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Debt Rattle November 11 2026

Nov 112026
 
 November 11, 2026  Posted by at 10:02 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Weeping woman 1937


• Iran Won’t Surrender. Can Russia Give Trump Another Way Out? (Ibragimov)
• The Peace Trade is a Trap (Jim Rickards)
• Russia Flatly Rejects EU Role In Abu Dhabi Ukraine Peace Talks (ZH)
• Elon Musk’s Greatest Sin Is That He’s Unapologetic About His Success (Moran)
• France’s Socialist Fever Dream a Preview of Democrat Party’s Future (Green)
• Is Socialism Becoming ‘Mainstream’ In America? (Eric Utter)
• Democrats: the Party of ‘No’ (Jack Hellner)
• This Is a HUGE Move for the House GOP (Matt Margolis)
• Dana White Makes White House Press Briefing Appearance (ET)
• What Jensen Huang Told Trump When Asked If He Knew She Was A Spy (ZH)
• DOJ Investigating Marc Elias in Peltola Scandal Case (Tim O’Brien)
• Biden Says Trump Should Carry Weight Of US Capitol Riot ‘To His Grave’ (BBC)
• German World Cup Winner Placed On Ukrainian ‘Kill List’ (RT)

 

 

 

 

Trump has said he doesn’t think there will be large scale US attacks needed anymore. He relies on ecoomic measures. Sanctions. Iran is selling hardly any oil.

Putin, who’s close to Iran, may be able to mediate. But that means, in this case, finding the language that saves IRGC faces.

Russia could for instance step up to guarantee that Iran has no more nuke development.

 

 


“Tehran’s outreach to Moscow opens space for a deal that could protect Iranian interests and give Washington a political win. “

“.. by Farhad Ibragimov – lecturer at the Faculty of Economics at RUDN University, expert and lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences and Mass Communications, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation..”

• Iran Won’t Surrender. Can Russia Give Trump Another Way Out? (Ibragimov)

On November 5, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran Mohsen Rezaei in the Kremlin during the official’s working visit to Moscow. According to the Kremlin, the two sides discussed the development of bilateral cooperation under the Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, as well as international and regional issues, with a particular focus on the situation in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. The Kremlin also confirmed that Rezaei conveyed a message from the Supreme Leader of Iran Mojtaba Khamenei.


The fact that the meeting was also attended by Presidential Aide Yuri Ushakov and Head of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Igor Kostyukov is quite notable. While the details of the conversation have not been disclosed, Kostyukov’s presence suggests that the discussions likely extended beyond political relations to include urgent security matters, which are of paramount concern for Iran.

Rezaei is an influential figure in Iran’s military and political landscape. As the former commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), he has a strong reputation in military circles; he also has longstanding ties to influential clerics. Rezaei’s appointment as Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and the task entrusted to him – that of personally delivering Khamenei’s message to Vladimir Putin – indicate the high level of trust placed in him by the Supreme Leader of Iran. Therefore, his trip to Moscow carries substantial weight. Rezaei advocates for a robust strategic alignment between Iran, Russia, and China, viewing these relationships as crucial for Iran’s security and independent foreign policy. His visit reaffirms that the strengthening of ties with Moscow is supported at the highest level in Tehran.

Another important aspect is the speed with which Rezaei arrived in Moscow. A phone call between Putin and Rezaei occurred on November 2, and just three days later, it was followed by the in-person meeting, in the course of which the message from the Supreme Leader was delivered. This signals that the matter could not be resolved remotely or through standard diplomatic channels. Such urgency is understandable. After eight months of war, both the US and Iran are exploring potential diplomatic breakthroughs while also bracing for renewed hostilities.

American forces in the region are poised for a brief, intense campaign should US President Donald Trump authorize it. Trump himself has stated that he currently has no plans for new strikes but remains ready to act if necessary. However, Tehran understands that such assurances do not preclude future attacks. Consequently, the Iranian leadership cannot trust Washington’s public statements, but must take into account the likelihood of further escalation and determine what kind of support the country can count on.

This uncertainty is exacerbated by discussions surrounding the potential use of weapons of mass destruction. Tucker Carlson has recently claimed that Trump is considering a nuclear strike on a site near Natanz, one of Iran’s key nuclear facilities. Trump responded that there is no need for such an attack; no further confirmation of Carlson’s claims has emerged. While American officials cited by major Western outlets assure that Washington has no intention of using nuclear weapons, such reassurances are insufficient for Tehran.

At the same time, a debate about chemical weapons is unfolding. According to recent reports, Israel has informed the US that Iran is allegedly contemplating the use of chemical weapons. Some American officials view these reports as an attempt to pressure Washington into resuming large-scale military operations. Meanwhile, the Gulf countries have reacted to the news with skepticism. Iran itself categorically denies possessing any chemical weapons. Even if the likelihood of extreme scenarios is low, such discussions force the Iranian leadership to consider worst-case scenarios and seek external support.

Mohsen Rezaei’s visit to Moscow takes on special significance amid evolving US-Russia relations. Trump explained his decision not to impose new sanctions on Russia by the desire not to disrupt negotiations over Ukraine. Washington is interested in maintaining dialogue with Moscow, and Russia is also open to dialogue. However, Russia has no intention of sacrificing its relationship with Tehran. Russia’s public reception of the Iranian envoy sends a clear message to those who hope that the warming ties between Russia and the US might come at Iran’s expense or that Russia may abandon its interests to please the White House.

The message is clear: Moscow will choose its partners independently, and its relationship with Tehran holds intrinsic value. For the Iranian leadership, this meeting represents an opportunity to reaffirm mutual interest in collaboration and discuss how to advance it in the current circumstances. There’s also a pragmatic aspect. As Russia’s role in the Iran issue becomes more prominent, there are more reasons for Moscow to be involved in the resolution of the conflict. On October 21, President Putin expressed Russia’s readiness to assist in addressing the crisis surrounding Iran.

High-level contacts with Tehran lend weight to this statement ahead of possible negotiations: discussions are underway regarding a meeting between leaders, including Putin and Trump, on the sidelines of the APEC summit, which will be held on November 18-19. Russia has the means to facilitate a resolution, and the absence of mutual defense obligations with Iran doesn’t negate that capacity. Moscow maintains ties with Tehran while also engaging with Washington. This position enables Russia to act as a mediator and allows it to offer a platform for talks, which Iran is keen to pursue, as achieving lasting peace is crucial for avoiding further military action.

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Again: Iran sells no oil. It has no income, but it does have bills to pay.

It can stretch this, because it is a nasty dictatorship, but still..

• The Peace Trade is a Trap (Jim Rickards)

The price of oil has dropped sharply over the past few weeks. Traders are once again betting the war will end soon. This is a dangerous assumption. We’ve written from the beginning of the war that it would not be over quickly and the U.S. would struggle to win in the end, despite being able to inflict enormous damage on Iran and its economy. That forecast has proved highly accurate.


Viewed from Iran’s perspective, there has been no regime change. Iran still retains a substantial stockpile of highly enriched uranium and the regime continues to resist U.S. attacks. It is true that scores of top Iranian religious, military and political figures have been killed. The result is personnel change, but that’s not regime change. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), with a figurehead ayatollah, is still in charge.

Trump has claimed over and over that the war would be done “in a few days” or “a few weeks,” but those claims proved hollow, and Trump’s credibility on the issue is dropping. There was a “ceasefire” last April, a “Memorandum of Understanding” last June and a string of negotiations, but none of it lasted.

There are negotiations currently underway through Qatar between Iran and the U.S., but the sides are still far apart. I don’t expect that to change. Both sides are playing for time to rest, rearm and prepare to resume the fighting. There’s a relative lull in the fighting right now, but both sides know that’s just a breather. Major military action will likely resume in a few days, now that the midterm elections are over in the U.S. and parliamentary elections are over in Israel.

An Unwinnable War
U.S. failure to win the war does not mean Iran has achieved a major victory. Iran can’t win the war except in the sense of the regime hanging on and continuing to block the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. can’t win either — bombing blows things up but won’t win the war by itself. The U.S. won’t agree to Iran’s terms involving reparations and withdrawal from the Middle East.

Iran also insists that it will control the Strait of Hormuz going forward, with vessels seeking transit subject to Iranian permission and restrictions. Iran has also sought to impose transit fees based on vessel size and cargo, while reserving the right to waive those fees at its discretion, obviously beginning with its own oil export cargoes. The U.S. will not agree to any of this.

Iran won’t agree to U.S. terms, including the elimination of its nuclear enrichment facilities and surrender of its highly enriched uranium stockpiles. The U.S. also wants an end to Iranian support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen at the entrance to the Red Sea and Hamas in Gaza. Iran will never agree to these terms.

Iran depends on the so-called Shia Crescent that runs from the Strait of Hormuz through Tehran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to exert regional influence and keep Israel continually on the defensive. With neither side coming close to agreeing to the other side’s terms, this war will drag on with no end in sight.

The War’s Economic Kill Chain
Of course, the impact of this war goes far beyond the battlespace. Prices for oil, liquefied natural gas, nitrates, sulfur and distillate products such as gasoline, diesel and kerosene (jet fuel) have risen sharply. This has led to inflation not only in energy costs and home heating but in a large variety of consumer goods.

Everything you buy moves by truck, either to your door, a distribution center or a store. When the cost of diesel to move trucks goes up, the cost of everything on the truck goes up with it. This dynamic will not change soon. Matters will soon get worse. Sovereign petroleum reserves, natural gas reserves, fertilizer and chemical stockpiles have all been drawn down over the past eight months since the war began.

Those stockpiles are one reason prices have not gone even higher and shortages have not been more severe. That grace period based on reserves is running out. Many stockpiles are depleted, and further shortages and price spikes may not be far behind. This supply disruption will play out in inflation, which in turn could drive interest rates higher.

Those higher interest rates affect mortgages, credit cards and other forms of consumer debt. They also add to the cost of servicing the national debt as the U.S. Treasury has to refinance maturing debt at progressively higher rates. Even the AI infrastructure boom will slow as hyperscalers face higher interest rates on the enormous borrowings and financing commitments they are undertaking to pay for new data center construction.

The process feeds on itself, with supply shortages, higher costs, higher interest rates, slowing investment and ultimately a market crash and recession. But before the crash and recession, investors will have to endure inflation. The bad news comes in stages, but it’s almost all bad news because of a war that never should have started.

Iran’s Next Targets: Oil, Power and Water
Iran is another “forever war” and looks more and more like Vietnam as the months drag on. The regime continues to strike oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz with anti-ship missiles and drones. Over the weekend, at least two full tankers of oil were on fire in the U.S.-controlled southern route.


If the war restarts at full scale, the Iranian battle plans have been well advertised. When the U.S. begins its new attack, they will not remain passive. Iran still has a substantial arsenal of missiles and drones. Iranian officials have threatened attacks across the Persian Gulf, warning that nothing is off limits. That means Iran could attack pipelines, refineries, oil fields, electricity-generating stations, ports and desalination plants.

This presages a humanitarian crisis as Gulf populations dependent on desalination could face severe water shortages within days if critical facilities are disabled. The news (really propaganda) will be filled with election stories for weeks to come. But Congress will be as dysfunctional as ever, even with new faces in place. The real story is what’s going on in Iran. Get ready for more fireworks and higher prices for gas, diesel and everything else as far as the eye can see.

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There’s nothing EU there. Just proximity.

• Russia Flatly Rejects EU Role In Abu Dhabi Ukraine Peace Talks (ZH)

Trilateral talks between Russia, Ukraine, and the US are set to begin Tuesday and run through Wednesday, but there’s already a serious disagreement brewing involving representation at the negotiating table. On Monday European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced in a post on X that the EU would have representatives at the talks, stating that “the EU will be present alongside our partners.”


But this has resulted in a nyet – a swift objection – from Moscow within hours of von der Leyen’s statement. Russia has instead instisted that the trilateral talks exclude officials from the European Union. “As for the presence of Europeans, you know that the Americans have their own channels of communication with the Europeans, as do the Ukrainians,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, rejecting that EU officials will have spots at the negotiating table.

American and Ukrainian negotiators are “in all likelihood constructing their own coordination mechanism” with European representatives, Peskov asserted. This is also after “A European official told AFP that national security representatives from the EU, NATO, as well as France, Germany and the U.K. plan to be in the UAE capital during the negotiations.”

The Kremlin is certainly also going to balk and some kind of direct NATO representation, and all of this could serve to derail the negotiations before they are even set to begin. Is this more EU sabotage of a US-backed peace process? Ukrainian media has also highlighted Moscow’s firm rejection of EU representation at the talks:

On 8 November, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Vesti’s Pavel Zarubin that Russia had held no talks with Europeans on a security agreement, unlike the Americans, and claimed Europe still could not choose a negotiator, according to Interfax. A day later, Peskov told reporters that what will take place in Abu Dhabi “are trilateral talks between Russia and Ukraine mediated by the United States,” and said Europeans were apparently building their own coordination with the Americans and Ukrainians, Interfax reported.

As for Ukraine’s President Zelensky, he has stated on X, “We are doing everything to ensure the trilateral format delivers results.” Meanwhile, President Trump has said during a Sunday appearance on “60 minutes” that he’s ‘very close’ to overseeing a peace deal in the nearly five-year long war. “It was the hatred between Zelensky and Putin. If I had been president that war would’ve never started. Zero chance. But it did start. So I inherited that war. I believe we’re very close to making a deal,” Trump explained.

When asked which side he ‘trusts’ more, Trump responded: “I’d rather not say, but I get along with both. I believe that that war is going to end, and it’s going to end soon. And the only reason it’s going to end is because of me. There is tremendous hatred between President Putin and President Zelensky.” However, the US president echoed similar things in the opening days and weeks of his second term in office, but peace has remained elusive.

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“Voters sided against data-center development in 44 of 45 local referendums, while incoming Democratic governors in Georgia and Ohio pledged tougher restrictions. Musk joked on X: “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.”

• Elon Musk’s Greatest Sin Is That He’s Unapologetic About His Success (Moran)

America’s historical relationship with its super-rich has alternated between admiration and resentment. Americans have traditionally loved a rags-to-riches story, as the cultural mythos, from Horatio Alger novels in the 19th century to modern-day profiles of self-made tech founders, celebrates upward mobility as proof that the economic system works.


Yet, that same public harbors an ingrained suspicion of inherited wealth or fortunes built through market manipulation, viewing unearned privilege as fundamentally un-American. “Trust fund babies” are often despised, especially if the kid shows an arrogance of privilege that puts him above the law, as was the case with the Kennedys. But ambivalence toward massive wealth also reflects a healthy skepticism about money’s corrupting power and its inherently anti-democratic nature.

We have never been an egalitarian people, although we worship at the altar of equality. We talk a good game about creating a “level playing field” for all, but we honor that idea in the breach. In fact, we’ve never been able to reconcile our notions of individual liberty with a broad definition of “equality for all.” To create that kind of society, a powerful arbiter must broker a compromise that inevitably destroys both: liberty is choked by regulation, and true equality is undermined by the very arbiter granting it.

We’ve only been at it for 250 years. We’ll get there eventually.

No one should feel sorry for Elon Musk. He’s the richest man in the world, and he’s about to be attacked by a bunch of Lilliputians dressed just like Democrats who believe he should be punished for: 1) being friendly with Donald Trump; 2) supporting Republicans; and 3) being rich and successful beyond the dreams of avarice. It’s #1 that really rankles for the hysterical TDS crowd. If Musk had a picture taken with his arm around the devil, yukking it up, it would probably go over better with the Democrats.

Whenever extreme wealth concentrates at the top, the public debate quickly adapts to reflect the dual view of aspiration vs. suspicion. The exact same tycoon can be seen simultaneously as an innovative “captain of industry” who creates jobs and drives progress, and a predatory “robber baron” or member of “the 1%” who rigs the rules of the game. For Democrats like Bernie Sanders and DSA acolytes, fabulous wealth is a trigger. Sanders and his cohorts may rail against wealth and privilege, claiming the rich don’t pay “enough” taxes, but the one place they tried to punish great wealth, ordinary people rose up and smote them down.

California’s Proposition 40, which would have levied a “one-time” 5% levy on those worth more than $1 billion, went down to defeat 53-47. To anyone who believes this tax would have been a one-off, I got a beautiful bridge over the Chicago River I’d like to sell you.

The flight of wealthy people from California even before the vote was significant. They aren’t stupid. They know that this would be only the beginning, as the state is already running out of other people’s money to spend. The next step would be to prevent the rich from leaving. In the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion, of course.

It’s not enough for Democrats that Musk was humiliated by spending $475 million on Republicans running in the midterm elections, where “more than 99% of his traceable spending goes to losing candidates,” according to Axios. Democrats are targeting the entire basis of Musk’s wealth and, not coincidentally, threatening the future of America itself.

Axios: “Armed with subpoena power, Democrats are preparing to investigate Musk’s DOGE operation, its access to sensitive government data and whether his companies benefited from his extraordinary influence over the Trump administration. Musk is already downplaying his dependence on Washington, claiming government contracts will account for less than 5% of SpaceX revenue a year from now. “Happy to cancel any that the government doesn’t want,” he posted Friday.

The scrutiny also extends to national security: Lawmakers are demanding answers about Musk’s reported communications with Vladimir Putin and his role in the October slowdown of Starshield that disrupted Ukraine’s drone operations. For better or worse, Elon Musk’s ideas and unquenchable desire to shape the future have created much of the modern world and will continue to impact the U.S. economy in ways both large and small.

He’s also a key cog in American national security. The midterms have given the backlash against AI new political muscle, threatening both the massive data centers powering Musk’s ambitions and the technology behind Grok itself. Democrats are preparing legislation that would require independent safety testing of advanced AI models and hold developers liable for harmful outputs. Lawmakers have already demanded SpaceX’s AI safety records.

Voters sided against data-center development in 44 of 45 local referendums, while incoming Democratic governors in Georgia and Ohio pledged tougher restrictions. Musk joked on X: “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.” The bottom line: Democrats must find a way to separate Musk the political combatant from Musk the industrialist, whose companies are central to America’s technological and military power.

I predict they will be unable to do so. Their hatred of Musk and Trump, their burning envy of anyone more successful, and their messianic vision of “equity” will set back the two most important industries shaping America’s future: AI and space. Yes, but at least Musk will be humbled (or jailed), and the world will be made safe from a rich man’s dreams of the future.

Read more …

Look through Melenchon’s points here and then try to apply them to Elon Musk.

Musk for now is free to move, but that new Texas governor already talks about curtailing him.

• France’s Socialist Fever Dream a Preview of Democrat Party’s Future (Green)

Sure, American socialists want to do little things like pack the Supreme Court, eliminate the Electoral College, and give the vote to cats who think they’re people. But before we get to all that, you’ve got to see what France’s would-be Comrade President would do to what’s left of his country.


France holds its presidential election in April 2027, and the establishment incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, is term-limited out. And in any case, Macron’s Renaissance party doesn’t look so rebirth-y these days. Party leader (and former PM under Macron) Gabriel Attal is in a distant third behind Marine Le Pen and her nationalist National Rally party, and the lefty LFI’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

To read Mélenchon’s just-released campaign platform is to laugh, down a stiff drink, and then cry into your follow-up drinks. French news service AlertesInfos published it on X this weekend, and X did its usual commendable job of translating it into English for people — like Yours Truly — whose French is limited to popular restaurant items. Among Mélenchon’s many cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs campaign pledges:

• Lower the retirement age from 64 to 60, with a full pension after 40 years of contributions.
• Gradually reduce working hours to 32 per week.
• Introduce a mandatory 9-month environmental service for people under 25, paid at the minimum wage.
• Set a cap of €12 million on inheritances.
• Freeze the prices of certain essential products to limit excessive increases.
• Raise public-sector salaries.
• Guarantee a minimum income for young people through a benefit.
• Make public aid to businesses conditional on social and environmental commitments.
• Reinstate the wealth tax to increase taxes on the very wealthy.
• Begin a gradual phaseout of nuclear power.
• Achieve 100% renewable electricity generation by 2060.
• Ban flights between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. (Really.).

No word on whether Mélenchon would require citizens to change their underwear every half hour and wear it on the outside so he can check. And price freezes along with indexing wages to inflation… [chef’s kiss.] My personal favorite might be Mélenchon’s proposed seven days of bereavement leave following the death of a friend. As one French voter put it, “I’m going to follow the activities of my 5,000 Facebook friends very closely.”

Statism always starts with lovely sounding promises, and always ends with the Interior Ministry’s Permanent Undersecretary for Interpersonal Relationships and Online Communications scouring everyone’s private DMs to see who their real friends are, and whether they’re worthy of bereavement leave.

Here’s where things really get fun. The April election will likely lead to a runoff in May, and the French establishment might just rally behind Mélenchon and LFI to thwart her. Mon Dieu! And that brings me back to America and the Democratic Socialists currently hard at work in a dank cellar crafting a skinsuit out of the decaying bits of the Democrat Party.

If Mélenchon’s platform reads like a parody of nation-destroying leftism from a comic-opera called Les Communistes (and it does), French elites would still likely prefer it to President Le Pen ordering mass deportations of unassimilated Muslims currently helping burn down the country. I don’t understand that; I can only report it.

We have a similar problem in this country with Democratic Socialists who are few in number, but who have successfully moved the Overton Window from “let’s expand the social safety net” to “let’s seize the means of production and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.” And the DSA has the Democrat leadership increasingly cowed.

Because, like the French establishment, a nation-destroying communist takeover is still better than letting Trump control the border, deregulate the economy, or just build a White House ballroom.

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“The Democratic Socialists of America are now the de facto Democrat party. Your father’s Democrat party no longer exists.”

• Is Socialism Becoming ‘Mainstream’ In America? (Eric Utter)

After the Immaculation of Barack Hussein Obama, the Chosen One, the Lightbringer™ set about trying to divide and destroy the United States along racial, class, and sexual preference lines, among others. Obama once again threw in on the side of darkness, by endorsing Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race. So here you have a Kenyan Marxist endorsing an Arab terrorist.


Or at least a person who endorses and hangs around with those who support Arab terrorists. But, in doing so, he may have accidentally done the party formerly known as Democrats a minor disservice, as his appearance with — and endorsement of — El-Sayed is a tacit admittance that the DSA is a rising force and that it is becoming mainstream, something fellow Democrat and California Gov. Gavin “Slick” Newsom, has actually verbalized.

Could that notion possibly end up hurting Democrats in the long run? Probably not. Since the midterm elections, formerly less-crazy Democrats have been lining up to support their newly elected Marxist and Muslim comrades. This won’t end well.

Socialism is becoming “mainstream” in one of America’s two major political parties. One can almost hear the Framers groaning from beyond. Many older Democrats do not want to hear this, but it is, in fact, true. The Democratic Socialists of America are now the de facto Democrat party. Your father’s Democrat party no longer exists. It has been successfully penetrated, invaded, and taken over by Marxists and Muslims, much like Marxists and Muslims are trying to do to the nation — and indeed the West — as a whole.

Polls have shown that a majority of those surveyed under the age of 40 somehow have a positive view of socialism, despite its unbroken track record of misery and death. (Nice job educational system and mainstream media!)

