadian broadcaster CTV, aired on Wednesday. Asked to comment on the “spectacular attack” on the bridge, as the broadcaster put it, Zelensky said Kiev was not involved. “We definitely did not order that, as far as I know,” he told the reporters. The bridge was hit by a massive explosion on October 8, which severely damaged its road traffic section and killed three civilians, as well as setting a passing freight train on fire. Several top Ukrainian officials openly celebrated the attack, while the country’s postal service issued a stamp commemorating the blast, just hours after it happened.

Moscow has directly blamed Kiev for the incident, branding the explosion a “terrorist attack.” Russian law enforcement claims to have established how the bomb, which was disguised as construction materials, made it to the bridge from the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, via multiple transit countries. Russian investigators believe the plot was hatched by Ukrainian military intelligence. Moscow has identified 12 individuals as suspected accomplices in the plot and has arrested eight of them, the FSB said. The list of people in custody includes five Russians and three foreign nationals, who hold passports of Ukraine and Armenia. A spokesman for Ukrainian military intelligence told the media that the FSB was a “fake structure,” and that the report was unworthy of comment.

“..states begin to fail within 15 years of losing their main sources of energy and economic revenue..”

• Britain’s Stark Choice Ahead – Transformation or Collapse (Nafeez Ahmed)

Five years ago, I warned in a study that Europe faces an increasing risk of state failure due to the escalation of interlinked environmental, energy and economic crises – and I found an intriguing pattern: states begin to fail within 15 years of losing their main sources of energy and economic revenue. Escalating crisis drives social polarisation, undermining national cohesion and resulting in outbreaks of civil unrest. Without a change of course, these outbreaks coalesce to undermine the functioning of key state institutions. At worst, they can lead to total government collapse and a state of permanent warfare. Gripped by multiple crises, Britain now appears to be following a familiar pattern of environmental, energy and economic-driven state failure.

Since the 1970s, the world has experienced a rising trend of civil unrest and societal breakdown – in correlation with three realities: rising inequality associated with the neoliberal age of globalisation; escalating economic overshoot of the Earth’s ecological systems; and intensifying decline in the quality of fossil fuel energy resources. Britain’s North Sea Oil production peaked in 1999. Fifteen years later, as its domestic oil production haemorrhaged, fringe right-wing nationalist forces had moved increasingly into the mainstream. They blamed Europe, immigrants, asylum seekers, Muslims and ethnic minorities for Britain’s intractable social and economic crises. Their success was arguably reflected in the 2016 vote to leave the European Union. During that period, the quality of the UK’s energy dropped by a third, if not more.

In 2000, a year after the UK’s North Sea Oil production peaked, Britain’s ‘energy return on investment’ (EROI) – a ratio capturing the amount of energy used to extract a single unit of energy – was around 9.6. By 2012, this had plummeted to 6.2. This is well below the minimum EROI benchmark of 11 considered necessary to sustain continued economic growth. As a study by the University of Leeds’ Sustainability Research Institute concluded, this means that “more and more energy is having to be used in the extraction of energy itself rather than by the UK’s economy or society”. What is happening to Britain now is symptomatic of a wider global phenomenon. Its dependence on oil, gas and coal is self-cannibalising. The scientific consensus shows that it is driving us towards climate catastrophe and, at worst, civilisational collapse.

Only US LNG allowed.

• US Slams Turkey-Russia Deal to Form a Natural Gas Hub (GR)

The U.S. expressed on Wednesday its opposition to the agreement announced by Turkey for the creation of a natural gas hub in cooperation with Russia. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that he had agreed with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to form a natural gas hub in Turkey. Speaking to members of his AK Party in parliament, Erdogan said Putin had said Europe can obtain its gas supply from the hub in Turkey. “Türkiye will be a hub for natural gas as well. In our last meeting, we agreed with Putin on this issue. We will create a hub here with Turkish gas coming from Russia,” Erdogan said. The U.S. State Department fired back.

“We have worked closely with our allies and partners to impose severe and unprecedented costs on Russia, including through sanctions, export controls, visa restrictions. We have urged Turkey and all of our allies and partners that no one should have become a safe haven for illicit Russian assets or transactions, and we will continue to make that case,” Vedant Patel, State Department’s principal deputy spokesperson said. “And as it relates to the energy conversation, we have continued to urge our allies to take steps to diversify their energy sources, to reduce energy reliance on Russia. And in the case of Turkey, we are working with them closely to assist in their own efforts to enhance energy security in the long term,” he added.

Last month, on the sidelines of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia summit in the Kazakh capital Astana, Erdogan held a closed-door meeting with Putin, who had proposed building a natural gas hub in Turkey. Putin has floated the idea of exporting more gas via the TurkStream gas pipeline running beneath the Black Sea to Turkey, touting the country as the best route for redirecting gas supplies to the European Union after the Nord Stream pipeline leaks. Erdogan previously said Russian and Turkish energy authorities would work together to designate the best location for the potential gas distribution center, adding that Turkey’s Thrace region, bordering Greece and Bulgaria, appeared to be the best spot.

Carrying natural gas from Russia to Turkey and further into Europe, the TurkStream was formally launched in January 2020. The pipeline, which allows Moscow to bypass Ukraine as a transit route to Europe, carries Russian gas to Southern Europe through the Black Sea and Turkey.

About Xi’s speech this week.

• Xi Gets Ready For The Final Countdown (Escobar)

Xi also did not mention the US by name. Everyone in the leadership – especially the new Politburo – is aware of how Washington wants to “decouple” from China in every possible way and will continue to provocatively deploy every possible strand of hybrid war. Xi did not enter into details during his speech, but it’s clear the driving force going forward will be technological innovation linked to a global vision. That’s where BRI comes in, again – as the privileged field of application for these tech breakthroughs. Only this way we can understand how Zhu Guangyao, a former vice minister of finance, may be sure that per capita GDP in China in 2035 would at least double the numbers in 2019 and reach $20,000.

The challenge for Xi and the new Politburo right away is to fix China’s structural economic imbalance. And pumping up debt-financed “investment” all over again won’t work. So bets can be made that Xi’s third term – to be confirmed later this week – will have to concentrate on rigorous planning and monitoring of implementation, much more than during his previous bold, ambitious, abrasive but sometimes disconnected years. The Politburo will have to pay way more attention to technical considerations. Xi will have to delegate more serious policymaking autonomy to a bunch of competent technocrats. Otherwise, we will be back to that startling observation by then Premier Wen Jiabao in 2007: China’s economy is “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and ultimately unsustainable”. That’s exactly where the Hegemon wants it to be.

As it stands, things are far from gloomy. The National Development and Reform Commission states that compared to the rest of the world, China’s consumer inflation is only “marginal”; the job market is steady; and international payments are stable. Xi’s work report and pledges may also be seen as turning the usual Anglo-American geopolitical suspects – Mackinder, Mahan, Spykman, Brzezinski – upside down. The China-Russia strategic partnership has no time to lose with global hegemonic games; what drives them is that sooner rather than later they will be ruling the Heartland – the world island – and beyond, with allies from the Rimland, and from Africa to Latin America, all participating in a new form of globalization. Certainly with Chinese characteristics; but most of all, pan-Eurasian characteristics. The final countdown is already on.

The Ukraine conflict hinders China’s BRI. They want it to flow into Europe unimpeded.

• ‘Peaceful Modernization’: China’s Offering To The Global South (Escobar)

All over the extremely incandescent global chessboard, international relations are being completely reframed. China – and key Eurasian players at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), BRICS+, and Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) – are all proposing peaceful development. In contrast, the Hegemon imposes an avalanche of sanctions – not by accident the top three recipients are Eurasian powers Russia, Iran and China; lethal proxy wars (Ukraine); and every possible strand of hybrid war to prevent the end of its supremacy, which lasted barely seven and a half decades, a blip in historical terms.