We can only hope that this time Obama might actually shed light on the prevalence and seriousness of the darkness overtaking us, even if unwittingly. Wouldn’t it be nice if old-school “moderate” Democrats, independents, and Republicans united to prevent the virtual takeover of the U.S. by forces so utterly opposed to everything the nation was founded to be?

No, I’m not holding my breath. And I don’t believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. But I bet those who view socialism favorably might.

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“:Democrat policies will move the country rapidly backward.”

• Democrats: the Party of ‘No’ (Jack Hellner)

Democrats are clearly the party of “no, including no carbon. Their policies would certainly move the country rapidly backward instead of forward. Democrats clearly don’t care how much power and control China and Russia will have over the World, including the U.S., if they get their way:


Democrats want to severely limit the development of data centers. One of their talking points is that the construction jobs are temporary, as if all construction jobs aren’t essentially temporary. Whether a project is a road, bridge, school, office building, warehouse, data center, or a house, once it is complete, the workers move on to another temporary project.

Another false talking point is that data centers substantially increase utility costs. Somehow, the WaPo printed this story a few days after the election that shows that they cause little increase: Everyone blames data centers for high electricity prices. But these are the real reasons.

They falsely claimed they wanted lower prices during the election, but Democrats oppose crude oil, gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, heating oil, natural gas, refineries, pipelines, and terminals. Think of the lack of progress the World would have had in the last 175 years if we hadn’t discovered and developed these products.

Democrats are generally a no on private schools for poor children. Democrats would rather have poor children end up in generational poverty than give them better options. Democrats seem to have a goal to get as many people dependent on the government as possible instead of getting them a head start on moving up the economic ladder.

Democrats don’t like border enforcement or enforcement of immigration laws that Congress passed. They claim that we need poorly paid immigrants to produce our food and keep food prices low, so why didn’t that work during the Biden years? How many deaths and other crimes occurred at the border during the Biden years? How many deaths occurred because Democrats handed out commercial drivers’ licenses to people here illegally who couldn’t read English? Jeffries and other Democrats should look in the mirror to see who has blood on their hands.

Democrats want to get rid of private health insurance companies. Think of Obamacare on steroids and what it has done to affordability. Obamacare intentionally took away choice and reduced competition. Small and medium-sized companies couldn’t afford the risk with no annual or lifetime limits, and medical providers had no incentive to control costs. How many private sector jobs will be destroyed?

Democrats want to end gas and diesel vehicles and machines. Trying to dictatorially force people to buy electric cars during the Biden years made vehicles, repairs, and insurance less affordable.

Democrats want to limit private gun ownership. Tyrants take away guns so people can’t defend themselves. As gun ownership increased, murder rates and other violent crime plunged in 2025 to historic lows. That is what you get when the government focuses on arresting criminals, both illegal and legal, instead of being soft on crime with “no bail” laws and leftist prosecutors letting dangerous criminals roam the streets. Somehow, the media focuses little on this as they seek to destroy Trump every day.

• Democrats want no separate boys’ and girls’ sports teams or locker rooms.
• Democrats seem to care little about fairness, safety, and privacy of women and girls.
• Democrats want to close prisons unless they are for people like Musk and Trump supporters.
• Democrats are a hard no on photo IDs to vote, even though that is popular and every person of voting age already needs a photo ID for so many other things.
• Democrats want to get rid of the Electoral College. They don’t want small states to have any power. Democrats believe in the tyranny of the majority.
• Democrats think we should have no billionaires. It is so much better for the people when the government controls our money.
• Democrats are a hard no on allowing people and companies to keep more of the money they earn to spend, invest, and save as they choose.
• Democrats say they are against corruption, but they care little about massive fraud, waste, and abuse throughout government, and they never cared about the Clintons and Bidens collecting millions throughout the World because of their government positions. The Trump family has been doing business deals throughout the World long before he was President.

Think about how many millions of direct and indirect jobs would be lost if Democrats get their way on the Green New Deal and Medicare for all. Think of how stocks would get massacred and destroy public and private retirement funds and investments. Of course, this would reduce the wealth and income gap, but it would not help the poor or middle class. There should be no limits on abortion despite public opinion.

The only thing the Democrats don’t seem to want to limit is the size, scope, and power of government, including taxes.

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The GOP chooses combat. As does Trump.

• This Is a HUGE Move for the House GOP (Matt Margolis)


Jim Jordan

When House Republicans met behind closed doors on Tuesday to choose their next leader, they picked a fighter who won’t back down from the radical Left.


Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, defeated Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) 106-73 to become House minority leader, according to sources in the room. Insiders had predicted a close race. The final tally said otherwise, and loud, sustained applause carried into the hallway once the result became official.


Let’s be honest here. The GOP needed a reset. Republicans suffered historic losses in state and federal races last week, giving up ground in both the House and the Senate. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) responded by stepping aside, and he won’t seek any leadership post for the next two years. That left incumbents and members-elect projected to win their races with a real choice about the conference’s direction.

Because the ballot was secret, nobody had to reveal a vote, making Jordan’s comfortable margin even more telling. Members voted their gut, and their gut wanted change. At a candidate forum Tuesday morning, both men pitched themselves as the best choice to unite the conference. The session stayed mostly cordial. Members asked how each would bring Republicans together after the midterm defeats and how each would handle leaks to the press.

Jordan said the forum went well but declined to discuss what happened inside. One attendee said both candidates signaled that members could “vote their districts,” which gives lawmakers wide room to break from leadership when they need to. “I personally like Steve, but he’s been in leadership since before I was in Congress,” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) said. “And Jim Jordan, while he’s a leader in Congress, he hasn’t been part of the leadership team. He basically rose through the ranks because he was super effective.”

Before the vote, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) pointed to how Senate deals had played out in the House. “When the Senate wanted to get their bills passed… they called Scalise and actually brokered backend deals to get these bills passed by suspension, so we had no leverage,” Luna said. “That’s why I’m supporting Jim Jordan.”v


Here’s why Jordan fits this moment. He helped lead the House Freedom Caucus in its early days, and over the past decade he has become one of President Donald Trump’s most vocal defenders. Democrats are already gearing up to investigate Trump’s Cabinet, family, and business interests. Jordan now leads the response, and Republicans could hardly ask for a sharper counterpuncher.

Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-Wis.), a Jordan ally, said Jordan “understands what we’re up against.””His ability to communicate is really kind of unrivaled by anybody else in the House right now,” Fitzgerald added. Jordan also plans to do more than play defense. “In these next two years, our job cannot be merely to spotlight how radical this new Democrat party is—offense, not defense, wins elections,” he wrote in a letter making his case to fellow Republicans.

“Republican policies prioritize making Americans’ neighborhoods safer, keeping more money in their pockets, and protecting enduring American values and freedoms.” If you needed proof this is good news, Democrats and their allies aren’t happy about it.


Sorry, but the people cheering every Republican defeat don’t get to write the GOP’s comeback plan. The Left wants a timid minority that apologizes, cuts deals, and stays quiet while Democrats turn their gavels on the president. Jordan knows how to “fight, fight, fight” for the country and against the Left, and that’s exactly what has his critics so rattled.

Read more …

“Thank you for the offer, sir,” White said. “No, I do not want to be in politics.”

But Trump is right: he’d be great as press secretary. So would Trump himself.

• Dana White Makes White House Press Briefing Appearance (ET)

UFC President and CEO Dana White took the podium in the White House press briefing room on Nov. 9 following President Donald Trump’s announcement last week that he was offering the UFC boss the position of White House press secretary.


“I have zero political aspirations,” White, a longtime friend of the president, said during the Nov. 9 briefing, adding that he waited to comment on the offer. “I don’t tell the president ‘no’ to anything. … I didn’t want to be disrespectful and say anything until he said something first.”

Trump said he “was sort of kidding” when he posted the announcement on Truth Social on Nov. 7, which included requests to bring several fighters along as assistants to “defend us against the Lunatic Left.” “Dana White could be our press secretary if he would only take the job,” Trump said, while introducing him on Nov. 9.

“The only problem is he’ll talk for a little while, and then he’s going to beat the hell out of you.” Trump answered questions for about 30 minutes, telling reporters that he expects the war with Iran to end, before turning to White and asking whether he wanted the position. “Thank you for the offer, sir,” White said. “No, I do not want to be in politics.”

Conservative political commentator Katie Zacharia served in the role for about five days in October and left the role after her first briefing, which lasted approximately 15 minutes. Before Zacharia took the position, Karoline Leavitt served as the administration’s press secretary during the first 20 months of Trump’s second term.

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They’re after him because he’s nice to Trump.

• What Jensen Huang Told Trump When Asked If He Knew She Was A Spy (ZH)

President Trump said Monday that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told him he had no idea the woman he had a relationship with was a Chinese spy, and that Huang should not worry about the FBI. “I asked him that question: ‘Did you have any idea that she was a spy?'” Trump told reporters at a surprise White House briefing. “He said, ‘I had no idea that she was a spy.’ And I really believe him.”


“I know the FBI is looking into it in terms of something else, and I think that he’ll be in good shape,” Trump said. He added that he spoke to Huang Monday “just to see if he’s feeling alright” and called him “an honorable man.”

The FBI’s work does not appear to be a probe of Huang’s affair. The Justice Department is running a criminal investigation into Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company suspected of smuggling Nvidia AI chips into China, per an unnamed source, led by its National Security Division with the FBI and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security. Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive, is believed by U.S. intelligence officials to be a Chinese spy; she is not related to Jensen Huang. The Justice Department declined to comment.

All The Way To The Top?
According to Bloomberg, Nvidia’s general counsel intervened in a US government probe of smuggling by Megaspeed – raising questions over whether the Trump administration was involved in the alleged spy’s arrest. In late summer 2025, Nvidia’s Tim Teter called Commerce Under Secretary Jeffrey Kessler, who oversees US chip export curbs, to ask about the Megaspeed investigation, according to people familiar with the matter.

Specifically, Teter wanted to know whether Kessler’s Bureau of Industry and Security was involved in the Singapore government’s recent detention of Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive, according to the people. Singapore police had brought Alice in for questioning and restricted her from leaving the country. BIS was not involved in that action, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity owing to the sensitivity of the matter.

It’s unclear whether Teter made any specific requests of Kessler related to his agency’s investigation into Megaspeed, which was separate from Singapore’s. But in the weeks that followed, BIS staff were muzzled in their ability to look into the company, including a mandate that they route all requests of Nvidia through Kessler or seek his approval for outreach – a highly unusual step that remains unique to the chipmaker, the people said. -Bloomberg

The FBI’s probe comes amid a broader “Singapore washing” trend in which Chinese companies set up shop in Singapore to bypass US restrictions and provide access to global markets and technology – a practice which has spread across multiple industries, including technology, biotechnology, and critical minerals, the Epoch Times notes.

“The central questions are whether intellectual property or sensitive information was compromised, whether customer relationships or export approvals are affected, and whether there is a material change in leadership,” Ken Mahoney, president and CEO of Mahoney Asset Management, told the outlet.

The White House implemented strict export controls on the company’s most advanced AI chips to Beijing, forcing Nvidia to produce China-specific chips to comply with U.S. regulations. Chinese AI companies have increasingly turned to domestic alternatives, including chips developed by Huawei and other local firms. Huang has been highly critical of U.S. export controls, calling them a “failure.” -Epoch Times

“Four years ago, Nvidia had 95 percent market share in China. Today, it is only 50 percent,” Huang said last year at a press conference in Taipei. “The rest is Chinese technology. They have a lot of local technology they would use if they didn’t have Nvidia.” As we’ve noted, China is adapting with locally developed chips.

Nvidia’s board has opened an independent investigation after reports that Huang “has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.” In a note to staff, Huang wrote: “I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.”


Nvidia shares closed down 4.2% Monday, the worst performer in both the Dow and the Nasdaq while the broader market held up. The Megaspeed case has a second wrinkle: as we reported, the feds’ Megaspeed probe was derailed after Nvidia came knocking.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun called it “unsubstantiated. It is nothing but smears against China.” On Capitol Hill, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, expected to become Speaker, asked for “a full briefing,” and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Jim Banks issued a joint statement calling on Congress to “take decisive action” on oversight of AI-linked companies.

Meanwhile, lawmakers are all over this – and have requested a closed-door briefing over Nvidia’s security protocols as well as Huang’s interactions with the alleged spy. “We are writing to request that you appear before our committees for a joint, closed-door briefing on Nvidia’s security protocols against foreign adversary espionage and your interactions with a publicly reported People’s Republic of China (PRC) intelligence asset,” reads a letter from the he House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

“We need to get to the bottom of what was exchanged with this Chinese intelligence agent,” Sen Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told the Epoch Times. Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) told the outlet that to see the CEO of “one of the most important, cutting-edge AI companies clearly in a relationship” with an alleged Chinese agent raises significant national security risks. Needless to say, Jensen just handed Democrats a box of ammunition following the blue wave.

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“.. the shady leftist lawyer who is best known for his work smearing President Donald Trump with the Russiagate hoax ..”

• DOJ Investigating Marc Elias in Peltola Scandal Case (Tim O’Brien)

On October 29, I openly wondered whether the “stench of Alaska’s Peltola scandal would spread to Marc Elias.” Wonder no more. According to Just the News, the shady leftist lawyer who is best known for his work smearing President Donald Trump with the Russiagate hoax is now implicated in a scandal that’s likely to grow.


In October, I detailed the New York Times reporting of how Alaskan Senate candidate Mary Peltola’s campaign allegedly actively recruited a nobody by the name of Dan Sullivan to enter the Senate race. This was, apparently, to confuse voters since the incumbent Republican senator in the race is also Dan Sullivan.

In addition to that, insider emails uncovered by the Times indicated that the campaign was considering the creation of a fake MAGA party to confuse voters into thinking the leftist-organized party is really MAGA. Previously, I wrote: “One of the insane ideas the Peltola campaign floated by a very receptive Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), according to the Times reporting, was the creation of a knockoff MAGA party in Alaska to serve as a virtual front group for the Democrats.”

The Times reported: ‘Imagine if there was a MAGA party!’ (Anton) McParland, of the Peltola campaign, wrote in January. ‘Smart,’ replied Piatt, the DSCC’s director of campaigns. ‘Let’s see.’ Jacquelyn Lopez, an attorney with the Elias Law Group, the firm that represents both the committee and the Peltola campaign, was part of this effort, according to Rios.

In a text message from April viewed by the Times, a campaign consultant asked Rios: ‘Do we need to follow up with Jackie about maga party stuff?’ In another message from that month that misspelled Kurtz’s first name, McParland wrote: ‘Jackie is calling Jarid.’ Lopez did not respond to a request for comment. The MAGA party plan fizzled out in May, the Times reported.

The Elias Law Group is run by Marc Elias, who has represented the DSCC, presidential campaigns, and anyone who is anyone on the left. Amid the legal action after the big rig in 2020, Elias represented the Democrats in more than 60 cases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Elias led dozens of lawsuits that sought “to expand mail-in voting, extend deadlines, provide prepaid postage, and make other related changes that transformed America’s elections from a one-day event to weeks of chaos and confusion.”

We now learn that it appears the Department of Justice (DOJ) sent letters to Marc Elias himself and his firm, warning them that they may be targets of investigation in this case. Just the News reported that 20 Democrats received such letters. “Marc Elias as well as at least one Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee official were notified,” reported Just the News. “A target letter signals that prosecutors view the recipient as a likely defendant, but it does not guarantee charges will be filed.”

Lopez, the attorney mentioned in those uncovered emails, received a records-preservation letter from Sen. Ron Johnson, (R-Wis.). Johnson chairs the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. According to Federal Elections Commission records reviewed by Just the News, the Elias Law Group was paid roughly $117,000 in 2026 by Alaskans for Mary, Peltola’s principle campaign committee, while Elias was also working for the DSCC.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told Just the News that the people who may have been involved in the alleged scheme, including lawyers, “may be exposed through campaign filings and statements, which must be truthful.” “You have what are clearly false statements that some have made, according to The New York Times. And all of those people are going to have to lawyer up, including the lawyers,” Turley said. “At this point, I think Peltola’s lawyers, those campaign lawyers who allegedly played a role in this, have to remove themselves. They are now potential targets or witnesses.”

Legal experts say that the potential criminality in this case falls within 18 U.S.C. §241. This deems it a felony when two or more people conspire to deny American citizens their constitutional rights, which, in the Peltola scandal, is the right to vote for the candidate of their choice. If convicted of a felony under this statute, the actors could face up to 10 years in prison.

Read more …

“White House spokesperson Lauren Bis called Biden “the worst president in American history” in response to the BBC’s request for comment.”

Is it a good idea for the Dems to trot out looney gramps?

• Biden Says Trump Should Carry Weight Of US Capitol Riot ‘To His Grave’ (BBC)

Former US President Joe Biden has unleashed a barrage of criticism on President Donald Trump in a soon-to-be released memoir, saying he believes the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021 “should follow him to his grave”.


In an excerpt published in The Atlantic on Monday, Biden also said Trump should not have pardoned supporters who stormed Congress in a bid to thwart the certification of Biden’s election victory. “The criminals who attacked law-enforcement officers that day didn’t deserve pardons,” the former president wrote. “They deserved prison terms.” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis called Biden “the worst president in American history” in response to the BBC’s request for comment.

In the excerpt of the book, which is due to be released later this month, Biden assailed Trump and his administration for pushing to “tear down institutions and inflame hatreds”. Biden accused him of turning a “blind eye” to their violent acts, writing: “You don’t get to turn a blind eye to cops being punched, speared, sprayed, and brutalised and call yourself a friend of law enforcement.”

“What Trump did on January 6, 2021, should never be forgotten. It should follow him to his grave,” he said. Trump has previously denied any wrongdoing in connection with the riot, which happened after he held a rally.] Upon returning to the White House last year, he pardoned more than 1,000 people convicted for their role in them and commuted the sentences of a dozen members of far-right groups the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Trump defended these pardons, saying “these people have been destroyed”.

Bis, the White House spokesperson, said on Monday that what Biden and his administration “did to this country should never be forgotten”. She asserted they “created the worst border crisis in history, were soft-on-crime, produced the worst inflation crisis in 40 years, and championed America-Last policies”.

What happened on 6 January at the Capitol riot?
The excerpt of Biden’s memoir also detailed a long meeting between himself and Trump following the latter’s 2024 election victory. Biden wrote that he was shocked when Trump purportedly said: “if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends”. The former president said the statement left him “too stunned to respond”.

“He said my performance on job creation had been ‘extraordinary,'” Biden wrote. “He added that he’d been relieved he didn’t have to run against me. I didn’t really understand why he was buttering me up, so I cut off his compliments to move on to the business at hand.” Biden’s memoir comes on the back of Democrats’ success in midterm elections last week.

He was not seen much on the campaign trail as he has continued treatment for prostate cancer and has said he is limiting a promotional tour for his book because of this treatment. “Some days are better than others,” Biden said in a social media post on Sunday about his cancer experience. “It hasn’t stopped me. But sometimes it slows me down.”

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“Former Germany football star Mesut Ozil had criticized FIFA and UEFA for banning Russian teams while allowing Israelis to compete..”

I remember him being scolded for being nice to Erdogan. He’s Turkish and German.

• German World Cup Winner Placed On Ukrainian ‘Kill List’ (RT)

Former German football star and 2014 World Cup winner Mesut Ozil has been added to a Ukrainian “kill list” after accusing FIFA and UEFA of double standards over their treatment of Russia and Israel, media have reported.


The notorious Mirotvorets website, which maintains the list, publishes personal information on people it considers “enemies” of Ukraine. The database, which claims to be a private research project but enjoys tacit backing from Kiev, has published data on over 180,000 people and marks the profiles of deceased individuals with a “liquidated” stamp.

Ozil came under fire after publicly criticizing FIFA and UEFA for suspending Russian teams from international competitions while allowing Israeli teams to continue participating. The website has accused him of supporting Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.

Ozil made the remarks during a veterans’ football match in Istanbul between his former Turkish club Istanbul Basaksehir and Russia’s Zenit St. Petersburg. “Football has always brought people together,” Ozil said, arguing that sporting organizations should not discriminate on the basis of nationality or religion. “As you know, FIFA has not imposed any sanctions on Israeli teams, but it has done so against Russian teams,” he said, urging football authorities to abandon double standards and treat all countries equally.

Russian national teams and clubs have been barred from FIFA and UEFA competitions since February 2022, following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict. Israeli teams, meanwhile, have continued to participate in international tournaments despite growing calls for their suspension over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

Ozil, 38, retired from professional football in 2023 after a career that included spells at Real Madrid, Arsenal, Fenerbahce and several German clubs. He made 92 appearances for Germany, scoring 23 goals, and helped the national team win the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

Launched in August 2014 following the Western-backed change of government in Kiev, Mirotvorets claims to identify individuals it considers threats to Ukraine’s national security. Its database includes Western journalists who reported from Donbass and Crimea and Ukrainian writer Oles Buzina, who was murdered in 2015 after his personal details appeared on the website. His killing remains unsolved.

The list has also included prominent foreign politicians and athletes. In August, former Soviet and Russian footballer Akhrik Tsveiba, who won the 1990 Soviet championship with Dynamo Kiev, was added to the database. More recently, Polish MEP Ewa Zajaczkowska-Hernik and Poland’s presidential chief of staff were reportedly added after criticizing Kiev’s commemoration of Ukrainian nationalist figures who collaborated with Nazi Germany.

The website has repeatedly faced international criticism for publishing personal information without consent. In 2016, the OSCE warned that the disclosure of journalists’ details could endanger their safety, while human rights organizations raised concerns about threats against those named on the platform.

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Debt Rattle November 4 2026

Nov 042026
 
 November 4, 2026  Posted by at 10:55 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  25 Responses »


Edward Hopper New York restaurant 1922


• Democrats Tear Up Trump’s Political Map On Historic Night (Anthony Zurcher)
• What The Midterm Elections Say About America (Scott Ritter)
• NATO Fears Trump Clampdown In Case Of Midterms Defeat – Politico (RT)
• Election Day in America (CTH)
• The Day After Tomorrow’s Midterm (Stephen Green)
• Alarming Abuse Identified in Secret Ukraine Azov Battalion Detainment (CTH)
• Russia Confirms New Round of Talks with Ukraine Mediated by US (CTH)
• The EU Met Its Waterloo In Warsaw (Clarice Feldman)
• Why Is Hillary Making Excuses for Democrats Losing the Midterms? (Margolis)
• Mamdani’s Massive Real Estate Swindle Just Took a Huge Step (Stephen Green)

 

 

Not final results

 

 

 

 


No kidding, I am disappointed. Less because Trump lost, more because the Dems won. Because I’m very wary of anything everything that smells like globalism, Soros, Ursula, Merkel, Obama, it’s a long list.

Globalism erases identities, national identities. You can be a world citizen, but you’re still born somewhere and you live somewhere.

You identify more with the people around you than those far away. And you need to identify, you need identity, or you don’t know who you are. That’s less important then it used to be, for sure, but it’s there.

Different identities gave us different cultures, different languages, a smorgasbord of luxuries. Globamism on the other hand would give the Soroses of the world much more control over people, and we need to ask ourselves if we want that, and why we would want it.

Trump loves America. Not everybody loves that, or loves the way he expresses it, but that should be secondary.