The current dysfunction – physical, political, financial, cognitive – is reaching a climax. As Europe plunges into the abyss of largely self-inflicted devastation and darkness – a neo-medievalism in woke register – an internally ravaged Empire resorts to plundering even its wealthy “allies”. It’s as if we are all witnessing a Mackinder-on-crack scenario. Halford Mackinder, of course, was the British geographer who developed the ‘Heartland Theory’ of geopolitics, heavily influencing US foreign policy during the Cold War: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”

Russia spans 11 time zones and sits atop as much as one third of the world’s natural resources. A natural symbiosis between Europe and Russia is like a fact of life. But the EU oligarchy blew it. It’s no wonder the Chinese leadership views the process with horror, because one of BRI’s essential planks is to facilitate seamless trade between China and Europe. As Russia’s connectivity corridor has been blocked by sanctions, China will be privileging corridors via West Asia. Meanwhile, Russia is completing its pivot to the east. Russia’s enormous resources, combined with the manufacturing capability of China and East Asia as a whole, project a trade/connectivity sphere that goes even beyond BRI. That’s at the heart of the Russian concept of Greater Eurasia Partnership.

Critical mass.

• Saudi Arabia Is Interested In Joining The BRICS (Telesur)

At an interview on the South African Broadcasting Corporation on Tuesday, President Cyril Ramposa announced that Saudi Arabia is interested in joining BRICS, an economic cooperation organization made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. “Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman expressed the kingdom’s desire to join the BRICS,” the South African president said, adding that other countries are also interested in joining this organization. “In 2023, the BRICS summit will be held under the South African presidency and this request will be studied. Several countries are in contact with the BRICS and we have assured them that the accession issue will be discussed and a decision will be made,” Ramposa explained.

Among the nations that have already applied to join this international forum is Argentina, whose President Alberto Fernandez asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to join the BRICS. Sabino Vaca, Argentina’s ambassador to China, stated that the BRICS constitute an excellent cooperation alternative for developing countries given that the current world order has shown that it only works for the benefit of a few nations. At their 14th summit in July, the BRICS countries discussed economic cooperation options related to the creation of a new development bank, the formation of a contingent reserve arrangement, an intercountry payment system, and a BRICS basket reserve currency. Seen from the perspective of the global financial system, the consequence of those actions would be the gradual weakening of the U.S. dollar as an international reserve currency.

ZeroHedge: “Just as Musk wanted”, “And the thing is Musk will still end up owning it… just 80% cheaper under the next admin.”

• Biden Admin Weighs Blocking Twitter Deal On “National Security” Grounds (ZH)

One month ago we joked that should the Delaware judge force Musk to buy Twitter, then none other than the US government would step in and prevent the South African from gaining control over the blue-checkmark echo chamber of record, the one social media network which congressional testimony after congressional testimony has argued it can manipulate the outcome of elections. Well, that prediction is about to come true, because according to Bloomberg, the Biden administration is discussing whether the US should subject some of Elon Musk’s ventures to national security reviews, including the deal for Twitter and SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, citing people familiar with the matter.

In short, not only is the ~~deep state~~ government preparing to block Musk’s acquisition of TWTR on national security grounds (unlcear what that would achieve as the stock would crater to single digits, especially after today’s SNAP earnings, and so many of its employees have already quit), but it may “expropriate” Musk’s satellite pet project too, all for daring to ask a question about the US involvement in Ukraine, and what exactly the endgame there is. As Bloomberg adds, “US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine — he said it had cost him $80 million so far — and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.”

The discussions are still at an early stage, the people familiar said on condition of anonymity. Officials in the US government and intelligence community are weighing what tools, if any, are available that would allow the federal government to review Musk’s ventures. One possible legal pathway is through the law governing the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to review Musk’s deals and operations for national security risks. The CFIUS was used extensively in the Trump admin to block and undo numerous Chinese deals, arguing they could pose a national threat to the US. Now, it’s none other than Musk who has emerged as the deep state’s biggest nemesis.

“..the company still maintains a $2,500 “liquidation” policy against accounts accused of “discrimination” and “hatred” as well as “intolerance”..”