America has its first Muslim Brotherhood senator, and I think it should not, because it’s not a muslim nation.

We were put on notice last night that the fight to defend our identity is not decided yet.

Trump will be in a hurry now.

PS most of the below, I gathered before the election results were in.

 

 


Ain’t no denying..

• Democrats Tear Up Trump’s Political Map On Historic Night (Anthony Zurcher)

Democrats have torn up Donald Trump’s political map on a night that will send shockwaves through American politics for years to come. With a string of major Senate victories in states that have been reliably Republican for decades – and in Kansas’s case, nearly a century – a blue tidal wave crashed across the nation, sweeping Republicans out of power.


Halfway through President Donald Trump’s second term, the Democrats now have decisive control of the House of Representatives and have wrested a majority back in the Senate. They will be able to frustrate Trump’s agenda, and launch investigations into his administration. A historic third impeachment attempt could also be on the cards.

Few imagined such an outcome was possible in the months after Trump returned to the White House with unified Republican control of Congress in January 2025. As the public mood turned against him and his party, Democrats had hopes of retaking the House. But they contemplated a Senate map that appeared unfriendly, populated by states Trump had won comfortably just two years ago.

Instead, Democrats rewrote the political equations with victories in Texas, Maine, Kansas, Ohio, Iowa and North and South Carolina. In comments to the BBC’s US partner CBS, Trump pledged to strike deals with congressional Democrats, adding that he didn’t want to have to spend his final two years in office rejecting their legislation. He somewhat undermined that sentiment later, posting a picture to Truth Social of his trademark red baseball hat with the word “veto” emblazoned on it.

The president went on to note that his name wasn’t on the ballot this year, but if it had been Republicans would have won a decisive victory. Trump had helped elevate many of those Republican candidates, however, and had urged voters to pretend he was up for re-election. In the Senate, Democrats flipped at least six seats, comfortably securing a majority.

Adam Hamilton won in Kansas – a state that last elected a Democrat to the Senate almost 100 years ago during the Great Depression. James Talarico beat Republican Ken Paxton in Texas’ Senate race, ending a 38-year Democratic losing streak in statewide elections there. In South Carolina, Annie Andrews beat Darline Graham, who had been appointed to the seat after the death of her brother, Senator Lindsey Graham. Few analysts had that seat in play even a few months ago.

Five-term Republican Susan Collins conceded Maine’s Senate election to Democrat Troy Jackson. Paralympian Josh Turek flipped the Iowa Senate seat held by retiring Republican Senator Joni Ernst. Democrats also wrested from Republicans a Senate seat in Ohio, with Sherrod Brown’s comeback victory over Jon Husted. Meanwhile, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed looked on course to beat Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan’s bitterly fought Senate race.

Nor was that the end of the electoral carnage for Republicans. Ruby-red Texas witnessed another seismic result in the governor’s race. Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa ousted the incumbent Republican Greg Abbott, who was earlier this year seen as the prohibitive favourite. Democrats also took governors’ races in Iowa, Ohio and Georgia, which made history by electing the first black woman to such a post.

Meanwhile, the party has won a House majority for the first time since 2022. They are projected to win 245 House seats and the Republicans 166 seats. A look at the key races offers plenty of reasons why. Democrats flipped House seats in Texas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Kentucky and Colorado, among others. And they were poised to make gains in Virginia and Indiana.

Black Democrats in the southern states turned out in record number, helping to carry their party to victory. And Hispanic voters, whose support had helped secure Trump’s presidential victory in 2024, swung decisively back to the Democrats. Democrats won all three House races in the overwhelmingly Hispanic congressional districts along the Texas-Mexico border.

And Hispanic voters helped Democrats hold House seats in Florida that the state’s Republicans had sought to flip by redrawing the congressional district lines.In fact, the congressional redistricting battles that had dominated headlines for months last year ended up being a bust for the Republicans. In Texas, they had hoped their line-drawing would net five new seats for their party. But on Tuesday they may end up losing one seat.

If there is a silver lining for conservatives, Florida as a whole still appears to tilt to the right. Republican Senator Ashley Moody narrowly won re-election, as did congressman Byron Donalds, who was elected the Sunshine State’s first black governor. And embattled Republicans were able to hold governorships in Vermont and New Hampshire. But the bright spots were few and far between.

Just two years ago, Trump won the presidency with 48% of the vote. He claimed an electoral mandate. He then went about governing like it, pushing sometimes unpopular policies on trade and immigration, and launching an Iran war that is opposed by most of the American public. On Tuesday, voters gave him the kind of stinging rebuke that will not be easily forgotten.

Read more …

Written before the election.

““It’s the economy, stupid” is more than a political warning. It’s the epitaph of a nation.”

“The vote lays bare a people unwilling to cast off the shroud of consumerist excess and strive for conscience and national renewal..”

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.

• What The Midterm Elections Say About America (Scott Ritter)

Tuesday’s mid-term elections hang over the heads of the American voters like an executioner’s sword – halfway through President Donald Trump’s second term in office, the elections are not simply a referendum on the state of the union, but perhaps more importantly, a hearing on the fate of the president himself.


The first two years of Donald Trump’s come back tour have not gone anything like the American people who voted him into office two years ago were led to believe. They were promised an end to the endless wars in the Middle East, yet the US finds itself embroiled in an endless war in the Middle East which clearly did not need to be fought, and perhaps worse from the perspective of the psyche of the American voter, is a war America is losing badly.

Failed military adventures in the Middle East and Southwest Asia have been a regular feature of the American experience for the past three decades, and elections – especially midterm elections where the president’s name is not on the ballot – do not normally hinge on foreign policy or national security issues, but rather local issues – the domestic agenda, so to speak. And there is no greater barometer for a consumer-driven society like the US of the success or failure of a domestic agenda than American economic health. The age-old question, “Are you better off today than you were two years ago?” is very much the talk of the town, and the answer should send shivers down the spine of every Trump loyalist scanning the polls as they would an EKG, desperately looking for evidence of viable political life: Americans most certainly are not.

“It’s the economy, stupid” is a famous American political aphorism attributed to James Carville, a Democratic strategist who helped manage Bill Clinton’s successful run for the US presidency in 1992. It is as valid a point today as it was 34 years ago, something Donald Trump and his supporters seem to have forgotten. “Short term pain for long term gain” has emerged as the Trump counter to Carville’s words of wisdom, a reflection on the price Americans are paying at the pump when putting gasoline into their cars or diesel into their trucks.

America is a land defined in large part by the automotive industry – when Bruce Springsteen belts out the opening lyrics to ‘Racing in the Streets’ (“I got a ‘69 Chevy with a three-ninety-six, Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor”), there isn’t a man among us who can’t close his eyes and envision the machine as described.

Whether singing along with Bobby Troupe about getting “our kicks on Route 66” (the iconic American highway that connected Chicago to Los Angeles), or nodding knowingly at the title of Bob Dylan’s classic album ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ (named after the stretch of concrete and asphalt connecting Minneapolis to New Orleans which gained fame as the ‘Blues Highway’ and gave perch to the Freedom Riders of the American Civil Rights movement), the American Highway system and the machines that traverse them have defined the hopes and dreams of successive generations of Americans.

But when rising gasoline prices eat into the slender margin of comfort most American paychecks provide at the end of a hard month of work, and spiking diesel prices raise the cost of transportation such that the price of the very things that defines American quality of life – food, electronics, clothes – rise as well, the American way of life becomes unsustainable, and the American people begin looking for someone to blame.

And that someone generally is the man whose desk once famously bore a sign reading “The Buck Stops Here.”

“It’s the economy, stupid” is a sad condemnation of what America, and Americans by extension, have become – a land of consumer-oriented individuals who long ago abandoned any notion of the kind of collective citizenship which once served as the bedrock of the nation known as the United States of America. This mantra reveals a harsh truth about the American people – as long as politicians keep them wrapped up in a cocoon of perceived comfort, where they are led to believe they can coast from one day to the next awash in a sea of consumer excessiveness, the American people will ignore just about anything, regardless of what it says about them as a people.

We ignore the fact that our lifestyle is built on the back of a colonial system disguised as a “rules-based international order,” which to provide the American consumer with the goods they crave, requires American industry to acquire resources at far below fair market value. This leads to the kind of exploitative economic relationships that produce child labor in Africa to harvest the rare-earth minerals that give us the smartphones our culture revolves around, or the sweat shops of Asia that make the clothes we drape around our bodies and the shoes we prance around in as if on parade.

We ignore the fact that our economy operates on a foundation of debt that would be unsustainable for any rational economic system, but which is kept alive by the printing of money whose only hope of viability is sustaining its status as a global reserve currency while the US government simultaneously seeks to leverage this reserve status to blackmail and bully nations into maintaining their status as American economic colonies.

In our greedy embrace of personal consumerism and the artifice of prosperity it creates, we turn a blind eye to the corporate greed that has seen the personal wealth of our nation gravitate exclusively toward the top 1%, while the rest of us wallow in a swamp we’ve convinced ourselves is paradise.

How strong is the narcotic of greed and avarice? Strong enough for Americans to ignore a president who sells access to his social media postings so that those who seek to profit from their manipulative effects (which have taken on the role of instruments of declaratory policy), or the empowerment of friends and family to conduct national diplomacy as little more than a front for the enrichment of the president’s inner circle.

Strong enough for Americans to turn a blind eye toward the facilitation of genocide of the Palestinian people by America’s “friend and ally” Israel. Strong enough to allow this very same “friend and ally” to lure us into a military disaster in the Middle East, where our leaders committed an act of perfidy as the opening act of an illegal war of aggression, which simply put should never have been considered, let alone fought.

Strong enough to ignore historical truths by supporting the hate-filled progeny of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi German regime, in the form of Ukrainian nationalists who embrace the odious ideology of Stepan Bandera, all in support of rampant Russophobia that has seen us turn our back on the ally who made the defeat of Nazi Germany possible.

As long as the American spirit is greased with the lubricant of perceived wealth and the fantasy of comfort it affords, then the American moral compass once guided by ideals and values enshrined in a constitution long since abandoned by those who govern, and those who empower them through their vote, can no longer stand in the face of evil.

We are collectively dead as human beings, economic zombies infected by greed and all that accompanies this affliction. Which is why “It’s the economy, stupid” is more than a political warning. It’s the epitaph of a nation. The American people will go to the polls tomorrow and vote. They will vote their pocketbooks.

Which means it will be a bad day for Donald Trump and those who have embraced and facilitated his failed policies. But they will not vote with their conscience. Which means that the executioner’s sword will not be stayed regardless of the outcome. Their votes will solve nothing, because their votes seek to solve a problem that has not been accurately defined.

The high price of fuel and the resultant rise in the cost of living for the average American has burst open the cocoon of comfort we have wrapped ourselves in for far too long. Tomorrow we should be voting to liberate ourselves from the narcotic of this cocoon. Instead, most Americans will be voting for putting the cocoon back in order. And this will be an indictment not of President Trump, but of us.

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“The US president “could be very pissed off” after the election, a diplomatic source has told the outlet ..”

• NATO Fears Trump Clampdown In Case Of Midterms Defeat – Politico (RT)

NATO is worried that Donald Trump could significantly reduce US involvement in the bloc if the Republican Party loses the midterms on November 3, Politico has reported, citing European officials and diplomats. Officials in the military bloc are “bracing for a worst-case scenario” as a result of the vote on Tuesday, the outlet said in an article on Sunday.


If a victory for the Democrats blocks Trump from legislating domestically, he may decide to go after NATO to rally his MAGA base, diplomats told the outlet. The US could withdraw thousands more troops from Europe, cut American funding for the bloc, or limit the NATO-backed PURL arms-buying scheme for Ukraine, they suggested. Trump “could be very pissed off” after the midterms, if so, “he’ll be very harsh,” one diplomat reportedly warned.

When addressed for comment by Politico, White House Assistant Press Secretary Olivia Wales insisted that “Trump has done more for NATO than anyone else,” including persuading member states to boost defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, increasing the US militarily presence in Greenland, and undertaking diplomatic efforts to resolve the Ukraine conflict.

“The president will never settle for the West’s managed decline and will continue to unapologetically advance our interests at home and abroad,” she said. However, Wales stressed that Trump “remains firm that our NATO allies should have been there for the US” during the war with Iran.

After the bloc’s members in spring refused to join the US-Israeli campaign against the Islamic Republic and countries such as Spain and Italy barred the Pentagon from using bases on their territory for attacks, Trump said he was “never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger.” When asked if he could reconsider the American membership in the bloc, Trump said: “Oh yes, I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said previously that the US and the rest of NATO members were “engaged in an unhealthy, traumatic relationship,” which required the attention of a therapist.

In a separate comment, Zakharova noted that the Trump administration “has stopped hiding its disappointment” with the organization. “NATO strategists should take a break and reflect in order to avoid making irresponsible decisions that could lead to a disaster — not just for the bloc, but for the entire world,” he warned.

Around a half of the 2,000 US soldiers stationed in Romania left the country last year, with some 5,000 American servicemen currently being in the process of withdrawing from Germany. According to media reports, Trump wanted to order a pull-out of as many as 25,000 soldiers from Europe earlier this year, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio talked him out of it. American forces on the continent number around 80,000.

The NBC News average of national polls, published on Monday, suggested that 52% of Americans preferred a Democrat-controlled Congress as a result of the midterms, with 44% being in favor of a Republican one. Trump’s approval rating stands at 38% a day before the vote.

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I wanted to say I’ve grown to appreciate Sundance as a writer much more through 2026.

• Election Day in America (CTH)

–Today is election day in America. Depending on who you talk to, follow or review, opinions & predictions are all over the place. What really matters is what YOU DO and ultimately the scale of voter turnout.


After years of watching UniParty politics, back in 2015 I said it really didn’t matter to me what Donald Trump did in the first primary debate, he had my support. The reason was simple; all other candidates represented the status quo in one form or another. Two wings of the same bird that had been delivering the same economic policy outcomes that created the rustbelt, destroyed the American middle-class and usurped our constitutional intents for partisan purposes.

Professional Democrats organize to gain power; professional Republicans organize to gain money. The business model within Washington DC works both wings of the UniParty vulture this way. That’s why I said 11 years ago, it doesn’t matter to me if Donald Trump shows up to that first debate in five-inch stiletto heels and a Carmen Miranda hat to start twerking at the podium of Jeb Bush…. The only non-UniParty member has my full support.

The Tea Party assembly already knew the duplicity of the GOP, the entrenched dangers behind the ruse of the Obama coalition and the conniving manipulations inside the unelected federal administrative state. We had already been targeted by the DOJ and IRS long before the term “weaponization of government” became a catch phrase.

In 2012, we watched what is now labeled as the Democrat Socialists of America, assemble in Charlotte North Carolina at the DNC convention and THRICE they denied God!

When Obama/Biden weaponized the system to target the threat Donald Trump represented, which is to say his targeting was genuinely to take all the fire they could not easily deploy against our larger mass, we watched what we knew. Yes, “we been knew” and not much of it came as a surprise.

Fast forward a decade later and where are we? Still right here, fighting, scrapping and highlighting the same conniving, corrupt and manipulative interests who tried to tear us down in the decade before Trump’s arrival. They haven’t quit and neither will we. The difference now is THE GREAT AWAKENING.

Will enough people who are abhorred by the Democrat Socialists of America and the various Communist regional advocates vote to keep them out of elected office. Or will the DSA and Communists succeed in gaining power by any means necessary.

Today we will discover the answer to that question.

We will provide updates as the day progresses and issues and/or events surface. In the interim, if you are voting today or following specific races to gauge outcomes, feel free to share your perspectives and experiences on this day of consequence.

Always remember, while this is a day of action and activity created within the systems of man, ultimately there is a universal operation far beyond the realm of our influence. God Always Wins!

We are blessed.

Live your very best life, and go cast a happy vote!

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“..it’s a helluva thing when we’ve spent the last six years or so watching the left do everything in its power to delegitimize our elections to rely on hope that it won’t amount to much the day after tomorrow. ”

• The Day After Tomorrow’s Midterm (Stephen Green)

The Day After Tomorrow was “Master of Disaster” movie director Roland Emmerich’s take on climate change, in which a pretty much impossible series of events creates an instant ice age. I never saw the thing — I prefer my propaganda delivered with a gentler touch — but I couldn’t get the title out of my head this morning.


Nobody knows what will happen in the election tomorrow, but it’s the day after tomorrow I can’t stop thinking about. And while I’m hardly the paranoid type, there is cause for genuine concern.

I’ll get to the big names — Data Republican, Cynical Publius, Infantry Dort — in a moment, but the latest on the left’s post-election preparations comes courtesy of Amy Reichert. She posted to X on Sunday that “Far left Soros funded group Indivisible is preparing for mass mobilization following Tuesday’s election in San Diego.”

According to Reichert, an email circulated by the group outlined plans for:
• Up to 120,000 protesters mobilizing within hours
• Daily demonstrations at Waterfront Park from 4–8 p.m.
• A nationwide strike shutting down work, schools, and shopping
• Protesters bringing goggles and N95 masks in anticipation of possible tear gas
• Stockpiling two months of food and supplies and telling people to stock up on rice and beans

Indivisible has “spent 94 weeks preparing” for the day after tomorrow. Reichert has screencaps at the link of plans that amount to using strikes and other measures to convince the public that the midterms were illegitimate.

That last word is key.

Data Republican has spent weeks publishing (and I don’t know how many months researching) her Democracy Files series on X. While it’s impossible to excerpt properly here, DR has uncovered much — including audio and video recordings — about a loose collection of retired military, intel community, NGO types aiming to do a “color revolution” in this country. Organizations like Indivisible presumably would help supply the ground troops.

[..]

Cynical Publius chimed in around the same time with a 2,300-plus word essay titled The Color Revolution in Our Midst. While it sits squarely in Read the Whole Thing territory, here’s today’s most relevant section:

A big part of the dark money is used to deploy “independent” election monitors, create fake pre-election polling and fake exit polling, and rapidly publicize perceived “irregularities” to create a clear trigger for mass protests. NGO networks then convert the disputed vote into sustained mass street action. While the architects of color revolutions consistently highlight the “non-violent” nature of their protests, certain groups are designated to engage in covert (i.e., masked) violent action, and other groups are essentially sent to the slaughter in hopes that the government will violently crack down and create martyrs.

“These NGOs all have one thing in common—they are all vocally dedicated to ‘protecting democracy,'” CP also wrote. “However, when examining their track record of fomenting revolution, it’s arguable that many of the regimes they overthrew were, in fact, democratically elected (at least to standards no more corrupt than America’s 2020 Presidential election).”

Elon Musk, DOGE, and Data Republican went after the NGOs’ public funding last year, and now we see various DANGER signals all around this year’s election.

Finally, there’s the been-there/done-that Army officer, Infantry Dort with a chilling reminder to the men and women of the armed forces:

Events going on right now in Poland might very well have started with the American left.

Maybe there’s nothing to all this worry. Maybe what DataR uncovered is just a lot of big talk from lefties with nothing better to do than cosplay as revolutionaries.

That’s the hope, anyway. I’d like nothing better than to revisit this column in a few days, shaking my head at myself.

Regardless, it’s a helluva thing when we’ve spent the last six years or so watching the left do everything in its power to delegitimize our elections to rely on hope that it won’t amount to much the day after tomorrow.

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Azov = nazi. “We” support them.

• Alarming Abuse Identified in Secret Ukraine Azov Battalion Detainment (CTH)

War is hell. Forced war upon the innocents is even worse and this story is very disturbing.


Ukraine has forced conscription. Essentially a radical forced draft where the government pays private contractors to locate Ukrainian men, drag them off the streets, put them into military training and force them to fight in the war. Inside Ukraine this process has become more and more aggressive as the population of available fighting-age males has declined.

The process is also fraught with corruption. The private contractors, “draft enforcers” ie. “headhunters”, are paid to find the men who refuse to fight. Financial support given to Ukraine by Europe and the USA funds these headhunting operations. However, the headhunters also take bribes and payments by Ukraine families who want to keep their sons, brothers and husbands alive and away from the eastern Ukraine meat grinder.

The headhunters are paid a bounty by the government for every Ukraine conscript they produce. The headhunters will let the conscripts avoid service if a bribe is paid by the family. To say the headhunters are hated by the Ukrainian people would be an understatement. This has created a powder-keg of anger inside the population of Ukraine and is the #1 reason why President Zelenskyy will not permit an election. Zelenskyy would be crushed.

When the headhunters capture the conscript, they turn the man over to the Ukrainian Azov Battalion who are responsible for getting the unwilling soldiers prepared to fight and die. Azov uses physical and psychological pressure to break the resistance of the conscript and get him trained for the front lines. You can easily imagine what horrors happen in this process until the conscript finally breaks and agrees to go fight.

We have watched this unfold for several years. Everything about this forced military service is horrific. That horror is compounded when you realize the ideological mindset of the Nazi Azov Battalion and the unlimited brutality they are willing to execute to succeed in the objective.

There are no rules, laws or humanitarian limits within this process, and everything is subject to the overarching Ukraine corruption system that exists within this hellscape of a country supported by EU and U.S. elites.Last night one of the interim Azov detainment facilities was identified in the Kiev suburb of Petropavlivska Borshchahivka.

The Azov guards held between 20 and 40 men who were in the process of ‘transition’, where they are beaten, abused, subjected to controlled torture operations and psychological efforts needed to turn ordinary civilian men into combat ready soldiers. Some of the conscripts were being severely injured during their transition and training.

A paramedic was called who witnessed up to 40 men with substantial injuries in the basement of the house being used as one of the Azov transition facilities. Word soon spread throughout the neighborhood and people began assembling to confront the plain clothed armed guards who refused to let further medical assistance reach the men in the basement.

Hundreds of citizens began showing up. The Azov regular military came in to support their undercover comrades. Things quickly escalated as the Azov group have no respect for the civilian population; they are, after all, just sheep awaiting slaughter. The civilian population have no respect for the Azov military because they know exactly what tortures are happening in these transition houses.

KIEV – Residents gathered outside a facility in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, attempting to force open its gates, lighting flares and throwing eggs. Forced detention allegations: Reports circulating on social media claimed that between 20 and 40 men were being held in a basement, with some allegedly injured. National Guard response: Spokesperson Ruslan Muzychuk identified the property as an Azov 1st National Guard Corps facility used to temporarily accommodate personnel before military training.

Four hospitalized: National Guard commander Oleksandr Pivnenko said four servicemen were taken to hospital following the confrontation. Official investigation: Interior Minister Ivan Vyhivskyi ordered an internal investigation into conditions at the facility. Police denied allegations of illegal detention and reports of fatalities.

Ukraine’s wider conscription crisis: The incident comes amid growing scrutiny of military recruitment practices, draft evasion and unauthorized absence from military units. Ukraine faces mounting pressure to maintain military manpower as its war with Russia continues. Allegations of forced recruitment and controversial mobilization practices have intensified public scrutiny of the country’s conscription system. (source)

What also alarms me personally, is the way Ukraine media justify the brutality and torture that is being carried out and funded by the European and American government. The Senior Reporter at the Kyiv Independent attended the confrontation and writes a long thread on X justifying the behavior of the Azov enforcers.

https://twitter.com/aleksthgrt/status/2117349349919539264?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2117349349919539264%7Ctwgr%5E194c216c4d0d961b1f81281377a9f3df582f0485%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheconservativetreehouse.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F11%2F03%2Falarming-abuse-identified-in-secret-ukraine-azov-battalion-detainment-and-forced-conscript-transition-house%2F

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Get rid of the nazis.

• Russia Confirms New Round of Talks with Ukraine Mediated by US (CTH)

While Zelenskyy is in Berlin firming up support from Germany, France the U.K and EU allies around the concept of expanded conflict with Russia, while Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney shares his support from the sidelines of the Commonwealth in the Caribbean, the Kremlin has announced their representative for upcoming talks in Abu Dhabi. In a slight change from previous discussions, President Vladimir Putin’s primary aide Vladimir Medinsky will serve as Moscow’s chief negotiator at the organized talks in Abu Dhabi Nov. 10-11.


There is something different about this round of talks considering the successful 6-day ceasefire in Oleshky, Ukraine, which was led by the outreach of First Lady Melania Trump toward representatives of both Russia and Ukraine.

Additionally, and likely much to the annoyance of those European figures who control the Ukrainian narrative, Melania Trump has announced there will be a meeting at the White House between representatives of both Russia and Ukraine later this week. Mrs. Trump is going to make public remarks Thursday, November 5th.

WHITE HOUSE – First Lady Melania Trump will personally bring representatives of Russia and Ukraine, two nations actively at war, together at the White House. This event represents an extraordinary moment in American history. […] First Lady Melania Trump will deliver remarks on the ceasefire in Oleshky at 11:00 am ET on Thursday, November 5, 2026, at the White House.

In another interesting aspect to the Kremlin announcement:Peskov also said Tuesday the Kremlin hopes to finalize plans for a trilateral meeting between the leaders of Russia, the U.S., and China in the coming days. The comments follow earlier reports that these countries were planning to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the table.

A week after the Abu Dhabi negotiations, President Trump, Chairman Xi and President Putin will be together at the APEC Summit.

This is the trilateral hard-power meeting that infuriates the sensibilities of the middle soft-powers, Ukraine, Europe and Canada.

The APEC Summit is being held in Shenzhen China on November 17th and 18th.

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“EU-supported politicians attempted a coup d’etat in Poland and lost due to the bravery of the Polish president Karol Nawrocki and the thousands of Poles who support him. “

• The EU Met Its Waterloo In Warsaw (Clarice Feldman)

While the news is scattered and the incidents fresh, it appears the EU-supported politicians attempted a coup d’etat in Poland and lost due to the bravery of the Polish president Karol Nawrocki and the thousands of Poles who support him. The international press is largely silent as this significant setback for the EU unfolds, but thanks to Elon Musk, X is covering it well.


Hermann Tertsch , a member of the European Parliament for Spain, reports

“Without X, no one in Europe would have found out about what happened in Poland tonight. The head of government Donald Tusk carried out an attempted coup d’état, taking advantage of the state head Karol Nawrocky’s trip abroad. He stormed the Constitutional Tribunal with the police and tried to remove the president and vice president of the Constitutional with a loyal judge without competencies. But he hadn’t counted on the president, who, upon learning of it, ordered the plane to turn around while it was flying over Spain. ”

He returned to Warsaw, forced his way into the TC building ahead of his escorts despite Tusk’s police cordon, and summoned all the highest institutions of the Supreme and Constitutional to restore constitutional order. Although the crisis continues, it seems clear that Tusk’s government, the puppet of Von der Leyen who would never have carried out this assault without Brussels’ permission, has its days numbered. But remember, the public and private media across all of Europe have been complicit in the coup d’état by silencing the entire operation. Only social networks have alerted Poles and Europeans. That’s why they want to intervene in them.

The plotters managed the airport well enough to refuse Nawrocki’s return flight landing rights but the military pilots of his plane ignored the control tower and landed anyway. A little background on Polish government from Jeff Childers: “Poland has a Constitutional Tribunal, which works roughly like our Supreme Court. Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s pro-EU government called the court illegitimate because the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) packed it with conservatives back in 2015. So his government simply stopped publishing the court’s rulings, even though Polish law requires it.

This year, parliament elected new leftwing judges. President Karol Nawrocki, a PiS ally who holds the veto, refused to swear five of them in. Without the president’s oath, Polish law says they aren’t judges yet.

Last night, while President Nawrocki was out of the country, Donald Tusk’s justice minister, Waldemar Zurek, moved to criminally charge the court’s conservative chief justice, Bogdan Swieczkowski, , by lifting his official immunity. Seven of the not-yet-sworn judges walked into the Tribunal under government security escort, and the court’s own guards were told to leave.

One of the new judges, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, declared herself the court’s most senior judge, by counting her years from 1995 in the ordinary courts, not from any time on the Tribunal. On that basis, she suspended the chief justice and his deputy for a month. Riot police ringed the building and the new judges took over the court’s website. The court’s X account, still run by the old leadership, posted that everyone involved was “committing the crime of a coup d’état.”

When it all went down, President Nawrocki was flying to Senegal. He posted, “At such a moment, the President must be in Poland. I’m interrupting my flight,” and flew back. Just after midnight, he went to the Tribunal with the head of the Supreme Court, cut a padlock on the Tribunal’s front fence with a power saw, pushed through the police at the door, and told the new judges, “You are not judges.” Before dawn, he called it a “forcible takeover of a constitutional organ of the state” and convened emergency security talks for today.[/quote]

The coup plotters timed this to occur when the president was to be out of town and when most of the capital city residents were likely to have traveled back to rural areas to celebrate All Saints Day with their families. The city’s residents seem to have returned en masse and surrounded the government buildings in support of Nawrocki.

How to commit political suicide: Donald Tusk managed to unite the entire fragmented Polish Right + the President against him. He sends the Police to expel the current President and Vice of the Constitutional Tribunal… on a Friday night, after the Stock Exchange closes, during an All Souls’ weekend and with the President away on an official trip. Why the importance of All Saints’ Day? Because the Polish opposition elite who live in Warsaw and most people all head to their hometowns, to light candles and clean the graves. The sly trick of wanting a city empty of opposition. Result: they all came back from their hometowns and even the President ordered the plane to turn around.

By Saturday it was reported that Prime Minister Donald Tusk had fled Warsaw and flown to the Baltic Sea city of Sopot. Another report has him hiding in the prime minister’s office. In any event he’s not been seen in public. I don’t think this is the action of a winner.

The U.S. Ambassador to Poland, Tom Rose, issued a diplomatically neutral statement: “The events unfolding tonight at Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal are very serious indeed. We appear to be witnessing an unprecedented confrontation over the government’s use of state power and the independence and authority of a constitutional institution. Both sides offer sharply different accounts of what happened and why. Whatever the facts ultimately establish, thousands gathering outside the Tribunal make an already dangerous situation more combustible. The last thing Poland needs is a confrontation that spirals into something far worse. America is on Poland’s side. It is not our place to judge or interfere in its internal affairs.

Our concern is for the stability, security, and democratic future of a country we are proud to call our friend and ally. I hope everyone involved — government officials, law enforcement, and demonstrators alike, to take a deep breath, and don’t take any action that could provoke violence or further escalation. Americans and U.S. President Donald Trump care deeply about this country, its democracy, and its future. But Poland’s strength ultimately must come from within — from its people, its institutions, and their shared commitment to the rule of law. Poland has come too far and accomplished too much to let political differences, no matter how strongly felt, put any of that at risk.”

Of course, it is impossible to predict the next step in this crisis, but the fact that Tusk has flown the coop (or has locked himself in his office) suggests to me he’s failed to overturn the government which had earned Ursula von der Leyen’s ire by refusing to give up its independence and open its borders.

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Will she run for President again now the Dems have won? She must be itching.

• Why Is Hillary Making Excuses for Democrats Losing the Midterms? (Margolis)

Do you remember how Democrats couldn’t lose an election without questioning the results, then declared questioning the results a crime the moment they won? Now they’re questioning the results of the midterms before a single vote gets counted, and naturally, the latest salvo comes from the queen of election denial herself, Hillary Clinton.


On Monday, Hillary sat down on ABC’s The View alongside her podcast co-host Kara Swisher and rolled out a litany of excuses for why Democrats might come up short Tuesday night. The pair floated one theory after another about how the midterms could be stolen, from voter intimidation to hacking to states refusing to certify the results.

Co-host Sunny Hostin set the table by asking whether President Donald Trump would try to “steal this election” if the votes didn’t go his way. Hillary took the bait immediately.

“Well, he certainly has been trying with all of his legal actions and his threats, trying to seize ballots, trying to bring litigation against states to, you know, tell them that they are not running the elections right and they have ineligible voters,” Hillary said. “So he’s been trying.”

She went on to describe running war room exercises with large groups of allies to prepare for “the craziest thing that somebody could try to do,” and said she had spoken with Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.), who is leading the House Democrat response. Then she got to the excuse she clearly came to deliver.

“What I do think they are planning to do in some places is intimidation,” she told the hosts. “You know, having ICE or others show up and just be standing there, staring at people, you know, looking threatening to voters coming in to vote.” Hillary offered zero evidence for that claim.

Homeland Security officials have already pushed back on the idea, and federal law bars armed federal agents from polling places to begin with. This is a preemptive strike. If Democrats underperform what the polls show and lose some close races, they’ll be sending out their lawyers to challenge results.

Swisher then piled on with her own parade of nightmares. “They still control the Justice Department. They still control the Federal Marshal Service,” Swisher said. When Hostin asked about hacking, Swisher pivoted to DOGE and the data she believes Elon Musk’s team walked away with. “One of the areas worthy of investigation is what exactly happened during DOGE, and what numbers and data did they take, under the muskrats, which is what they call them,” she added.

Zero evidence for any of this, just baseless allegations designed to get their base to question the results of any election they lose. Of course, Hillary jumped right back in, and this is where the game plan came into focus.

think Kara is making a really important question, because there is going to be an effort to try to convince certain states not to certify election results, to hold the votes,” Hillary said. “There may well be efforts by an outgoing Congress under Republican leadership to try to launch investigations into certain elections.”

From there, she accused Musk’s people of stealing the Social Security information of every American, then promptly undercut her own charge. “I don’t know if that happened, but people from inside said that it was,” Hillary said.


She doesn’t know if it happened. She said it on national television anyway, the day before Americans head to the polls.

We’ve already watched the polls tighten in the final stretch, which looks a lot like pollsters covering their butts in case the blue wave they’ve been promising doesn’t materialize. But what makes Hillary’s rant so dangerous is that she’s building the case for Democrats to challenge the results of any election they lose. This is the same woman who called Trump “an illegitimate president” in 2019, three years after he beat her fair and square. She has spent a decade refusing to accept her own defeat, and now she’s teaching the rest of her party how to reject theirs before the ballots are even counted.

The Democrat Party treats election integrity as a principle it holds only when it wins. To Democrats, questioning election results is sedition when Republicans do it, but it’s civic vigilance when Democrats do. They’ve been laying the groundwork to challenge the midterm elections for over a year now, and it’s somehow so fitting that Hillary Clinton is the one pushing the conspiracy theories in the final days.

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“It’s funny what happens when you freeze rents on dwellings that were barely making any money to begin with..”

• Mamdani’s Massive Real Estate Swindle Just Took a Huge Step (Stephen Green)

New York City’s Commie-Islamie Mayor Zohran Mamdani imposed a rent freeze earlier this year, and now the nation’s two biggest mortgage backers just made it “impossible or extremely difficult for landlords to get financing.” If your first response isn’t to laugh at this news with a hearty “Gooder and harder, NYC!” you might not want to read the rest of this column — but we have some serious stuff to cover, too. So stick around.


City Reporter’s Greg David noted on Monday that “Government-backed Fannie Mae, which has become the lender of last resort for private rent-regulated buildings, has toughened its underwriting standards since the rent freeze passed in June. Freddie Mac, the other government-backed lender, has instituted a ‘pause’ on new loans while it assesses the impact of the freeze.”

David said the decision will result in “severe consequences” for two kinds of apartment buildings. They include “Older, almost entirely rent-regulated buildings that are already under severe financial distress,” and “Buildings composed of all affordable units built with city help whose finances are also deteriorating.”

Rafael Cestero, CEO of Community Preservation Corp., told David that CPC will make 50% fewer loans to all-affordable projects than it did just two years ago. “I don’t know of any one [who] is making loans on private rent-regulated buildings,” Cestero said.

It’s funny what happens when you freeze rents on dwellings that were barely making any money to begin with — if that — and now need repairs, upgrades, or refinancing. Maybe not laugh-out-loud funny, but still. All is proceeding exactly as I — and so very many others — have foreseen.

Maybe the city could step in with the financial backing that Fannie and Freddie no longer can, but that won’t be easy. Hizzallah used various one-time accounting tricks to hide this year’s budget shortfall, but future projections show the deficit rising from roughly $7 billion in 2028 to nearly $10 billion by 2030.

But don’t worry about the big scary numbers, because Mamdani certainly doesn’t care. He has something bigger in mind: seizing the means of production, or in this case, the places of dwelling.

AEI’s Howard Husock warned last summer that the “endgame” of Mamdani’s war on landlords “could well be what Mamdani promised in his campaign: housing socialism for thousands of apartments, which would move into city ownership or nonprofit ownership enabled by the city taking and disposing of apartments.”

“An estimated 50,000 apartments are being left vacant,” Husock added, “because renting them means operating at a loss, thanks to the costs of code compliance.” With owners of rent-controlled apartments losing an estimated $120 per unit per month, Mamdani’s rent freeze, basic maintenance costs, and inflation will likely force even more units off the market.

And Another Thing: The only thing government creates in abundance is shortages, and there ought to be a monument to that in D.C. It would consist of a massive pedestal with “THE ONLY THING GOVERNMENT CREATES IN ABUNDANCE IS SHORTAGES,” carved into it, and on top of which would be a statue of nothing.

There’s the affordability crisis — entirely man-made — that Mamdani will use to “transfer ownership of those properties to politically aligned cadres like tenant cooperatives and nonprofits,” Vickie Paladino wrote earlier this year. She also reminded Tablet readers that the effort is “backed by the mayor’s new taxpayer-funded $53 million Office of Mass Engagement.”

If Mamdani succeeds, it could prove to be one of the biggest real estate swindles of all time, paid for by taxpayers and ultimately shouldered by the city’s worst-off.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/rinalu_/status/2117466319885050280?a=v9ORvD8xhFxfDvNcPoM&s=20 https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/2117423608616374687?a=IJvFWZZh_6KvSSZYUlo&s=20 https://twitter.com/GuntherEagleman/status/2117333795980431739?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle October 16 2026

Oct 162026
 
 October 16, 2026  Posted by at 8:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  39 Responses »


Paul Cézanne Young Italian Woman at a Table c1900


• Zelensky Says ‘We’re Done’ With Trump Energy Truce, Hits Russian Refinery (JTN)
• Trump Begins Highlighting “The Zelenskyy Problem” (CTH)
• “It’s A Pity…”: Zelensky Feels ‘Betrayed’ By Trump & Elon Musk (ZH)
• Millions Are Fleeing Blue States, and It’s Not for the Sunshine (Aaron Hanscom)
• The Problem Of Immigrants Whose Faith Mandates Conquest (Allan J. Feifer)
• Trump Admin Floats Unfreezing Russian Assets In Big Move To Restart Talks (ZH)
• Bulgarian PM Stuns EU With Full-Throated Backing Of Trump-Putin Diesel Deal (ZH)
• Has Trump Handed Dems the Rope with which to Hang Him? (Paul Craig Roberts)
• The Lie Behind the Gaza Genocide Accusations (Victor Davis Hanson)
• Hamas is a Complete Death Cult (Victor Davis Hanson)
• The Masks Were Never About Science (Peter Navarro)
• Nord Stream Sabotage Trial Begins With Explosive Allegations Against Ukraine (RFE/RL)

 

 

https://twitter.com/BGatesIsaPyscho/status/2110361208985661753?s=20 https://twitter.com/Rusia_HD/status/2110468522455535725?s=20 https://twitter.com/ivan_8848/status/2110453950197452889?s=20

 

 


Does Europe tell him to turm his back on Trump?

• Zelensky Says ‘We’re Done’ With Trump Energy Truce, Hits Russian Refinery (JTN)

Ukraine resumed drone strikes on Russian refineries after holding off for the three days to adhere to a unilateral “energy ceasefire” President Donald Trump initiated.


Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of repeatedly attacking its power grid during the ceasefire, and he accused the U.S. of betraying Kyiv by withdrawing support critical to its defense against Russia.

On Wednesday, Ukrainian military officials alleged that SpaceX interrupted military-grade Starlink terminals, which prevented Kyiv from using them to guide drone strikes. Functionality had been restored as of Thursday, NBC News reported, citing an unnamed source in Ukraine’s defense ministry.

Zelensky said in an interview with the Financial Times, published on Thursday, that Ukraine was “done” with the ceasefire, and would resume attacks on Russian refineries. Hours later, the Russian defense ministry said Ukraine “attempted a massive attack on the Ryazan oil refinery.”

“The block (on attacking refineries) is out. We’re done,” he told the newspaper.

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“Zelenskyy Urgently Sits Down for Interviews as …”

“It is a violation of commercial Starlink terms of service to use the terminal for weapon systems. This applies to all users and is shut down when discovered. There is a separate network called Starshield, which is operated by the US government. This is not under SpaceX control.” ~ Elon Musk, March 2026 “

• Trump Begins Highlighting “The Zelenskyy Problem” (CTH)

It is almost impossible to explain what is happening to those who have not followed the last five years of events closely. In the latest development, yesterday Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy -attempting his best Churchill performance- rushes to British media outlets to give lengthy interviews. Zelenskyy is in London because that is the center of his support system.


If you are a denier of CTH’s long standing outline about Ukraine being World War Reddit, yet you hold some intellectual honesty permitting you to accept uncomfortable truth, you might perhaps pause and think about what is happening carefully. Zelenskyy is in a crisis moment within the Russia conflict. Ukraine is getting pummeled by Russia’s fast moving and highly accurate drones and missiles. Yet, at this moment of consequence, Volodymyr Zelenskyy finds the time to travel to the U.K and give long interviews with pro-Ukraine media outlets.

What exactly is the priority here? …. Zelenskyy is fighting a narrative war. That’s why the term World War Reddit applies. It is transparently obvious what is going on. Zelenskyy has one primary demand, more money. That’s it. The rest is positioning and false presentations of patriotism. The “defense of Ukraine” narrative is not about defending Ukraine in the traditional sense; it’s about using the defense of Ukraine to get money.

Five Days Ago we wrote this on X: “We have been watching everything for many years. Your next move will be for Ukraine intelligence, which we all know is EU-NATO intelligence, to launch a kinetic operation against your own energy infrastructure. You will then blame Russia, and your EU-NATO enablers will cite that example in opposition to President Trump. We can see you.“

In the last four days, exactly this predicted situation has been unfolding. To enhance the sympathetic narrative, Zelenskyy then claims the USA is no longer providing early warning intelligence or permitting Ukraine to launch offensive military strike operations using Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite communications. Again, more nonsense.

“It is a violation of commercial Starlink terms of service to use the terminal for weapon systems. This applies to all users and is shut down when discovered. There is a separate network called Starshield, which is operated by the US government. This is not under SpaceX control.” ~ Elon Musk, March 2026

President Trump, Secretary Rubio and even Elon Musk have had enough. However, from a perspective of money all U.S. and EU interests position sympathy for Ukraine through the same self-interest prism. Secretary Rubio was correct when at his brutally honest moment in February 2025 he said, “Ukraine is a proxy war between the United States and Russia”, and the Trump administration had no interest in maintaining this proxy war of foolishness built upon a foundation of grift, fraud and financial self-interest.

That was and remains the non-pretending reality. Western influence agents, led by the United States (before Trump) created this mess. There is a painful Gordian knot that needs to be cut in order to end this madness. President Trump is now pushing back against the entirety of the false Ukraine constructs. I hope he succeeds because this has been going on far too long.

TRUTH SOCIAL 2025 – “Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and “TRUMP,” will never be able to settle.

The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn’t Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this War is far more important to Europe than it is to us — We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation. On top of this, Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we sent him is “MISSING.”

He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden “like a fiddle.” A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only “TRUMP,” and the Trump Administration, can do. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the “gravy train” going. I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died – And so it continues…..


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“Switch Starlink on?” Doesn’t he know about Starshield?

• “It’s A Pity…”: Zelensky Feels ‘Betrayed’ By Trump & Elon Musk (ZH)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says he feels betrayed by President Trump in the wake of the US deal to buy Russian fuel from Moscow, which was announced last week. Zelensky went on a newly aired episode of Piers Morgan’s show, and he was asked point blank by the British show host if he had been “betrayed” by the Trump administration, to which Zelensky answered, “Really, Yes.” Russian media was quick to seize on the increasingly open schism between Trump and Zelensky…


Zelensky tells Piers Morgan he feels ‘BETRAYED’ BY TRUMP: ‘really YES, really, between us’ “It’s a pity that we are losing a strong partner,” the Ukrainian leader told Morgan on Wednesday. “This is our country, our body, our home, our children… That’s why it’s painful when Trump chooses one side,” Zelensky at one point also stated.

“If you’re in the middle, you have to stay in the middle. Not on the wrong side,” said Zelensky. “This is not the right side of history.” Here, Zelensky seemed to suggest Trump is actually more on the Kremlin side of things at this point. The interview also came amid reports that the US is throttling intelligence-sharing with Kiev. The White House has thus far neither confirmed nor denied the allegations.


But Zelensky has himself for the past two night of Russian airstrikes made a point to publicize that Western partners have not provided the typical early warning notices of inbound missiles that were available in prior such attacks. There’s been another apparently ‘betrayal’ (in Zelensky’s assessment) by the White House of late: reports say that SpaceX has imposed a movement-speed restriction on certain Starlink terminals used in Ukraine. This has deeply impacted Ukraine’s military, which is greatly reliant on Starlink for rapid battlefield communications and functions. Zelensky used the Piers Morgan appears to plead that it be ‘switched on’.


“People will die, of course, if attacks will continue and if Starlink will not work… it’s not helpful,” he continued. The Ukrainian leader expressed home the limitation was merely a “mistake,” suggesting it could “maybe a huge technical problem” at SpaceX. Overall, Zelensky’s message was that Ukraine is ‘losing’ American support and that he feels betrayed not only be Trump, but by Elon Musk too. Musk has directly chimed in on the controversy, clarifying “Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government” – and so ultimately it’s the US government, not SpaceX, behind whatever cut happened that impacted Ukraine.



Read more …


Now Zelensky can feel really betrayed…

“European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that Moscow “must pay for the destruction it has caused. And we are using the proceeds from the immobilized Russian assets to make sure it does.”

• Trump Admin Floats Unfreezing Russian Assets In Big Move To Restart Talks (ZH)

President Trump appears to be busy rolling back years of entrenched Ukraine policy. Starting last week he announced the controversial diesel deal with Putin, and this week Ukraine’s Zelensky is complaining that intelligence-sharing has been throttled, and possibly even cut off.