• PayPal Faces House Inquiry On $2,500 ‘Misinformation’ Fine Controversy (JTN)

House Republicans are launching an inquiry into PayPal after the payment processing company sparked major controversy for a policy that would fine customers for “misinformation.” The controversy began when news broke earlier this month that PayPal would fine customers $2,500 for spreading misinformation. PayPal quickly retracted the policy, saying it was a mistake that “went out in error” but not before “cancelPayPal” was trending and Twitter users boasted of deleting their accounts. The company’s stocks tumbled as the news unfolded. Now, House Republicans want answers. They sent a letter to PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman asking how the policy originated, who approved it, whether the Biden administration was involved, and more.

“As a leading financial technology company, it is concerning that a user agreement that contemplates the restriction of free speech was uploaded and disseminated to PayPal users – even if in error,” the letter said. “We understand your company is currently investigating this matter. Upon the conclusion of your investigation, we request that you provide a briefing for the Committees as soon as practicable.” [..] The letter requests answers by the end of the month to a range of questions, including whether any entities were affected by the policy change, when the internal investigation will be over, and who was responsible for the policy in question.

Critics also point out that while PayPal rescinded its misinformation policy, the company still maintains a $2,500 “liquidation” policy against accounts accused of “discrimination” and “hatred” as well as “intolerance” as the company chooses to define it. “The ability to transact without fear of retribution and political censorship is the foundation on which a free economy is built,” Emmer said. “We cannot afford to sacrifice these freedoms, and we must keep a close eye on any actions that erode them. The now-rescinded penalties outlined in PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy were deeply concerning, and the American people deserve answers about how these decisions are made and whether their speech will be protected on this kind of platform.”

Dumping Treasuries.

• How An Illiquid Dollar Ruins The World (Piepenburg)

All of this scheming, leverage and swapping boils down to not enough available (i.e., liquid) USDs in a global financial system in which nearly everything—from debt, to oil to derivatives—still has to be paid in increasingly scarce and hence increasingly expensive Dollars. In addition to this twisted, illiquid and over-levered swamp, the USD rises even higher on Powell rate hikes, all of which combine to force the world’s other currencies to fall. Why? Because other countries and central banks have no choice but to swallow/import USD inflation, monetary policy and American political self-interest. Indeed, with financial allies like the U.S., who needs enemies?

Whenever the Fed, for example, prints more of the world reserve currency or raises its interest rate, the rest of the world, which is tied to that currency, is forced to react—i.e., debase, hike and suffer. We remind that nearly $14T in USD-denominated debt is owed by both emerging market and developed market economies. As the USD rises in strength on the back of Powell’s impossible Volcker-revival and tangled derivatives, other Dollar-desperate nations from Argentina to Japan find themselves with not enough Greenbacks to pay their debts or settle trades, wires and oil purchases, which thus forces them to print (i.e., debase) more of their local currencies to make USD-denominated payments.

But Japan takes the cake for debasing its own currency all on its own, as no nation has ever loved a money printer and currency-debaser more. This might explain why Japan is leading the charge in dumping its USTs into the FOREX markets, which only adds more pressure to rising yields and hence rising rates. Thanks Kuroda—just one more central banker with a mouse-clicker gone mad… Perhaps he’ll be next in line for a Nobel Prize? But Japan is not alone, as other nations dump the once sacred UST just to keep their currencies afloat…In short: The strong USD is crippling the word, and that world, as we’ve written numerous times, will be de-dollarizing at a steady and irreversible pace.No shocker there. At some point, Dollar-indebted nations crack and this twisted global game ends in a credit crisis for the history books.

“..they still won’t apologize..”

• It’s Been 2 Years Since 51 Intel Agents Interfered With An Election (Devine)

Exactly two years ago, on October 19, 2020, one of the dirtiest tricks in electoral history was played on the American people by 51 former intelligence officials, who used the false alarm of “Russian interference” to stop Donald Trump winning a second term as president. Using the institutional weight of their former esteemed roles, they signed a dishonest letter to mislead voters 15 days before the election, claiming that material from Hunter Biden’s laptop published by the New York Post “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” In their expert opinion, “the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue.” Russia was “trying to influence how Americans vote in this election … Moscow [will] pull out the stops to do anything possible to help Trump win and/or to weaken Biden should he win.