The possibility or even likelihood of this heading to another TACO moment aside, what’s next? New reporting in the Financial Times gives an idea. The United States has floated a proposal that European countries unfreeze some of Russia’s sovereign assets and deposit them in an entity controlled by Washington.

via Associated Press: The FT report cites four people familiar with the matter, who describe that the idea was formally presented by envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner during a meeting of Western allies and Ukraine in Miami on Oct.10. “The US suggested several possible methods for unfreezing the assets, including for them to be moved into a new special-purpose financial vehicle overseen by Washington,” the sources said.

This US plan would be enacted in the hope of opening up momentum toward a comprehensive Ukraine peace plan. Moscow has of late rejected any ‘temporary’ proposal, including a 60-day pause in fighting recently offered by Zelensky. It wants a lasting political settlement and not a mere ‘pause’ along the front lines. At the Miami meeting were NATO representatives, as well as officials from the US, France, Germany, and the EU.

“Many ideas have been floated as to how Moscow’s frozen assets could be used after the war, the US official added,” the FT says. European officials are said to have balked at any initiative to let go of Russian assets. “They were told that this was just simply not going to happen,” one source said. For example, Germany has voiced its clear position:m”Those are assets that are frozen in Europe and they should remain frozen in Europe. This is our business and we are deciding over “it,” Merz said in Brussels ahead of an EU summit.

At least €260 billion in sovereign assets belonging to Russia’s central bank were frozen in 2022 as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of that year. Most of this is held at the Belgian securities depository Euroclear. The vast majority, or over €210 billion of the sum, is held in the EU.

The last couple years of war has seen the EU work out a scheme wherein payments are made to Ukraine utilizing interest gained from Russa’s funds. Washington’s sudden willingness to ease off the pressure on Moscow has interesting implications regarding the Iran war…


European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that Moscow “must pay for the destruction it has caused. And we are using the proceeds from the immobilized Russian assets to make sure it does.” “We are making a further [$1.62] billion of them available to Ukraine. This will support Ukraine’s continued resistance against Russia’s illegal war,” she had announced in August.

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“It’s the affordability, stupid. Why is everything so darn expensive in blue states?”

• Millions Are Fleeing Blue States, and It’s Not for the Sunshine (Aaron Hanscom)

It’s the weather, stupid.


That’s one of the left’s ready responses when confronted with the fact that millions of people are moving from blue states to red states, economist Stephen Moore says in a new PragerU video. While acknowledging that weather has long explained why people move west and south, Moore points to the state that pokes holes in that argument today: California.

Warm weather isn’t all the Golden State offers prospective residents. Moore mentions its other appeals: beaches, mountains, top-tier universities, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and a productive economy. So why have nearly 2 million more people left California for other states than arrived since 2012? For the same reasons that New York lost a net of more than 2 million and Illinois nearly 1 million from 2012 to 2024, according to Census Bureau estimates.

It’s the taxes, stupid. Florida, Tennessee, and Texas don’t tax wage income at the state level. California and New York, meanwhile, are near the top of the list of highest state income tax rates.

The Democratic Socialists of America would say we shouldn’t shed any tears over top 1 percenters like Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin deciding to leave California, but when wealthy people leave a state, their taxable income goes with them. Moore says it’s not just billionaires and millionaires who suffer in high-tax states: “Taxes affect small business owners, young families trying to buy a house, retirees trying to make their savings last.”

It’s the poor education and high crime, stupid. Leftists like to say that more government spending will lead to safer streets and better schools. Moore explains why that’s not the case:

From 2000 to 2024, New York’s per capita government spending quadrupled compared to Florida’s. You’d expect then New York to be cleaner, safer, and [to have] better public schools than Florida. But that’s not the reality. By most measures, while taking far less of its citizens’ money, Florida delivers better municipal services than its high tax counterpart and its educational outcomes are equal, if not better.

It’s the inequality and uneven law enforcement, stupid. Income inequality is worse in New York than in Florida, and in blue states the gap shows up in how the law is enforced, too. Michael Shellenberger describes a progressive Los Angeles that is all but lawless in certain parts: In wealthy neighborhoods, the law is still enforced. In poor and working-class neighborhoods, it is not. If you torch a car in Beverly Hills, you’re arrested. If you do it in East LA while shouting political slogans, you’re “engaging in protest.”

This two-tiered enforcement is not progressive. It is segregation by another name. It creates one set of expectations for the politically connected and another for the disposable. And in that framework, working people, especially immigrants, families, and hourly wage earners, are abandoned. They are the ones who walk their kids past open-air drug markets. They are the ones whose shops are looted and whose cars are stolen. They are the ones who call 911 and wait, and wait, and wait.

It’s the affordability, stupid. Why is everything so darn expensive in blue states? Moore offers one reason:

“Let’s look at energy prices. Eight of the 10 most expensive states for electricity were blue states, while nine of the 10 cheapest were red states. Among the large states, electricity prices in blue states were almost double those in red states. And higher electricity costs raised the price of everything: rent, transportation, groceries.

Moore says that because of our federal system, we can treat the states as “laboratories of democracy” and study their successes and failures in taxing, regulating, spending, and governing. And the best way to grade them? “Watch where Americans decide to live and work,” he says.

It’s not cheap to move out of state, yet from 2012 to 2024, Florida gained a net 1.7 million-plus residents, Texas 1.5 million-plus, and Tennessee 400,000-plus.

Roger L. Simon, a PJ Media co-founder, is one of the many Californians who decided to leave for the Volunteer State. He moved in 2018 after living in California since 1968, and wrote about it in his book American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Exodus From Blue States to Red States. He had no regrets when he wrote a post titled “Thank God I Left California” on his Substack in 2025, in which he said, “The leadership of California is a litany of some of the most immoral politicians in the country, every one of them a hypocritical fake: Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass, Sen. Adam Schiff, Rep. Maxine Waters, and former VP Kamala Harris, among a raft of malignant narcissists in a one-party state.”

In the upcoming midterms, voters should ask whether the records of Democratic candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, James Talarico, and Peggy Flanagan show the same self-serving politics Simon describes in California.

Read more …

“These are not the hard-working economic immigrants of old; this is a whole new type of immigrant, and America must address the change soon.”

• The Problem Of Immigrants Whose Faith Mandates Conquest (Allan J. Feifer)

In Wednesday’s Pluralism Is Broken, I argued that pluralism only works when cultural differences operate within a shared civic framework. Multiculturalism reverses that premise by asking America to accommodate differences without requiring assimilation. When immigration policy no longer reinforces a common framework—and when we become unwilling to examine its consequences—we are not preserving pluralism; we have sown the seeds of our own destruction.


The central question is whether a society committed to individual liberty can remain coherent when it loses the will to reject individuals or groups whose norms contradict its foundational values. Over time, we have deliberately bent our rules to accommodate two categories: those who come here solely for economic reasons and those who seem to come in a spirit of religious conquest.

Economic migration has existed since the nation’s founding, but two modern developments transformed it from beneficial to detrimental: easier entry from around the globe and a benefits system that attracts those seeking opportunity regardless of their ability to contribute.

That created a second, more complex challenge: the arrival of migrants whose religious framework is not merely a set of private beliefs but a complete system governing how believers live, their obligations to others, and a requirement to proselytize or even conquer—and that makes welfare not a gift, but a mandate from the new host country.

Classical Islamic scholarship draws this distinction through ibadat—acts of worship governing the relationship between God and the believer—andmuamalat—rules governing relationships among human beings, including family, inheritance, commerce, sexuality, and community life. Islam is not merely a faith; it also prescribes how believers must live and what to believe. Devout Muslims accept these obligations as divinely mandated, not optional. The concept of the ummah reinforces this: believers are members of a religiously defined community with obligations toward one another that extend across national boundaries.

In a religiously tolerant country like ours, we have no natural immune system to fend off a culture with a high birth rate that frequently rejects assimilation. This leads to an unavoidable question: whose culture will survive? This unprecedented question demands that we rethink our laws and beliefs while we still can.

The problem is not that Muslims are different; America has always absorbed differences. The question is whether those differences encompass fundamentally exclusionary ideas. America’s original social compact was built around the individual. The people who came here differed in nationality, language, and denomination, but generally shared a recognizable conception of society: individual liberty bounded by responsibility, private property, family, voluntary association, rule of law, and government constrained by citizens’ rights. We need not be homogeneous; we need only function within the same framework.

Islam is different. Muslims may understand and practice their faith differently, but Islamic obligations encompass family, inheritance, commerce, sexuality, charity, and relationships with the broader community. A religious obligation is different from a cultural preference. One can abandon a custom; abandoning a religious obligation can be understood as violating God’s commandments.

That confronts an American assumption: that religion can be neatly separated from civic life. And it raises the question America increasingly avoids: What happens when religious obligation and the American civic can no longer be reconciled? The First Amendment protects free exercise, not parallel legal systems. Americans are free to practice their religion and organize religious communities, but American law governs. A religious obligation can compel the believer, not someone else.

The problem comes when religious obligation involves matters American law treats differently: marriage, divorce, inheritance, women’s status, sexual conduct, speech, and religious criticism. When Islamic law addresses these areas, the issue is no longer merely private religious belief. It becomes a question of whether a religious framework can coexist with a civic framework built around individual autonomy and our Constitution.

Our society accommodates religious belief and practice—but not without limits. Muslims may pray, observe Ramadan, eat halal food, and establish a mosque, as long as they respect others’ rights. But religious freedom does not shield practices that violate our laws or undermine core civic norms. Customs that impose coercive dress requirements, restrict women’s autonomy, or involve genital mutilation, among other customs, are categorically incompatible with American legal and moral standards. Tolerance has boundaries; beyond them, accommodation constitutes societal surrender.

The problem intensifies when accommodation shifts from religious practice to reshaping society, allowing religious requirements to become institutionalized and requiring others to acquiesce. Beware exceptions granted on religious grounds; more will endlessly follow. Over time, tolerance of an individual practice can become pressure on institutions to accept norms fundamentally at odds with our culture.

At that point, we are no longer discussing religious freedom; we have breached the boundaries of our common civic order. We can’t stop at diagnosing incompatibilities; we must establish policies that prevent the erosion of civic order—not by restricting religion, but by restricting practices that violate American law, undermine individual rights, or create parallel social systems. What we must do:

First, the United States must enforce laws against coercive or abusive practices more consistently. Customs such as forced marriages, genital mutilation, or dress requirements imposed through religious strictures are not protected expressions of faith; they violate individual rights. Immigration screening should identify applicants who endorse or participate in such practices and deny entry to those who will not swear allegiance to American legal norms and our Constitution.

Second, the government must prohibit parallel legal systems. Any institution—religious or otherwise—that attempts to adjudicate family law, inheritance, or criminal matters outside the American legal system should be sanctioned.

Third, immigration policy must incorporate cultural compatibility as a legitimate criterion. This does not necessarily mean excluding people based on belief, but evaluating whether an applicant’s stated expectations and social media history align with America’s constitutional order and societal structure.

Fourth, assimilation must be a requirement for naturalization. This includes English proficiency, civic education, demonstrated lack of criminality, self-sufficiency, and a verifiable understanding that American law—not religious obligation—governs public life.

Finally, policymakers must recognize that immigration scale matters. Even compatible cultural differences will overwhelm our society when numbers exceed our capacity to integrate immigrants. Immigration levels must reflect not only economic needs but the nation’s ability to maintain our civic identity.

These policies do not directly target Muslims; they target their practices and frameworks that conflict with the American civic order. A pluralistic society can welcome many faiths, but it cannot survive the institutionalization of norms that contradict its foundational principles. Policy does not punish difference; it preserves the norms that make differences possible.

We have treated immigration as though the primary question is: how many people can we absorb? The more important question is what America becomes by absorbing them. A constitutional society can tolerate individual differences, but not indefinitely competing conceptions of the proper social order without becoming something different itself.

That is the transformation we should be discussing—not whether America is tolerant enough, but whether tolerance has become the mechanism by which a tolerant society is transformed, and what decisions we must undertake to preserve our own civic culture.

God Bless America.

Read more …

“Prime Minister Radev told the summit “Any step in reducing fuel prices and to guarantee our competitiveness, we appreciate” – in a clear reference to the US-Russia diesel agreement.”

• Bulgarian PM Stuns EU With Full-Throated Backing Of Trump-Putin Diesel Deal (ZH)

Bulgaria has just broken ranks amid widespread European criticism over the Trump-Putin diesel deal announced last week, with the NATO country’s Prime Minister Rumen Radev stunning Brussels in fresh remarks. “You know what is our problem right now in Europe? High fuel prices,” Radev said in English as he attended a two-day summit of leaders.


Reuters described of the top level meeting in Brussels, “the European Union began a packed summit on Thursday that quickly underscored wrangles over how to tame soaring energy prices, design a budget to keep the bloc competitive and curb surging exports from China that are blamed for job losses.”

Prime Minister Radev told the summit “Any step in reducing fuel prices and to guarantee our competitiveness, we appreciate” – in a clear reference to the US-Russia diesel agreement.

And even as most continue to vocally support Ukrainian President Zelensky in his ongoing standoff with Trump and defiance of US wishes, Radev criticized Ukraine’s strikes against Russia’s oil refineries, again siding with the White House. “I don’t support strikes on any refineries,” Radev said, at a moment Trump is strongly warning that Kiev better halt this tactic.

“I don’t support strikes on any energy power plants, like Russian attacks on energy power plants in Ukraine, because this hits us back,” he added. “The prices in Europe are (skyrocketing).” Fellow European leaders voiced wide disagreement, with EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas echoing Zelensky’s words that the diesel deal was a “gift” to Vladimir Putin.

“The question is: what has he (Putin) given in return? What we see is that he’s actually increasing the attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. The ceasefire that was also announced is not really working on the Russian side,” Kallas said. The recently installed Radev, whose Progressive Bulgaria party won the April election, has been busy rolling back the NATO ‘eastern flank’ country’s prior policy on Ukraine, including related to arms shipments.

The new government has made clear it has a new peace agenda, and its position is that nothing will be resolved by just pouring more heavy arms into the conflict, now in its fifth year. It was given a new mandate. This was also notable amid the AfD’s continued rise in Germany…


He has repeatedly criticized EU overreach on green-energy mandates, sanctions policies and what he describes as moral posturing in a “world without rules.” While analysts have lately noted he is unlikely to ultimately jeopardize the flow of EU funds that sustain Bulgaria’s economy, the result installs a distinctly Russia-friendly government at the heart of the EU’s southeastern flank – a shift that has been drawing close scrutiny in Brussels, Washington and Kiev.

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“The Democrats will use lawfare to turn the US into a one party political system.”

• Has Trump Handed Dems the Rope with which to Hang Him? (Paul Craig Roberts)

Alexander Dugin thinks that if the Republicans lose control of Congress in the November 3 midterm elections, the Democrats will renew their attempt to prosecute Trump as a criminal and members of his administration as well. This is a real possibility.


We witnessed the Democrats during Trump’s term and during Biden’s four years use lawfare against Trump. It was Trump’s reelection in 2024 that saved him from being turned into a criminal by the Democrats. Since then Democrats have made further inroads into transforming law from serving justice to serving Democrat agendas.

As Democrats have become ideologues convinced that whites are racists whose speech needs to be curtailed along with their 14th Amendment protection to equality under law, Democrats in the justice (sic) system have been perfecting their ability to use their offices not to serve justice but to serve their ideological agendas. This is what ideological parties always do.

New York Assistant Attorney General Rick Sawyer explained to the Jewish Anti-Defamation League in a 2022 conference that “Attorney General’s offices have a massive amount of power within their jurisdiction.” He pointed out that they do not have to charge a crime in order to bankrupt a target with subpoenas, massive investigations, and force them to enter into “creative settlements” without ever going to court. Sawyer explained that these means of harassment and intimidation can be used to negate free speech rights. Peter Brimelow and Emerald Robinson discuss how NY Attorney General Letitia James used these highly unethical tactics to close down the immigration website Vdare by imposing a $1 to $2 million legal bill caused by complying with subpoenas.

Another trick Democrats have devised is when a state attorney general transgresses on a target’s First Amendment rights, the Democrat federal judge to whom the First Amendment issue is brought refuses to hear the case and reassigns it to the state. In this way Democrat federal judges condone trampling on the victim’s First Amendment rights by state prosecutors serving some Democrat agenda.

This development is hardly surprising. American law schools have been teaching for a couple of decades that the purpose of law is not to serve justice but to transform society in a leftward direction. Shutting up one’s opponents advances the leftward direction. The same has happened in journalism schools where the students are taught that their purpose is not to objectively report the news but to use “news” as a weapon to transform society. The American people are unaware of these developments, because it is not in the interest of those bringing changes in this way to tell them.

It was not only Trump who was a victim of Democrat lawfare, but also others such as Mike Lindell, General Flynn, and Rudy Giuliani. When the Democrats return to power, expect to see an increase in the use of lawfare to destroy Republicans. The Democrats will use lawfare to turn the US into a one party political system.

In contrast, Trump has been unable to bring justice to the Democrats who abused power in efforts to frame the President of the United States. NY Attorney General Letitia James, who attempted to frame Trump for mortgage fraud when there were no complaints is herself known to have committed mortgage fraud. But Democrat prosecutors and judges in the state with jurisdiction prevent charges from being brought against her. We hear a lot about alleged “white privilege,” but here we see real black Democrat privilege.

Trump might have handed both the rope and tree limb to the Democrats to hang both him and the Republican Party by letting Netanyahu and the Israel Lobby drag the US into a war with Iran that has imposed hardship on Americans by reducing energy flows and sending up energy costs and inflation at the very time that AI data centers championed by Trump are driving up the cost of electricity. In effect, Netanyahu has succeeded in pushing America leftward into more policies destructive of the economy and the Constitution.

Read more …

Victor Davis Hanson has 2 articles about October 7. He makes some good points.

• The Lie Behind the Gaza Genocide Accusations (Victor Davis Hanson)

We’re at the third anniversary week, just last week, of the Oct. 7, 2023 massacres. Remember what happened? About 4,000 terrorists from Gaza, Hamas terrorists, accompanied by 2,000 opportunistic Gazan civilians, swarmed into Israel in a pre-planned assault. They penetrated 17 miles. They would have gone a lot further had the IDF and armed civilians not beaten them back. They killed almost 1,000 of the terrorists and their accompaniment.


But the question I have is: Why is Gaza now in rubble? We hear about genocide, we hear about settler colonialism, we hear about apartheid, but why is Gaza in rubble? And I think I can answer that in two ways. What happened before Oct. 7, and what happened after.

Let’s go first to what happened after. The Israeli government on Oct. 8, and subsequently for the next 20 days, asked Hamas, such as it is, to do two things: turn over the 251 hostages and turn over the architects and those who participated in the murder. They waited 20 days before invading Gaza. In those 20 days, the Gazans sent about 8,500 rockets into Israel’s civilian centers. These were not aimed at military targets or even dual-use targets. They were aimed at civilian targets.

So for 20 days, while Israel waited for them to give back the hostages before they invaded, give back the architects of this terror, they refused both counts, and they sent about 8,500 rockets. They would altogether send 13,000 rockets, we forget that, at Israel. So that’s number one and two.

And next, they exposed civilians at the entries and exits into the tunnels below Gaza. There was almost 500 miles in this labyrinth, and to get in and out, you had to go through a hospital, a mosque, or a school, or in some cases private homes. The Hamas terrorists, the people responsible for killing everybody, were hiding in this labyrinth quite safe while they were exposing their own civilians to retaliation for the crimes that they had committed.

Can you imagine during the Blitz, for example, if British civil defense people who were manning the barricades and were afraid of bombing went down into the subway and they denied the use of the subway to British civilians? That would be unheard of. But that’s exactly what Hamas did.

So number three, there were about 2,000 to 3,000 civilians that either planned all along to go into Israel to be opportunistic killers, looters, thieves, and rapists. And they participated in the mutilation and the desecration and the hostage taking. We know that. We had about a couple of hundred people who were captured. We had their GoPro cameras. We had security cameras in the kibbutzes.

And by the way, of the 6,000 who participated, the Israeli government has taken out about 4,000. The next 2,000 must know that they are marked people, and they will not be here very long.

Another reason. Why, when they brought back hostages and corpses and they paraded them in the streets of Gaza, were they not only met by a mob that was cheering, but the mob actually tried to spit, hit, club those hostages who were alive and mutilate the bodies of those who were dead and brought back as trophies?

In other words, the civilians, think of this, the civilians of Gaza that we say were innocent had to be stopped from further atrocities by the people who created the atrocities, the Hamas terrorists.

Let’s ask another reason why Gaza is in rubble, and in the context of before Oct. 7.

In September 2005, all Israelis were out of Gaza. There was not one Jew, there was not one Israeli inside Gaza. American philanthropic organizations and donors bought key infrastructure, especially greenhouses, and the Israelis turned them over to the Gazans, who immediately looted them and destroyed them against their own self-interest. They were very lucrative businesses, and they could have been using them.

So my point is, there were no Jews in Gaza. This is 22 years ago, or 18 years ago by the time of the October massacres. So Gazans and Hamas terrorists wanted to kill Israelis even though no Israelis were in Gaza. And they had not been there for about 18 years on Oct. 7.

And the West, mainly the United States and Europe and the U.N., had given Gaza in that period from 2005 to the date of the massacres about $40 billion. Did they build a Dubai-like resort? Did Hamas have regular elections? Did they have a constitution that encouraged the equality of the sexes, that allowed religious freedom, that called for protection of individual civil liberties? No.

Did they take their 25 miles or so of pristine Mediterranean beaches and turn it into a Dubai? No. What did they do? First thing they did is they murdered any contestant to the election. They held the election in 2006. They got elected, and then they canceled the election. And then for the next 18 years, they killed anybody who questioned this Hamas theocratic terrorist clique that ruled Gaza.

Let me emphasize again, they diverted $40 billion and built a tunnel labyrinth for one reason, to protect the terrorists and to expose their own civilians to retaliation when they committed their next planned atrocity.

Think of the argument. They are essentially telling the world we expect the Israelis to be more humane about our own civilians than we are. Therefore, we are putting our entries and exits in places where civilians will be there, in schools, mosques, and hospitals, because we think the Israelis are so humanitarian they won’t bomb those places and we will be safe. In other words, We don’t care if they get killed, but we want to save ourselves and we think the Israelis will treat our civilians better than we do who are exposing them.

Let me just sum up.

After Oct. 7, they had 20 days to come to an agreement and turn over the perpetrators and give back the hostages. They refused. Instead, they answered that with rockets aimed at Israeli civilians. When the Israelis went in there to get the perpetrators, they hid in tunnels, committed terrorist acts, sent thousands more rockets into Israel, deliberately at civilian areas, and put their civilians as human shields to ensure there would be civilian casualties even as the Israelis were dropping leaflets and texting individual apartment dwellers to get out and not be collateral damage.

Before Oct. 7, Israel had completely evacuated Gaza for 18 years. They had allowed an election. They were supplying, I should say, about 20% to 50% of the food, water, sewage treatment, chemicals, fuel, and power to Gaza. Gaza had a border with Egypt. Did Egypt want to let Gazans in there, and did they want to help? No. They wanted nothing to do with them. Nothing to do with them.

They had an election, then they canceled all elections, and they tormented and terrorized their own people. And we are supposed to believe now that Israel created a genocide when the population of Gaza, when they left in 2005, was what? It’s about 1.3 million. And what was it on Oct. 7? About 2.4 million. Nations or countries that want to commit genocide do not pull all of their military and civilians out of the area that is targeted and then see it increase by one million people in a mere 20 years.

The charge is absurd. The whole situation is absurd. And what’s most absurd, Westerners still parrot this word genocide, which applies to a lot of places in the world that they omit, but it surely doesn’t apply to what Israel did after Oct. 7.

Read more …

“Why Are Campuses Not Condemning Them?..”

• Hamas is a Complete Death Cult (Victor Davis Hanson)


Jack Fowler: Well, Victor, let’s go to some campuses—two campuses. I’ll throw both stories out there and your take on them. They both have to do with antisemitism, and one is at Columbia, which has always been a hotbed since Oct. 7 for antisemitism.

And the headline here is, from Fox News: “Columbia University Says Oct. 7 Dining Menu Listing Was a Mistake.” And part of what it said here on the menu at the school was Oct. 7 blush sauce, which is like—what the f–? This is, this is… “Oh, that was a printing typo.” How the hell does that get to be a printing typo? Anyway, that was one thing.

The other thing that’s antisemitic and really troubling has to do with this professor at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Professor Guangtian Ha he’s been arrested and charged with cyberstalking a Jewish colleague. He was posing as a MAGA anonymous person on X.

Let me just read this. It says, “In addition to posting vile antisemitic messages, he allegedly posted his colleague’s home address, infant child’s name, a photograph of the family’s mailbox, countless antisemitic slurs and threats, and reference of real-time observation of their home,” etc. And he was a wackadoo, I think, if you look at the courses he was teaching. But someone with that mentality could be hired at a prestigious college, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising, Victor.

Victor Davis Hanson: He’s DEI. He’s DEI. Remember what DEI is. DEI is just as if you and I go into an insurance company and say, “We’re gonna go take a trip, and we wanna get insurance. We’re gonna fly, and wanna get airline insurance.” And so we’re indemnified. I have a small little 40 acres, and I have a renter now, and I get insurance that says if anyone who wants to sue me, I have X amount.

Basically, in California, it’s happened five times. If you’re drunk, and you’re driving at a high speed, and you go aerial, and you go into an orchard or vineyard and you destroy $30,000 or $40,000 worth of damage, you get nothing, and the person leaves the scene of the accident. And if you try to take the car, of course you’ll be arrested as a deposit.

But they can… We’ve had cases where they sue people if they hit a pipe or something or, “Well, that pipeline shouldn’t be there.” So you get these expensive policies. Well, that’s what DEI is. It’s basically saying, “I got a DEI policy, and that means that if I want to make up a false identity and attack this person, I’m not a part of the oppressor class. I’m the oppressed class, so I get an exemption. If I wanna walk out of this store and shoplift, I get an exemption if it’s under $950, maybe even above.”

And that’s the very worst thing about DEI. And that’s all these things have something in common. If you are a victim and you say, “The Jews did this,” or “The Jews did that,” then you’re going to be protected.

I think the Jewish community, I think, knows that. I mean, there are right-wing antisemites. I think you can make the argument that Tucker [Carlson] detests Israel and is an antisemite, given the things he said. And I say that because I remember I had no evidence of that, but I remember when he, in his early career, he was a critic of Pat Buchanan, remember? And he said that Buchanan was really sending coded antisemitic themes. Tucker said that. So I think he’s gone from that to something completely opposite.

But what I’m getting at is if it’s [Nick] Fuentes or Candace [Owens] or Tucker, that’s an isolated group. What we’re talking about is the whole left-wing party now is antisemitic. Basically, the mixture of socialism and the whole Islamism, you get the people in the United States who are always accusing the Jews of running cabals, and you get the people from the Middle East who say Israel is the source of all of our self-inflicted problems, and they combine, and they’re powerful, and people are not speaking out against it.

But it’s from the Left, and that professor will be found out to be on the Left. That’s why he disguised himself as a MAGA person. But I think it’s accelerating so fast, Jack, I don’t think they’re ashamed of it. I think they’re happy about it. You know, you can see that with [Zohran] Mamdani. They’re talking now about firing Police Commissioner [Jessica] Tisch in New York. You know, the only Jewish member of his… I mean, mainstream Jewish. You know, she’s done a wonderful job.

And Hasan Piker, whom they all invite to be seen with, he said that Orthodox Jews are inbred, and he said you will not see a Jew nominated ever again as a Democratic candidate for president. So they’re open about it, and it’s gonna keep going.

Jack Fowler: By the way, we should just, since you stumbled into—you didn’t stumble into this, you brought us into this. About Mamdani, he did on Oct. 7 paid lip service to what happened three years ago. But then, of course, he also added all those other things. It was some event— But now he’s being attacked by — could you be further left than Mamdani? By those who say that his participation at an event that recognized the murders on Oct. 7 was inexcusable…

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, people who have been flying—at some of these demonstrations, not all, but some, they fly Hezbollah flags. They’re happy. They believe in terrorism. [Abdul] El-Sayed said, “Hurt people hurt people,” i.e. translated, people that are hurt by Jews then hurt Jews. What do you expect? Right.

The funny thing is, you take away Oct. 7 right now, and there would be no problem in Gaza. We would still go back to square one. The Gaza wall would be pathetic. It’s nothing compared to pictures of the Gaza Egyptian wall. In other words, the Egyptians were firmer that they didn’t want Gazans going into fellow Muslim Arab Egypt than the Jews were into Jewish Israel.

There would be 18,000 work permits, with people still going in making $11 to $13 an hour in Israel working side by side. All the buildings would be there, da, da, da. All they had to do was not go in under the guise of being workers and conduct intelligence operations, find out where the kibbutzes are, plan the whole thing.

Iran was the brain and the bank of the whole thing. Hezbollah was supposed to join in. The Houthis were supposed to join in. And they really did believe they would get further than 17 miles. They thought they were gonna go 50, 60, 80 miles because they thought that 150,000 rockets from Hezbollah would come in, Houthis would come in. They did fire right after—People forget this. They fired about 4,000 rockets after, Oct. 7 into civilian centers, before Oct. 20 when the Israelis went in. And then they ended up firing almost 14,000 in total. But they really did, and Iran really did believe that it could have deniability of culpability, and everything that we’re looking at now wouldn’t have happened. I mean, we might have —

– Jack Fowler: But on that point, on that point, Victor, it’s still hard to grasp that on Oct. 8 what happened and that it wasn’t latent. It was there. It wasn’t created on Oct. 8.
– Victor Davis Hanson: Absolutely.
– Jack Fowler: It was sitting there waiting to be unleashed.
– Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. That’s what I pointed out.

They were trying to hide it. And everybody thought people on both sides of good intelligence and a good heart said, “This was a horrible atrocity. We have to look at this.” Never in their right mind did they think that people would come out and cheer and think, oh my gosh, we killed 1,200 and we got to rape them and mutilate them and dismember them and torture them and take hostages. This is so wonderful. Now we’re going to celebrate. This is so…

And then they really did go to the next leap, And the Israelis are losing. We’ve got inside Israel with only 6,000 people, and now they’re surrounded, and the Hezbollah is gonna wipe them out with the Houthis, and everything’s gonna get better, and Hamas has got 50,000, and Hezbollah’s got 100,000, and the Houthis got 20,000 rockets and drones, and Iran’s got all … It’s gonna be wonderful. Let’s celebrate. That was the whole climate.

And the only reason Gaza is in rubble today, the Israelis said we want all of them back. We want all the people who did this. Send them back here. We want to try them. And by the way, give up the 251 hostages. That’s all we’re asking. And they said no. Why did they say no? Because we’re winning. We’re winning. We got people in the United States that are cheering on campuses. We got all of Europe is on our side. We’ve got 250,000 rockets, missiles, and drones in our ring of fire in Iran. We’re gonna win. And then Israel went in. And, when they went in, they were attacked.

Probably 40,000 missiles and rockets have been shot at Israeli civilians from Lebanon, from Hamas, from Yemen, from Iran. And they lost. They lost badly. And that was all they had to …

And if they didn’t wanna give them up, and they didn’t wanna give the hostages up, all they had to do was do this. They had to say, “You know what? The Israelis are gonna blitz us. We’ve got over 300 miles of tunnels. They have food. They have water. They’re safe from bombing. We want all you Gazan people who live anywhere near us, who might be in danger, get in those tunnels, because we’re gonna go out and fight these Jews. We’re gonna go out and fight the Israeli, the IDF. We’re gonna fight house to house. But we don’t want you hurt.”

They did just the opposite. They put the entries and exits under hospitals, private homes, mosques, and schools, and they kept the civilians out. And they used it because they really did believe the Israelis would be more reluctant to inflict damage or death on their own Gazan brotherhood than they were in exposing them to that.

So basically, Hamas made the calculation. You know, it’s easy. Anybody who knows any logic, A plus B equals C, will see that they said, “You know what? Those awful Jews in Israel, in their naivete, care more about human life than we do. And no, even worse for them, they care more about the Gazans than we do. So if we put our people out there to be killed, a lot of them are gonna get killed, but they’re not going to hit our entries and exits in the hospitals, the mosques, and the schools because they’re gonna pull back from those places. So we’re gonna sit here safe, and the Gazans will get killed, and that’ll be good for propaganda.”

What they didn’t count on was the Israelis went down and got them and pulled them out and fought. But that would have all been avoided. And we’re not even getting into not one Jewish person was in Gaza for 18 years—since 2005. Or we’re not getting out, they had an election. All they had to do was say, “We’re gonna have an election. Let’s not kill Palestinian Authority rivals. They’re a different party, but please, Hamas people, don’t throw them off houses anymore. Please, that’s all we’re asking. Don’t kill 150 of our own people and throw them off. And don’t go to people’s houses and threaten them to vote for us. And then, once we elect Hamas, let’s have a free press, habeas corpus, a constitution, and let’s every four years hold regular elections.”

They couldn’t even do that. And then if they couldn’t even do that, they could say, “Well, we’re gonna be an autocracy like, oh, the UAE or Saudi Arabia, but we’re gonna show the Jews in Israel that we’re smarter and better, so we’re gonna build a Kuwait City or a Dubai right here on 24 miles of priceless Mediterranean beaches, and we’re gonna make this. We’re gonna put the Israelis to shame. We’re gonna have more money, nicer places, tourists.”

They couldn’t even do that. They were a complete death cult.

Read more …

Navarro was there, as part of Trump1.

• The Masks Were Never About Science (Peter Navarro)

On March 8, 2020, Anthony Fauci told “60 Minutes” that a healthy person had “no reason to be walking around with a mask.” Within a year, he was applauding the idea of wearing two. The official explanation is that the science changed—that we learned about presymptomatic and asymptomatic spread. Fauci’s own diary destroys that explanation twice, in his own hand, and what it leaves behind is inventory management, sold to a frightened country as medicine.


I pull back the curtain on the mask war in my new book, “Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison”—and I can tell you what the other side of it looked like, because I was fighting it. While Fauci was on television explaining why Americans did not need masks, I was in the West Wing getting them some—the good kind, the N95 kind essential for first responders.

On Feb. 9, 2020—31 days before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic—I wrote a memo to the Coronavirus Task Force warning that China produced about half the world’s N95 masks, was blocking their export, and that “The U.S. therefore faces the real prospect of a severe mask shortage!” I asked for an export halt, purchase guarantees for every domestic producer at maximum output, and Buy American rules for the masks that cover an American face.

Then the phone rang. On March 12, a Honeywell vice president told me the company could stand up two new N95 manufacturing lines, in Rhode Island and Arizona, if Washington moved fast. Washington does not move fast. So I gave her my word—no signature, no paper.

Within 24 hours, Honeywell’s trucks, on my word, were hauling production machinery out of Massachusetts. By the end of the first Trump administration, those two manufacturing lines were turning out tens of millions of American-made N95s a month and employing more than a thousand Americans.

That was my mask war. Making masks. Now Fauci’s.

Here is the first thing his diary kills: his alibi for switching his position on masks. Supposedly the guidance changed when science learned that people without symptoms could spread the virus. But in the first days of February 2020, George Gao—the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention—told Fauci directly, in Fauci’s words, “that infected people can be asymptomatic and that asymptomatic people can transmit.”

He knew in the first week of February. He told “60 Minutes” there was no reason for a mask a month later.Here is the second thing, and it is worse. On June 23, 2020, after a six-hour House hearing, Fauci recorded a run-in with a West Virginia congressman who was “giving me s— about saying early on that we should not wear masks to save them for the HCWs [health care workers] at a time when there was a shortage.”

Read it again. Save them for the health care workers. On Fauci’s own telling, the “no reason” of March 8 was never an assessment of the evidence. It was supply triage. Tell the public not to worry about getting masks—so the masks stay on the shelf for the people who need them, in his judgment, more.

In the same March weeks Anthony Fauci was managing a shortage by misleading Americans about masks, Honeywell’s trucks were rolling toward Rhode Island on nothing but my word, and two factories were preparing to end the shortage he was lying to accommodate. One of us treated it as a production problem and fixed it. The other treated it as a communications problem.

And watch the staircase he climbed. March 31, in the diary: “We probably were too strong in saying masks do not work.” Not the science changed—we were too strong.By summer: “There’s no doubt that wearing masks protects you.” By autumn: “begging people to wear masks.” By February 2021, two of them.

No reason, to too strong, to no doubt, to begging, to double up—each certainty delivered with exactly the confidence of the one it silently replaced. A scientist updating his communication based on evidence says what he said, what changed, and why. This was a ratchet.

Let me be precise, because flattening this debate was itself the trick. I was never anti-mask; I ran mask production. The mask on those trucks had a federal filtration standard, a fit requirement, and a nurse’s face to protect. What Washington eventually sold under that same four-letter word ran down to a damp and floppy bandanna on a 5-year-old.

And the children paid for it. Fauci’s influence imposed years of face covering on small children at low risk from the disease, without evidence of benefit at that age, while treating the developmental cost to children as not important enough to measure. Everything I did in that war was supply. What President Trump and I never did was order one free citizen to wear anything.

As for Tony, there is an old line that you can tell when he is lying because his lips are moving. Maybe that is the real reason he wore the mask.

Read more …

Oh no, the CIA didn’t do it. No!

Do the Germans get together a show trial to please Langley?

To piss off Kiev?

• Nord Stream Sabotage Trial Begins With Explosive Allegations Against Ukraine (RFE/RL)

A German court is trying former Ukrainian officer Serhii Kuznetsov over his alleged role in coordinating the September 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. German prosecutors allege the operation was conducted on behalf of Ukrainian state authorities, although Kyiv denies involvement and no Ukrainian political leadership role has been established. The trial could intensify political disputes in Germany over continued military assistance to Ukraine, particularly among opposition parties critical of Berlin’s support.


After four years of speculation, leaks, and briefings by anonymous sources, the world is finally about to hear evidence given publicly under oath in a German courtroom about how the Nord Stream gas pipelines were blown up – in a case that could prove politically explosive. German prosecutors have identified seven Ukrainian suspects, but just one of them is in the dock in the trial beginning on October 14. He is named as Serhii K. in court documents that say he is suspected of being an accomplice to a war crime.

That classification has caused outrage. But German prosecutors have further raised the stakes by stating the suspects were operating “on behalf of state authorities in Ukraine. Kyiv has always strictly denied any involvement in the attack, which damaged crucial energy infrastructure serving Germany – one of its most important military backers in its fight since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Serhii K., who has been identified elsewhere as Serhiy Kuznetsov, says he is innocent.

‘Two Crazy Military Men’
Nord Stream is majority-owned by Russia’s state-controlled Gazprom and co-financed by major European energy companies. It was constructed to deliver Russian gas directly to Germany, bypassing transit states such as Ukraine and Poland, which had tense relations with Moscow. The suspected sabotage and subsequent gas leaks happened in September 2022, rendering the pipelines as inoperable.

Western governments originally accused Russia of carrying out the blasts, but German investigators started forming a case that said a group of Ukrainian divers hired a yacht and planted explosives on the seabed. They say Kuznetsov, a former military officer, was the ringleader. “

At the end of February 2022, he and other military personnel, on behalf of state authorities in Ukraine, developed the plan,” says a summary of the indictment released by prosecutors. “The aim was to permanently halt gas deliveries via the pipelines and prevent Russia from using the revenue from the natural gas trade to finance its war efforts.” The prosecutors have not stated publicly the full extent of the alleged conspiracy.

The full indictment contains some further details, according to three German media outlets that say they have seen it: public-service TV station ARD and two print-era heavyweights, Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit. They all reported that, while in custody in Italy, Kuznetsov had phoned his wife in Kyiv and investigators were secretly listening in as he said he’d been advised by a lawyer that it was time to admit this had been “an official military operation.” His commander should state that they were not just “two crazy military men.”

Kuznetsov’s Italian lawyer, Nicola Canestrini, has played down the importance of this evidence, saying there was “no smoking gun” in the case. “It is hard to believe that, after Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, a German court should hold a war crimes trial against a Ukrainian serviceman,” he added in comments to RFE/RL.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/iam_smx/status/2110357589099942066?s=20 https://twitter.com/EvaFox/status/2110463519292563757?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle October 14 2026

Oct 142026
 
 October 14, 2026  Posted by at 9:29 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  47 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Women Picking Olives 1889


• Russia’s Offensive Ability Is Broken – Kyiv’s Former Top General (BBC)
• UK and Poland Accuse Russia of “Mayhem” (CTH)
• Europe’s Diesel Shortage Is a Problem Created by Political Design (Lacalle)
• Zelenskyy Requests His Own “Diesel Deal” with the United States (CTH)
• German Opposition Demands Trump-style Diesel Deal With Russia (RT)
• Ramifications of the Trump-Putin Energy Deal (CTH)
• President Trump is Making Chopper Pressers Great Again (CTH)
• Jack Smith Could Track Phone Contacts, but What About the Lawyers? (Manney)
• Trump Might Not Be as Bad as He Appears (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Trump Suggests Ilhan Omar’s Money Came From Fraud (Catherine Salgado)
• Corporate Islamification (Stefan Padfield)
• The Midterm Polling Is Absolutely, Positively, 100% Wrong. (Maybe.) (Pinsker)

 

 

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2109714875932913993?s=20 https://twitter.com/GuntherEagleman/status/2109616355825569987?s=20 https://twitter.com/Tironianae/status/2109783416044449882?s=20

 

 


I want to ask for your help.

When this special operation started in 2022, military experts Douglas MacGregor and Scott Ritter both said Ukraine was losing 7-8 times more men than Russia.

That difference is now supposed to be the other way around, according to a Ukrainian voice.

Which means some 50 times more Russian victims than 4 years ago, compared to Ukrainian victims.

I don’t see how that could have happened.

Do you guys think that is credible?

“Ukraine has stabilised the front line and “broken Russia’s ability to advance” by killing so many of its men, Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief has said in an interview with the BBC.”

• Russia’s Offensive Ability Is Broken – Kyiv’s Former Top General (BBC)


Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi

Ukraine has stabilised the front line and “broken Russia’s ability to advance” by killing so many of its men, Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief has said in an interview with the BBC. Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi made the comments in an exclusive interview, his first since he was dramatically forced from his post in the summer. He addressed his sacking, disagreeing with his critics who declared him too “old school” to command Ukraine’s new, technologically advanced forces.


He also pushed back against allegations made by soldiers who previously served under him, who told the BBC they were ordered to remain at their positions even when they were almost surrounded by Russians, leading to high losses. Syrskyi said that Moscow’s overall losses in the war were six times higher than Ukraine’s. “If you count only dead, then it’s up to 11 times,” he added. Neither Russia nor Ukraine officially release the numbers of their dead. Ukraine’s military says it inflicted record losses this year on Russian soldiers in September, although that cannot be verified.

UK intelligence chiefs estimate Russia has lost around half a million men killed in Ukraine since launching its full-scale invasion in 2022. The US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies meanwhile believes Ukraine has lost up to 150,000 troops killed by June 2026.. He says this difference in death toll – as well as technological advances, and a strategy of attacking weak points in Russia’s lines while containing their advances in other parts – accounts for the current stalemate at the front.

In the first six months of 2026, Russia managed overall to seize 61 sq km, the general said. “It’s an indication that the front line has been stabilised.” The Institute for Study of War (ISW) has also confirmed this trend. One of its recent reports says that in September 2026, Moscow lost more territory than it took.


Syrskyi was appointed Ukraine’s commander-in-chief in 2024. He had previously won praise for defending Kyiv at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, and for leading the successful counteroffensive east of Kharkiv in the autumn of that year. But President Volodymyr Zelensky fired Syrskyi this summer, amid a major disagreement with then-defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

Fedorov had said that instead of adapting to the realities of the changing war, the army under Syrskyi had blocked his initiatives. Zelensky initially fired Fedorov, as tensions burst into the open between the two men. But mass street protests then forced the president to also fire Syrskyi, replacing him with Maj Gen Mykhailo Drapatyi, 43.

Syrskyi told the BBC that he had “disagreements” with Fedorov because the latter “didn’t take into consideration the interests of the army” when procuring weapons and supplies. Fedorov had created an “imbalance” in supplies, Syrskyi said. He had prioritised drones while overlooking key front-line kit such as unmanned ground vehicles, pick-up trucks and motorbikes. Even with drones, Syrskyi said, there were shortages as the army got only half of what they needed.

Fedorov was a popular young minister who was known for his digital and technological initiatives. Many contrasted him with Syrskyi, who critics thought was not fit to lead the new technological arms race with Russia. But Syrskyi disagrees with such criticism. It was during his time the use of drones reached this new, unprecedented level, including deep strikes more than 2,000km (1,200 miles) behind enemy lines, he said.

Ukraine was the first country to create the Unmanned Systems Forces as a separate branch of armed forces, under his command: now, he said, drones account for 80% of Russia’s losses. Under his military leadership, however, Ukrainian troops undertook chaotic withdrawals from the eastern cities of Avdiivka and Vuhledar, and from around Pokrovsk. Soldiers who spoke to the BBC in the past complained that they were ordered to remain at their positions at any costs. By the time they were told to pull back, it was often too late as they were almost surrounded by Russian troops.

Syrskyi does not deny that such situations occur on the front line. But he told the BBC that Ukraine was fighting against a far more powerful army. In 2025, the ratio of jets and bombs was 18 to one in Moscow’s favour, he said. In the same year, Russia had two-and-a-half times more artillery pieces and shells than Ukraine. And with four million militarily trained men who they can mobilise, Russian forces can create chances to push through, he argued.

One of Syrskyi’s most famous operations was an incursion into Russia’s Kursk region that started in August 2024. It ended with a dramatic retreat the following spring, which some soldiers described as “catastrophic”. Syrskyi, however, insisted that the Kursk operation was “a necessity”.

“In the summer 2024, Russian forces were pushing along all main directions on the front line with up to six times more troops than we had,” he explained. The Kursk incursion disrupted Russia’s offensive and forced Moscow to redirect troops, giving Ukraine a respite and a chance for its stretched brigades in the east and south to recover, Syrskyi said.