“A ‘laptop op’ fits the bill, as the publication of the emails are [sic] clearly designed to discredit Biden … It is high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.” It was all a lie. Their letter was the culprit “interfering with democracy” in broad daylight. Not one of the 51 had seen any material from the laptop or bothered asking for it, but their letter, instigated by, signed and delivered to Politico by Democratic operative and former John Brennan aide Nick Shapiro, killed the story stone dead. It got candidate Joe Biden off the hook for the corrupt influence-peddling scheme his family had been running through the eight years of his vice presidency. The shameful letter was used by Joe Biden three days later, on October 22, to deflect Trump’s attack in their last debate.

“There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan … Four, five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage … You know his character. You know my character. You know my reputation is for honor and telling the truth … The character of the country is on the ballot.” Biden dismissed as a Kremlin smear all the evidence that was on his son’s laptop of dirty money from China and Russia, of all his meetings with Hunter’s overseas business partners, and all the lies he had told about his involvement in Hunter’s business deals The letter, like the Steele dossier and Russia collusion hoax peddled by many of the signatories, has helped fuel a moral panic about Russia in recent years that now has heightened the risk of nuclear war.

A three month study will not reveal the real damage done. That takes years. But already 1 in 500 is insanely high. And still the CDC is pushing it.

• One in Every 500 Small Children Who Get Pfizer Vaccine are Hospitalised (DS)

One in every 500 children under five years who received the Pfizer mRNA Covid vaccine were hospitalised with a vaccine injury, and one in 200 had symptoms ongoing for weeks or months afterwards, a study has found. The study published in JAMA included 7,806 children aged five or younger who were followed up of for an average of 91.4 days following their first Pfizer vaccination. It was a retrospective cohort study done as an authenticated online survey (response rate 41.1%) in spring 2022 which included parents or caregivers who registered children for SARS-CoV-2 vaccination in outpatient care facilities in Germany. It compared the adverse events to those of the same children with other vaccinations in order to control for over-reporting.

7 year old boy

It concluded that the symptoms reported after Pfizer vaccination were “comparable overall” to those for other vaccines. Let’s see. • Any symptoms: 62% higher • Musculoskeletal (muscles and bones) symptoms: 155% higher • Dermatologic (skin) symptoms: 118% higher • Otolaryngologic (ears, nose and throat) symptoms: 537% higher • Cardiovascular (heart etc.): 36% higher • Gastrointestinal (stomach etc.): 54% higher. It calls these “modestly elevated”. In 0.5% of the children (40 of 7,806) symptoms were “currently ongoing and thus of unknown significance”. This is in a study with a 2-4 month follow-up period. That means 0.5% of children had an adverse effect that lasted for weeks or months. In two cases (0.03%), symptoms were confirmed to have lasted longer than 90 days.

Ten children were hospitalised with reported serious adverse events (SAEs), compared to zero with the other vaccines. This reported as 0.1%, as it is out of 7,806. However, the study also states that no hospitalisations were reported for children administered the low dosage of 3 μg. Since it also tells us that 6,033 children received at least one dose of over 3 μg. (or unknown dosage), the rate in the relevant cohort is closer to 0.2%, or around one in 500. Four of the hospitalisations were for cardiovascular injury; one child was hospitalised after both doses for this reason. Four were pulmonary (lung) related. Symptoms of the hospitalised children lasted an average of 12.2 days and a maximum of 60 days. None reported a myocarditis diagnosis. Mercifully, no deaths were reported in this relatively small sample.

Knots

“Sometimes the easiest way to solve a problem is to stop participating in the problem.”pic.twitter.com/7W8DcbAk7e

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) October 19, 2022

Denzel

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read it, you’re misinformed.”

~ Denzel Washingtonpic.twitter.com/dgZtkhLmXN

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) October 20, 2022