He also had strong words for European allies who doubt that Russia may have territorial ambitions beyond Ukraine. He advised European partners to start preparing for the war now and “drop all illusions that [it] will not come”. He also said he believed Ukraine’s war was going to become even more technological. There will be more robots, automated systems and artificial intelligence (AI). “Even ordinary weapons now get an AI-based control system to enhance their capabilities,” he said.

Such technologies can give a new life to conventional weapons like tanks. Both Russia and Ukraine were now racing to develop “active systems of defence” to protect armoured vehicles, Syrskyi said. But he insisted that “the human role will remain definitive [on the battlefield] because [people] will need to control those systems”.

Read more …

“UK Prime Minister Says Russia Interfered in Brexit Vote, Polish Prime Minister Says Russia Sabotaged Starlink System ..”

The UK still hasn’t gottten over Brexit?!

And look, of course Russia targets Starlink. it’s used against them in battle.

• UK and Poland Accuse Russia of “Mayhem” (CTH)

As President Trump continues to confront the EU-NATO antagonists who demand increased conflict with Russia, the primary voices of the EU-NATO group shout panic about Putin’s nefarious espionage, mayhem, general mischief and other heinous activity. All of it with the ever-present ‘just trust us‘ evidence. Yesterday, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham blamed Russia for the 2016 Brexit referendum vote that took the U.K out of the European Union.


UK NEWS – […] “The prime minister told The Rest is Politics podcast that upon arriving in No 10, he had asked about possible Russian interference in the 2016 vote, adding: “I’ve had the clear answer that, yes, there was.” […] Burnham did not provide further details about the type or extent of Moscow’s activity during the Brexit referendum.mBritain Unbound, a pro-Brexit campaign group, said Burnham’s comments were “another crude attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the decision that the British people made in 2016”. (read more)

Today, Poland Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a man of notoriously intemperate disposition, said that two Turkish fellows who sabotaged the Starlink satellite station near Warsaw were operating on behalf of Putin.WARSAW, Poland — Poland is blaming Russia for an arson attack on a Starlink satellite station in September and two Turkish citizens have been arrested in connection with the suspected act of sabotage, authorities said.

The suspects, whose names were not released in line with Polish privacy rules, were arrested in Germany, Polish officials said Monday. They are accused of deliberately setting fire to Starlink infrastructure on Sept. 23 in Wola Krobowska, Poland, about 40 kilometres (25 miles) south of Warsaw.[…] Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, in a post on X, called the incident “another act of hybrid warfare.” (read more)

Meanwhile the head of British Intelligence, MI5 chief Sir Ken McCallum, warned Prime Minister Burham that promoting Russian conspiracies without solid evidence to support his claim may lead to an erosion of confidence in the U.K government. Apparently, like the German people, the British are laughing at government leadership.

[He] suggested Russian trolls would be “delighted” to be front page news again, “despite the comparative unimpressiveness” of their efforts. He added: “There is a really important difference between interference attempted and outcome swayed. There are diabolical plots afoot, and serious seriousness is demanded.

https://twitter.com/TheOtherSideRu/status/2109969744547758097?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2109969744547758097%7Ctwgr%5E9ebed70b90d224e5c588dbea6444b462a8e94f75%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheconservativetreehouse.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F10%2F13%2Fuk-prime-minister-says-russia-interfered-in-brexit-vote-polish-prime-minister-says-russia-sabotaged-starlink-system%2F


ZELENSKYY TODAY – “I spoke with Prime Minister Mark J Carney. Thank you, Canada! I briefed him on the latest Russian strike on Kyiv and no advance warning from our partners about the ballistic missile launch. This is the second time Ukraine has received no warning this week.

A rescue operation is underway – the strike damaged a residential building, and the fire engulfed apartments on the first through eighth floors. All emergency services are on the scene, and residents are being evacuated. So far, one person has been reported killed and six injured. My condolences to their families and loved ones. There was also a strike on the grounds of an energy facility – one of Kyiv’s main power plants. We are counting on our partners’ support.

We also discussed contacts with the United States and diplomatic developments that may take place this week. It is important that the world clearly supports an end to this war and real steps toward de-escalation – genuine steps that Russia will actually take to bring its war and its killings to an end.”

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Very much so.

• Europe’s Diesel Shortage Is a Problem Created by Political Design (Lacalle)

The diesel agreement between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will not solve the diesel shortage, considering the magnitude of the problem created by years of misguided, wrongly called “environmental policies.” Complaining about diesel prices and the US-Russia deal while eliminating domestic refining capacity and bombing refineries is just another example of bureaucratic hypocrisy.


Renewables are important, but they cannot substitute diesel, just as they have been unable to offset the importance of natural gas. Diesel is essential for every segment of the economy, from transport, manufacturing, and farming to distribution. Now, European politicians complain. However, governments cannot negotiate away years of lost refining capacity. Europe’s vulnerability is structural. Yes, war has intensified it, but policy choices helped create an energy system increasingly dependent on imported fuels, expensive infrastructure, and high taxation.

Furthermore, the risk is that—as happened in the past—oil and gasoline prices may fall, and the European businesses and families will still pay much higher energy and fuel prices. According to European Commission figures and comparisons based on official European and US data, Europe suffers an enormous energy-cost disadvantage after two decades of massive subsidies and renewable rollout.

Industrial electricity prices are more than twice those in the United States, while industrial natural gas prices reach four times US levels. At the pump, European consumers pay approximately 47% more for diesel and 70% more for gasoline. This is not simply an oil-price problem. It is an enormous competitiveness problem that permeates throughout the economy.


On October 9, Trump announced that Russia would release 300,000 tonnes of diesel immediately, followed by 500,000 tonnes in November, one million thereafter, and another three million, subject to refinery conditions. Washington temporarily authorized Russian diesel transactions until April 7, 2027. However, these are announced commitments, not confirmed deliveries. It may mitigate but not solve the diesel crisis.

The distinction is important. A sanctions exemption may permit trade, but it cannot repair damaged processing units. According to International Energy Agency estimates, Russian diesel production has suffered a temporary but significant blow, declining almost 30% following Ukrainian attacks. The important element is a policy choice, not a consequence of war.

Europe’s refining contraction is the key factor behind the structural diesel problem. It has lost more than 20% of refining capacity since 2009. At the end of 2025, the EU, Britain, Norway, and Switzerland had 72 mainstream refineries and an annual primary processing capacity of 625.4 million tonnes, down 167.6 million tonnes. Industry association FuelsEurope counts 35 closures since 2009.

The deterioration did not stop with the 2022 Ukraine war and has continued recently. Europe lost almost 400,000 barrels per day of refining capacity between 2024 and 2025, with five refineries closing over two years. This trend is a continuing reduction in the infrastructure needed to turn crude into usable fuel.

Environmental policy is part of this story, but taxation and policy choices have aggravated the problem. Governments made it uneconomical to upgrade aging facilities or build new units. Furthermore, at least five closed European facilities abandoned crude processing through conversion into biorefineries. These conversions worsened conventional refining capacity and did not offer a reliable and sustainable alternative.

The policy mistake is obvious and reminds us of the same errors committed with nuclear plants and natural gas supply. Eliminating capacity is a policy mistake without a credible path to reduce diesel’s importance. This move was not a transition but a jump into the void. Europe now relies more heavily on refined products from the Middle East, the United States, and India. Importing products is not an environmental policy success. “Not in my backyard” led to dependency and loss of competitiveness. The EU was the fourth-largest buyer of Russian fossil fuels, accounting for 8% (EUR 1.2 bn) of Russia’s export revenues from the top five importers in August 2026, according to CREA.


Ukraine’s refinery attacks have reduced fuel availability, and Russia has restricted diesel exports. While damaged refineries can be repaired, it will take months. War in the Middle East and disrupted Hormuz flows have compounded the shortage. The European Central Bank estimates reported in September put the refining-margin contribution to diesel prices at €0.41 per liter, approximately 19% of the pump price.

That is why watching Brent alone misses the problem, as crude and diesel are different markets. On September 21, EU diesel averaged €2.226 per liter, the highest reading in the European Commission’s series since 2005. Taxes accounted for €0.861, or 38.6% of the price. VAT applies on top of excise duties, effectively taxing the tax itself.

The EU minimum diesel excise is €0.33 per liter. America’s federal diesel tax is 24.4 cents per gallon, before state taxes and fees. European taxation adds a persistent cost wedge that cheaper crude cannot eliminate. This means that the average EU final diesel price is almost 50% higher than the US one. Thus, falling oil prices can provide relief without restoring competitiveness. Fixed duties remain, and scarce refining capacity may keep diesel expensive even when crude oil becomes cheaper.

Europe needs to abandon ideology in energy, provide solid investment conditions, eliminate regulation, and support an adequate refining system. Even though the European Commission’s newly announced “refinery dialogue” mentions these issues, it does not change the underlying ideological perspective or any of the existing regulations and misses the key measures to reduce the competitiveness gap, which come from lower taxes, more investment, and elimination of punitive regulations. Emergency Russian cargoes may help at the margin, even if European politicians complain about the US-Russia deal. However, none of this is going to repair Europe’s own policy-created vulnerabilities. The solution may take years, even if the changes are implemented today.

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He wants Russian diesel?!

• Zelenskyy Requests His Own “Diesel Deal” with the United States (CTH)

The people around Zelenskyy, his support network, are struggling trying to find solid footing for a counter narrative.


That’s why these remarks from Zelenskyy sound weird; in reality, they just don’t quite know how to respond because what President Trump is revealing in the “diesel deal” with Russia really doesn’t have much to do with diesel fuel supplies.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy (via X) – “I don’t believe the volume of diesel Russia will export will affect the price. Moreover, we see that they can export from 300,000 to 500,000 tons a month today. Meanwhile, global consumption stands at 120 million tons a month. What kind of impact can that have? I don’t think it would have any. If some people think otherwise, so be it.

So I believe there are entirely different reasons behind these actions. If this is the approach, then why isn’t America making a “diesel deal” with Ukraine? Let Ukraine propose a “diesel deal.” We do have influence over whether these ships can sail or not, whether these refineries can operate or not. If that’s the case, then let’s do it.

Electricity is what matters to us. That’s clear. If we can be guaranteed protection for our power system, then we will not strike Russia’s diesel infrastructure in response. Electricity is first and foremost about helping people – keeping their lights on. It also means helping Europe. Everyone knows that we are connected to the European power grid. And if our energy infrastructure is not being destroyed, we can help some countries that are facing shortages by supplying them with cheaper electricity.

So, yes, let’s sign a corresponding “diesel deal” with the President of the United States.”

Following the lengthy phone call with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin, President Trump noted during remarks on the way to Ohio that his administration was unsure of who exactly would be conducting strikes against Ukraine power infrastructure. The lights going out in Kiev has a similar appearance to the performative air raid sirens whenever a high-profile EU govt official pays a visit [World War Reddit].


The answer to the Zelenskyy question is most likely, because the Trump-Putin diesel deal isn’t just about diesel. Just like the Belarus potash deal was not just about potash. What both the Russian-diesel fuel and Belarusian-potash have in common is an agreed pricing system that is outside western commodity structures.

Whether he intends it or not, President Trump is revealing the banking and finance system that profits from control of how energy products are bought and sold. This is further evidenced when you look at the Ukraine support assembly through the prism of what nations and political interests promote the climate change agenda.

It is not accidental that every nation and political apparatus supporting Ukraine is part of the green energy, climate change, Paris Climate Treaty, Build Back Better advocacy group.

On the banking/finance side, the western control system tries to block funding for coal, oil and gas. Those who price the markets for these energy products operate directly inside the same institutions. Chairman Xi, President Putin, Crown Prince MbS and President Donald Trump represent the other side of that dynamic and support traditional low-price energy development.

Europe is simply Europe, acting hypocritically and trying to survive financially. Europe is governing itself inside a system they built that is unsustainable. They rail against cheap energy yet purchase cheap energy from Russia; all while accusing Vladimir Putin of aggression….. yet demanding their purchase prices flow through the western banking/finance systems they control.

President Trump must be looking at all of this and listening to the arguments by Putin, Xi, Modi et al, that suddenly take on an entirely new context as he watches how this same western control system is leveraging its power structures to diminish his political strength and weaken his office. It is fascinating to watch all of this play out with a context for understanding that is missed by most of our neighbors.

https://twitter.com/BRICSinfo/status/2109899811558404505?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2109899811558404505%7Ctwgr%5E2837301d263e30a401f7a0cfd9aa7e757d258c98%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheconservativetreehouse.com%2Fblog%2F2026%2F10%2F13%2Fzelenskyy-requests-his-own-diesel-deal-with-the-united-states-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-diesel%2F
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Break the EU.

• German Opposition Demands Trump-style Diesel Deal With Russia (RT)

Two German opposition parties have called for restoring economic ties with Russia following US President Donald Trump’s example in striking a diesel deal with Moscow, challenging Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s sanctions policy as soaring fuel prices put further pressure on Europe’s largest economy.


The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the left-wing Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which together command a majority in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt’s parliament, are preparing a joint resolution demanding an end to anti-Russia sanctions and financial support for Kiev amid growing frustration over Berlin’s foreign policy and its economic consequences. “Germany also needs a diesel deal with Russia,” Claudia Wittig, deputy leader of the BSW parliamentary group, said, according to German media.

Wittig described fuel prices at German filling stations as “a scandal,” arguing that sanctions against Moscow had “failed across the board” and were primarily hurting Germany itself. She insisted that Berlin should go further than a one-off fuel agreement and resume regular imports of Russian oil and gas to help rescue German industry. “We need policies that think more about Köthen than Kiev,” Wittig said earlier, referring to a German town in Saxony-Anhalt. “We can no longer afford this war.”

AfD co-leader Alice Weidel also hailed Trump’s deal with Moscow, accusing Merz of undermining Germany’s economy with sanctions and expensive liquefied natural gas imports. “That’s how it’s done!” she wrote on X on Saturday. “While Merz ruins Germany with sanctions and expensive LNG, Trump practices realpolitik. German interests instead of escalation!”

The initiative comes after Trump reached a surprise agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday to ease a global diesel shortage. Washington subsequently suspended sanctions on Russian diesel exports, allowing Moscow to release hundreds of thousands of tons of fuel onto international markets.

Trump has repeatedly blamed Vladimir Zelensky for exacerbating the global energy crisis by targeting Russian oil refineries despite Washington’s warnings. On Saturday, he suggested that Ukrainians should replace their leader, accusing Zelensky of rejecting numerous opportunities to settle the conflict.

The joint resolution is scheduled for a vote in the Saxony-Anhalt parliament in Magdeburg on October 14. AfD and BSW hold a combined majority following September’s regional elections, although the state legislature has no authority to lift federal or EU sanctions against Russia. The initiative also marks a further breach of Germany’s longstanding political “firewall” against the AfD, which mainstream parties have sought to exclude from power despite its growing electoral support.

Merz’s government flatly rejected any prospects of easing its anti-Russia stance and vowed to pursue even more sanctions against Moscow. Government spokesman Stefan Kornelius insisted on Saturday that Berlin’s support for Kiev remained “unwavering.” Meanwhile, Green Party co-leader Franziska Brantner blasted Trump’s agreement with Putin as the height of “unscrupulousness.”

The chancellor, whose popularity has sunk so low that he faces calls to resign from within his own party, has faced mounting criticism over the impact of his policies on Germany. Wagenknecht previously accused him of turning German citizens into “cash cows for Ukraine.” Moscow has likewise accused Merz of acting more like a “Ukrainian chancellor” than a German leader.

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“Trump and Putin have exposed the game being played by the City of London..”

• Ramifications of the Trump-Putin Energy Deal (CTH)

It is challenging to put the geopolitical perspective into an easily digestible format because the construct of western finance is the only reference point available for most Americans. We do not have solid references for what exists outside the western monetary constructs that have existed for generations. However, Barbara Boyd tries to expand our cognitive bubble to explore the potential ramifications of a Trump-Putin energy agreement.


I do not personally think President Trump engages these dynamics from a reference of London or the U.K. Instead, he simply seems to recognize the institutional financial constructs are no longer working to the benefit of American interests, and those constructs happen to be from the British Commonwealth financial system and the bank of financial settlements.

Promethean Action’s Barbara Boyd opens with President Trump’s Sunday announcement of an energy ceasefire in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and what led up to it: his remarks to the press that it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president, and Friday’s agreement for Russia to supply diesel to the United States and the world, with a Treasury license authorizing Russian diesel through April 2027.

She argues that Trump and Putin have exposed the game being played by the City of London: Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russia’s refineries, which the Washington Post examined, keep fuel prices high ahead of the November 3 midterms, while the Financial Times reports the administration threatened to cut off weapons and intelligence if the attacks continued, and members of Congress move against the deal.

After President Zelensky’s interview on ABC’s This Week blaming high prices on the war in the Middle East, the episode turns to the energy wars: Russia’s ban on fuel exports, U.S. diesel above $6 a gallon, no major new U.S. refinery since 1977, and Europe’s emergency diesel stocks, held mainly by Germany and France, until Trump’s export threat brought a G7 release of 100 million barrels of oil and diesel.

Her presentation closes with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Operation Economic Outcast against Iran’s regime, the petrodollar system and London’s commodity markets since the 1971 collapse of Bretton Woods, President Putin’s case for long-term contracts between producing and consuming nations, the Conservative Treehouse’s argument that the world’s biggest economy is aligning against the financial schemes of London while retaining the dollar, and Secretary Bessent’s chart on prices under Biden and Trump.


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“Trump hits on Ilhan Omar, Zelenskyy and Putin, Kimberly Guilfoile, the issues with Ukraine and Russia energy ceasefire.”

• President Trump is Making Chopper Pressers Great Again (CTH)

Chopper Pressers have always been the best pressers, but when there are headline events swirling that capture great attention, chopper pressers are always awesome. I really appreciate them for how Trump cuts through the nonsense.


President Trump gives brief remarks about a variety of headline grabbing events. The first two minutes are captivating in the rapid-fire honesty. Seriously, in just the first two non-pretending minutes Trump hits on Ilhan Omar, Zelenskyy and Putin, Kimberly Guilfoile, the issues with Ukraine and Russia energy ceasefire.

Ilhan Omar is a terrible complainer and sketchy, but I have nothing to do with that. Not sure who is targeting Ukraine energy infrastructure, “we’ll have to take a look at that.” Looking at possibly having to fire the Ambassador to Greece for being a sketchy grifter. Ukraine and Russia “agree to the energy ceasefire because I’m saying they agree.”


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Jack Smith thought he could do anything.

• Jack Smith Could Track Phone Contacts, but What About the Lawyers? (Manney)

Jack Smith’s investigators wanted to know whom one of President Donald Trump’s closest aides called and when. Newly unsealed court papers show how they got permission. The sharper question is what happened when those phone records led them to Trump’s lawyers.


Two applications filed in February and April 2023 sought permission to monitor a cellular number the Trump administration identified as belonging to Susie Wiles, who then worked with Trump’s political operation and is now White House chief of staff. The public filings redact the subscriber’s identity. Federal judges Beryl Howell and James Boasberg approved the respective requests.

Smith’s team investigated government records and classified documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago, as well as possible obstruction. Prosecutors gave the court an investigative reason to monitor the number. They wrote that AT&T records showed contacts with at least nine witnesses or subjects within two days of interviews or grand jury testimony.

Investigators suspected additional calls might reveal efforts to contact witnesses after federal agents approached them. The applications described that suspicion alone doesn’t establish intimidation, obstruction, or any other crime, even if a phone call occurs near a witness interview.

The government’s request went beyond a simple list of outgoing calls. The pen-register and trap-and-trace applications covered incoming and outgoing phone numbers, communication times and durations, email addresses, IP addresses, and device identifiers. Prosecutors also sought historical call-detail records, and each order authorized up to 60 days of monitoring.

The filings expressly excluded communication content. These orders provide no basis to claim investigators listened to conversations through this surveillance authority. But names, timing, and frequency still show investigators who were talking with whom, including who contacted a lawyer immediately after questioning.

Earlier declassified FBI communications show agents reviewing contacts involving 21 Trump-affiliated defense attorneys and at least five journalists. In a March 24, 2023 message, an agent noted that a lawyer had called Wiles, recorded the call, and compared its 41-second length with earlier contacts. Another note tracked her phone activity after an April 7 FBI interview.

From Just the News: The three-year probe of the ex-president — which put Joe Biden’s administration in charge of the legal fate of his GOP rival in the 2024 election — was approved at the highest levels of the Biden Justice Department, including by Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and FBI Director Christopher Wray, the memos show.

In March 2022, Wray sent a memo to Garland and Monaco, seeking the attorney general’s approval to open a “Sensitive Investigative Matter” that would become Plasmic Echo. “I recommend you approve,” Lisa Monaco wrote at the end of the memo, leaving her initials “LM.” Days later, Garland signed the memo with his initials, giving his approval.

The new applications don’t specifically alert the judges to possible monitoring of defense-attorney contacts. Investigators sought broad collection from the phone, so such contacts could appear whether or not prosecutors initially intended to focus on them. The critical unanswered question is what agents did after identifying those calls.

Federal law helps explain why the two judges approved the surveillance. Under 18 U.S.C. Sections 3122 and 3123, prosecutors must certify that the information is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation. Unlike a traditional search warrant, the statute doesn’t require probable cause. Meeting that statutory threshold, however, can’t answer every question about how investigators used the information.

Communications between lawyers and clients receive special protections, but a telephone call alone isn’t automatically privileged. The released applications alone don’t demonstrate a violation of attorney-client privilege. They do raise the question of whether prosecutors identified defense-related contacts, restricted their review, or used patterns in those calls to guide further investigative steps.

Smith has defended his investigations and denied political motivation. The newly disclosed documents don’t establish that either judge knowingly approved improper collection, that investigators intercepted privileged conversations under these orders, or that the surveillance itself violated federal law.

From Just the News: Howell has been a central figure in Trump-related litigation for nearly a decade. As chief judge of the D.C. federal court from 2016 to 2023, she oversaw grand juries used by Russia collusion Special Counsel Robert Mueller and by investigators probing efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

In March 2023, she pierced the attorney-client privilege between Trump and one of his lawyers, Evan Corcoran. In that case, she relied on the crime-fraud exception, forcing more testimony in the classified documents vcase. She also enforced Smith’s warrant for Trump’s Twitter account and fined the company $350,000 for slow compliance.

A second application to extend the pen register and tap and trace monitoring of Wiles’s phone came in April and was approved by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, another Washington DC-based jurist famously critical of Trump, the court records show.

Americans deserve something more specific than assurances. Who reviewed the defense-attorney contacts? What safeguards applied? Were any call patterns used to anticipate legal strategy? Congress should seek those answers, and prosecutors should be prepared to supply them. Court approval explains how this monitoring began. The public still deserves to know how it was handled.

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“..if he is fighting to get out of the Establishment’s traps..”

Is that a caveat?

• Trump Might Not Be as Bad as He Appears (Paul Craig Roberts)

Yesterday Nima and I discussed the lies that are ricocheting around news events and how political figures think they can succeed with such obvious lies as the Strait of Hormuz is open, the US is in control of the Strait, and 20 million barrels of oil are being transported through the Strait daily. https://www.youtube.com/live/V2kwURVOV5Q


Nima was concerned with the latest claim from Trump that a deal has been reached with Russia in which Russia will provide 4.8 million tons of diesel fuel to the market in exchange for Trump removing the sanctions on Russia. To facilitate the deal Trump asked Zelensky to quit attacking Russian diesel facilities, and he asked Putin to stop attacking Kiev. Both Zelensky and Russia, according to reports, say they are unaware of this deal. The Russians say that they have no interest in a temporary ceasefire and that what Russia wants is a negotiated comprehensive end to the conflict with the West. Nima asked how could Trump announce an agreement that Zelensky and Putin didn’t know about.

NOTE: This morning, October 13, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the supply of Russian diesel fuel to the market “is a very mutually beneficial element of Russian-US cooperation,” but there is no direct link between the US decision on Russian diesel fuel and Russia’s position on Ukraine negotiations. Peskov goes on to say that Moscow has only read media reports about a US-European plan to resolve the situation in Ukraine: “No, we have not heard anything about it. We have seen reports in the media, but we have not heard anything about it,” Peskov told reporters. I replied that I could only speculate.

One possible answer, perhaps even a likely answer, is that Trump is putting out a narrative that if it takes hold could lead to a solution. One part of the solution is to protect the Republicans in the midterm elections from higher energy prices and the inflation that rising energy prices cause. Trump might also see that a deal in which sanctions are removed in exchange for more energy supply is a way to extract Washington from the conflict Washington started in Ukraine without it looking like an American defeat.

If sanctions are removed and energy is flowing, what is the point of a return to hostilities? I have always thought that Putin’s choice of Stanford and Harvard educated Kirill Dmitriev as Russia’s negotiator and Trump’s choice of business men Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law as Washington’s negotiators was crafted so as to produce a deal that would present a mutually profitable business arrangement more profitable than an unpopular military conflict.

I am a long time critic of Putin for ignoring Napolean’s important statement that “The reputation of one’s arms in war is everything, and equivalent to real forces.” I and Doctorow have concluded, correctly or incorrectly, that Putin’s refusal to use sufficient force to stop Ukraine’s ability to continue the military conflict has caused the conflict to greatly widen and that this widening implies eventually a nuclear conflict. We see many signs of this as the conflict is no longer limited to the Donbas battlefront but has expanded deep into Mother Russia as a result of long-range weapons supplied by the US and Europe and targeting information supplied by the US and MI6 to Ukraine.

Two more formerly neutral European countries have joined NATO and more NATO countries have agreed to host US nuclear missiles on their territory. Clearly the war has widened. Nevertheless, I understand Putin’s approach which does risk nuclear war when Russia has no further room to back away. Putin understands that if he ends the conflict by striking down Ukraine’s ability to continue the fight, which Russia could have done 4.5 years ago and could do tomorrow with conventional weapons alone, he will have obtained Russia’s aims but without Western acceptance. So in effect the conflict doesn’t end.

If Putin imposes a military solution, the West will say: “See, we told you. Putin intends to resurrect the Soviet Empire and spread it into Europe. Germany will be next.” Indeed, Germany seems already to think that Germany is going to be next as Germany prepares for war with Russia, an ill-advised enterprise.

The disagreement between Putin and myself is which of us has the best odds in the gamble on the table. My concern is that Putin’s sacrifice of a decisive military victory is resulting in more Western provocations that will result in nuclear war. Putin’s concern is that a Russian imposed military victory will not be a good victory because it will harden Western opposition to Russia, whose demonstration of strength would be regarded as a threat to all of Europe.

I cannot say that I am right and that Putin is wrong. I just hope he is aware of the risk. This concludes what Nima and I discussed, so you can save the time of listening to our discussion. Nima’s questions on occasions are provocative and push me into clarifying statements of how I view events as they unfold.

I will end with giving you important information. As a high level Reagan political appointee instrumental to President Reagan’s two important issues–the defeat of stagflation and the end of the Cold War, I can tell you that most presidential appointees are not in office to serve the President but to serve their own careers. It is not unusual for presidents, prime ministers, chancellors, dictators even, to have ministers working against the titular head in behalf of their own agendas and career. In my time in the Reagan administration my main opponents were Reagan’s appointments as his chief of staff, as his budget director, as his chairman of the council of economic advisors and their media whores who thrived on leaks against Reagan’s agenda.

For example the budget director, David Stockman had the intention of being the first budget director to balance the budget. From this achievement he would go on to become US Senator from Michigan or wherever it was he was from, and from there to the presidency. Stockman saw Reagan’s tax rate reduction as an obstacle to his career ambitions.

Murray Weidenbaum, chairman of the council of economic advisers, was busy reassuring conservative foundations that supported his situation at Washington University that he was against budget deficits and thus gave little if any support to Reagan’s economic policy.

Reagan’s chief of staff, Jim Baker, just wanted to reassure Wall Street and believed that a small tax rate reduction of 5%, which would be wiped out by inflation before it could be enacted, sufficed to show a Reagan victory in lowering taxes.

The facts which I had in my hands as Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic policy had no influence against these agendas. I simply had to run over them, which meant no further government career. But that is what it took to get to get Reagan’s economic policy out of his own administration so that Congress could vote on it.

I prevailed because I was right, had Reagan’s support and support in Congress and was willing to take the hits. Today 45 years later only Elon Musk can afford to take the hits. Today not even the US Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., can prevail over Big Pharma’s influence over the FDA, CDC, NIH–all of which report to Secretary Kennedy and all of whom obey Big Pharma. Secretary Kennedy cannot even get the proven dangerous Covid-19 vaccines prohibited. Big Pharma’s political campaign contributions are more powerful than the Secretary of Health.

In my opinion, it is the inability of elected governments to prevail over powerful private interests, such as the Israel Lobby, the military-security complex that President Eisenhower warned us about as long ago as 1961, and Big Pharma, that has given rise to an ideological Democrat Party that sees the institutional structure of American society so corrupt that it must be overthrown. The US Supreme Court destroyed the accountability of the US government when it ruled that corporations had First Amendment rights to purchase the US government to serve their agendas.

I doubt that the US will have a French or Leninist revolution, but that is the intention of the new ideological Democrats, and I understand the frustrations that have led them to their war on existing society. There is no doubt whatsoever that the republic established by the Founding Fathers has been corrupted.

Where will redemptive American leadership come from? Trump was defeated by his captivity to the Israel Lobby. The Democrats are committed not to the restoration of America but to America’s overthrow.

It is a true statement that “Where there is no vision the people are lost.” In a world in which the only interests of peoples is in self-affirming narratives the people are doubly lost. A life in false narratives is a life in The Matrix.

Life in The Matrix is life in Western countries today. It is not a life worth living. The question is: In all of the world today do any people other than the Israelis and Zionist MAGA Americans believe in themselves, believe in their country?

Perhaps the Iranians?

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She supposedly arrived with nothing, just a few years ago.

• Trump Suggests Ilhan Omar’s Money Came From Fraud (Catherine Salgado)

President Donald Trump just implied that there could be evidence linking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Somalia) to millions of dollars in lucrative fraud.


Early on October 12, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security, in partnership with the Department of Justice, executed a search warrant at Omar’s D.C. home. Members of the Trump administration including Vice President JD Vance and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin have alleged that Omar did commit immigration fraud, including by faking a marriage with her own brother. But she and her family are also connected with the massive Somali fraud machine stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from Americans in Minnesota.

On Tuesday, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Why did Ilhan Omar report a Net Worth of up to 30 Million Dollars just a short time ago, and then immediately say, ‘Oh, I made a mistake! It’s really $100,000.’ Could it be that her highly paid accountant actually reported the money that was stolen from her fraudulent activities in Minnesota? Would something like that be possible?”

He pressed his speculative point home. “Do you think the accountant actually gave the right number the first time, 30 Million Dollars, and then she was forced to disavow because she never would have been able to report where that much money came from? She must have freaked out when she saw that money!”


Omar certainly lives a plutocratic life for an alleged refugee to America who supposedly subsists off her congressional salary. “Where did her house come from, where did her cars come from, and what about her lovely place in Washington, D.C.?” Trump asked. “I didn’t know that Congressmen and women made that kind of money, but I do know her husband, according to information and belief, makes almost nothing, so it couldn’t have come from him. How many people did she illegally bring into our Country from Somalia? America wants answers, and we want them, NOW!”

GOP lawmakers and the convicted mastermind of the $250 million “Feeding Our Future” scheme implicated Omar in the fraud. Fraudsters emailed each other about “Ilhan’s Office” and her sister is tentatively identified as one of the USAID fraudsters who registered at the same address as the “Feeding Our Future” criminals.

Sen. Ernst said “One of our spending bills making its way through Congress was a $1 million earmark from Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, which was an earmark that was supposedly going to a substance abuse clinic, which actually happened to be housed in a restaurant and run by three individuals that share the same residential address, according to their IRS paperwork.”

After all, Omar has said that she would prioritize Somalia’s interests and her father is reportedly one of the Somali officers responsible for the Isaaq genocide.

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The Islam doesn’t belong in the US. Or in Europe, but it may be too late there.

• Corporate Islamification (Stefan Padfield)

So, what is Islamification?


A recent documentary by former Virginia congressman Nick Freitas titled “The Immigration Crisis That Will Destroy the West” warns viewers about the risks created by the Islamification of Western civilization. The film focuses primarily on the negative impacts of cultural norms related to the treatment of women and girls, with a reviewer noting allegations of “a significant problem of organized, industrial-scale rapes being conducted by mostly Muslim men” in the UK.

Relatedly, another recent column noted that “seven of the top 10 countries with the highest prevalence of child marriage have a Muslim-majority,” and went on to ask: “Why does Islam appear so frequently in discussions surrounding religious persecution, terrorism, and certain forms of sexual violence?” Similar concerns have also been raised about the cultural roots of rampant fraud we’ve seen in places like Minneapolis.

And even more recent fiery riots in France have left some “pointing to second and third-generation immigrant youths–many from Muslim North African and sub-Saharan backgrounds–as the core of the violence.” Perhaps pulling all the foregoing together, Douglas Murray argues that “the West remain[s] at war with Islamic radicals.”Importantly, while conservatives cherish individual liberty and religious freedom, those commitments are perverted when it is claimed that only a nihilistic multiculturalism properly embodies those values.

To the contrary, in addition to individual liberty and religious freedom, conservatives also value truth and free speech in pursuit thereof, both of which demand acknowledgement of the fact that not all cultures or branches thereof are equal, that some cultures are better than others at the very least vis-a-vis a specific people in a specific place at a specific time, and that certain cultures can pose a threat to Western civilization if they are imported en masse without any expectations of assimilation.

Accordingly, the liberty and freedom of individuals to practice their religion should be respected and protected, and members of all religions who strive to assimilate should be embraced. However, the people who support terrorism in the name of Islam, or who promote cultural norms directly antithetical to Western civilization, such as undermining property rights or the rights of women and children, should not be ignored or empowered. Nor should asserted connections between those issues and Islam be handwaved away as exaggerating a “few bad apples” problem.

This brings us to the role corporations play in the Islamification of Western civilization, and what applicable fiduciary duties and expectations of good corporate governance have to say about that. Consider how the following corporate actions might increase the risk of immigration-related harms to the United States, including Islamification–which will be explained in more detail below.

First, corporations fighting restrictions on welfare benefits could be supporting incentives for problematic immigration. Second, corporations seeking to import cheap labor could be similarly promoting mass immigration with costs outweighing benefits. Third, corporations opposing ICE operations could be making it easier for illegal aliens who harm the United States to stay in the country.

Finally, H-1B visa abuse can exacerbate immigration-related strains on U.S. citizens. This applies both generally and specifically to risks related to Islamification because while discussion of demographic issues related to H-1B visa abuse can focus on beneficiaries from India, which is apparently 80% Hindu, it is highly unlikely that the H-1B beneficiary population excludes Muslims. For example, 14% of India’s population apparently identifies as Muslim.

Of course, the reputational and financial risks associated with a corporation creating the perception that it directly or indirectly supports the Islamification of the U.S. are not the only factors to be considered by corporate leaders in making related business decisions. But it is also arguably true that failing to become fully informed about these risks could constitute a breach of duty, including being found guilty of bad faith in relevant cases of willful blindness.

An argument could certainly be made that no corporate fiduciaries dealing with this issue can claim to be fully informed if the word “Islamification” never once appears on the board agenda.

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I’m not sure I understand this.

• The Midterm Polling Is Absolutely, Positively, 100% Wrong. (Maybe.) (Pinsker)

Our world runs on incentive structures: Your values and goals drive your decision-making. It’s a fundamental tenet of free market capitalism. Trouble is, our incentive structures can also lead us astray. Low-hanging fruit, socioeconomic pressures, and instant gratification cloud our judgment. Instead of striving for long-term accuracy, we’ll settle for short-term accolades.


Which takes us to the “science” of polling. Because it IS a real, legitimate science. And pollsters are real, legitimate scientists. Y’know, just like TV weathermen. It’s fascinating: When we crack the veneer of scientific-sounding stats, numbers, and probabilities, both weather forecasters and pollsters use the same exact language. It’s kind of eerie.

“Forecasting is both a science and an art,” wrote famed meteorologist Jeff Haby. “To be a great forecaster, the meteorologist needs to have skills in weather pattern recognition… [including] intuition (the 6th sense).” Because the numbers alone aren’t reliable. Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, who served as a weather officer in World War II, quipped, “One thing I learned from meteorology is that being an actual science was no guarantee of exactness.” Which is why weathermen interject their own biases, experiences, and assumptions into weather forecasts. It’s where the “art” — and “intuition” — come in.

Wait: art and intuition? What the hell kind of “science” relies on artwork and ESP?! Actually, polling does, too.“Polls are the worst form of prediction ever, except for all the other kinds,” said pollster Nate Silver. “In some ways… it’s amazing that polls are as accurate as they are.” Because, when it comes to quantifying key factors, including an accurate, representative sample of likely voters, as fellow pollster John Zogby freely admitted, “This is where polling is an art.”

It’s subjective. There’s a near-infinite galaxy of competing, contradictory statistical projections, and each pollster is free to accentuate — or deemphasize — absolutely anything he or she wants. Just like TV weathermen. bPredicting the weather and predicting the midterms are both science-based without being scientific. Science is just the starting point: Yes, pollsters and weathermen use real numbers and real math to paint a picture, but their “art” is guided by their intuition.

And pleasing the paying customer. This is where the incentive structure comes in — and where TV weathermen and pollsters differ. TV weathermen, after all, are almost always employees of a TV station. It’s analogous to a tenured professor: The station has a vested interest in promoting ‘em, so unless they screw up spectacularly (or sink in the ratings), a likeable, “accurate enough” weatherman has a job for life.

It’s why TV weathermen are incentivized to play it safe, avoid major screwups, and make semi-reliable predictions. But pollsters (usually) aren’t employed by a TV station. They’re either contracted for a short time, or they work for an independent company and need the media to trumpet their results — or nobody will hear it.

Either way, the incentive structure is the same: When you’re on a contract, you’re incentivized to do whatever you can to earn a renewal. This means keeping your customer happy. And if you need media outlets to trumpet your results, you’re incentivized to tell them a story that they’re likely to run.

Weather forecasts and political polling projections aren’t science. They’re science-based — the same way pro wrestling is sports-based. There’s real athleticism, and the wrestlers are working hard, but c’mon, methinks someone has his thumb on the scales: Fun fact: Over the past eight years, about 70% of August polls have overestimated support for Democrats.

It seems someone has put his thumb on the pollsters’ scales, too. So it’s not remarkable that the 2026 polls point to a Democratic victory. The opposite is true: This is exactly what we’d expect the incentive structure to produce! And whattaya know, 70% of the time in the month of August, that’s what we get.

Which is an institutional problem: Left-wing reporters, at left-wing media outlets, favor left-wing news stories. That’s not a secret. It’s why Republican trust in the media has nosedived. And since most major media outlets are left-wing, most political polls lean to the left — because that’s the incentive structure of the media marketplace.

So yes, the midterm polling has been utterly abysmal for Republicans. And yes, we’ve heard the super-scary stats: One expert gives the Democrats an 84.5% chance of winning the House. Another expert gives the Democrats a 74.8% chance of winning the Senate. Those are VERY scientific-sounding numbers. Why, these scientists are so precise, they even used a decimal point!

But these numbers don’t mean anything. They’re not real. It’s science-inspired artwork. (Or science fiction.) They were guided by “intuition.” Y’know — ESP. Which means that the 2026 midterms aren’t anywhere close to over and Republicans shouldn’t be demoralized.

Because the God’s honest truth is, nobody knows nothin’. We don’t know which demos will show up and vote on Election Day, which ones won’t, and which ones were underrepresented in the polls. Nor do we know which issues will be top-of-mind on November 3, 2026. The election is still three weeks away. And that, dear reader, is the final caveat: If nobody knows nothin’, then, alas, we can’t disprove the media polls either. All we can do is note the systemic bias and the sky-high error rate.

So get out and vote like the midterms are still up for grabs — because they absolutely are.

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https://twitter.com/XFreeze/status/2109903478470643868?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle October 3 2026

Oct 032026
 
 October 3, 2026  Posted by at 8:54 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  30 Responses »


Hieronymus Bosch Ascent of the Blessed c1510


• Iran’s Regime Is Running Out of Options (Victor Davis Hanson)
• Trump Expected To Name National Intelligence Head Clayton As 1st Ai Czar (JTN)
• Super Interesting, as long as this AI/SI Czar Report is NOT a Leak Trap (CTH)
• Putin: Ready To Use ‘All Weapons’ Incl. Nuclear, If Kaliningrad Attacked (ZH)
• The West Tried To Rein In Russian Oil. What Went Wrong? (RT)
• NATO Chief Advocates War of Aggression (RT)
• Europe’s Housing Crisis Is An Immigration Crisis (RMX)
• Always Watching (John Stossel)
• The Ancient Parable (James Howard Kunstler)
• The Tyranny Of One Man’s Opinion (Judge Andrew P. Napolitano)

 

 

https://twitter.com/GlobalDiss/status/2105769810294378615?s=20 https://twitter.com/Q_TheStormRider/status/2105631211444183069?s=20

 

 

 

 


It’s about time.

• Iran’s Regime Is Running Out of Options (Victor Davis Hanson)

Sami Winc: Iran, let’s turn to. It looks like internal strife is increasing, not because of the protesters out there, although I’m sure there are some. The women are openly defying the hijab in universities.


Victor Davis Hanson: They are. Daily, daily they do.

Sami Winc: But their administration knows it because they’ve increased patrols and checkpoints in fear of the protests from universities.

Victor Davis Hanson: For all you people who are worried and have sworn the war is lost, Robert Kagan, the whole left-wing media, what are you going to say when the people rise up? Three things are going to happen, and they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Number one, the people are going to rise up, and this time when they try to kill them, the U.S. will add air support. Number two, they are so desperate for a deal. Today they said, “We have a deal, we have a deal.” You can’t trust anything they say, but they will basically give most of us what we want, and it won’t be worth anything.

And number three, they will have a final fireworks October surprise, where they’ll call everybody up. How many drones you have in that mountain over there? Don’t we have a tunnel over there somewhere with six more missiles? We want them all to go at the Saudi oil field or something. And when that happens, he will unload on them, and the regime will be destroyed, conventionally.

So it’s gonna be like Greenland. It’s going to be like the NATO problem. It’s gonna be solved, but it’s not gonna be solved in a way that’s gonna bring credit. It’s the most existential problem the United States has faced since the Cold War. A lunatic regime that’s going to get nuclear weapons and whose terrorists dominate the entire Middle East, terrify every Arab government that has Shia Arab minorities in it.

It’s gonna be solved, and it’s gonna be solved very quickly. And I’m sure the people who say that Donald Trump was a warmonger and a war criminal and it was a forever war, left and right. Tucker Carlson says he should be impeached. He’s satanic. He loves nuclear weapons. I’m sure they’re all going to say that when the people overthrow this government or this government dissolves, that it had nothing to do with Donald Trump. It had to do with their criticism of Donald Trump.

Sami Winc: Well, adjacent to that, did you see that there were passengers that rescued a plane? It was going from Dubai to Israel, Tel Aviv, and it was taken over by a terrorist who was one of the pilots, and the passengers wrested control of it. There were pilots among the passengers, wrested control of it and landed it safely.

Victor Davis Hanson: Now, there’s this preliminary. It happened early this morning as I speak. I think we’ll get the whole story. You really don’t wanna predict what the whole story will be, but from the fragmentary evidence adduced so far, I think you can come up with two or three legitimate suppositions.

One, any flight that leaves an Arab country, like even from moderate Dubai to Israel, there are Israeli security on that flight. And one of them or two of them know how to fly it. They’re probably ex-Israeli pilots, right? Military. So they not only know how to fly a plane, they know how to fly a plane in danger.

From what we can tell, as you said, the captain attacked the co-pilot, thinking that my mission is to hijack the plane and ram it and kill everybody and ram it into an iconic Israeli building when we get there 30 minutes later. [Editor’s Note: The co-pilot attacked the pilot.] Sami Winc: Yeah, we could guess in Tel Aviv maybe.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, it’s good. And so the Israelis, thinking way ahead of them, have people on every one of the flights. And number two, to enact that, I have to kill the co-pilot so there’s no other buddy that can grab the plane. And those cabins are locked. So I will be the only person here.

The co-pilot is dead or injured, and they can’t get me, and I’m just going to do what Mohamed Atta and those guys did. But what they didn’t know is that there were security, and Israelis are not normal people in the sense they just said, Oh my gosh, we’re hijacked. We’re all dead. They stormed and they broke through, and they rescued the co-pilot, and I guess they killed the pilot, and they got him out, and they had dropped about 12,000 feet in a minute, and the sheer stress on the airframe broke the rudder on the back of the tail.

[Editor’s note: The co-pilot who attacked the pilot was not killed.] So there was no way really, it was kind of wagging like a dog’s tail. And this pilot or pilots, Israeli I assume, were able to, as they do with fighter planes, use the wing flaps and rotate, I mean, wiggle back and forth and stabilize the plane, and they landed in a Saudi airport.

Three, I would not be surprised if that pilot had some connection with Iran. I don’t know how. In the same way, I would not be surprised as the five would be, I don’t know what we’d call them, would-be attackers of the RAF U.S. base in England had ties to Iran. But because that’s how Iran operates. And then they have deniability of culpability. Oh, we didn’t do that. That’s crazy. This guy was an Arab. He was Sunni. We have nothing to do with it. And then they brag, you know, in Farsi among themselves how they did this.

And we’ll see what happens, but I would be very careful if I was them. If this is traced … I’ll be candid. There’s an election coming up in Israel. It’s deadlocked. Has anybody noticed that of the missiles they’ve sent the last five months, most of them, half of them went to the UAE, over 5,000 of them, and Kuwait, less but substantial. A few on Qatar—their ally—Saudi Arabia, Oman, but not Israel. Not one on Israel.

And Benjamin Netanyahu‘s up for election, and he’s under pressure, and they’re promulgating this conspiracy theory that he knew about [the Oct. 7 massacre], and the UAE people told him, which we discussed was not true, I think.

So if this is traced, that they tried to … The Iranians used an agent to try to destroy a whole planeload, 737 Max, and then do so by ramming it into an iconic building, he’ll attack them. He’ll retaliate and he’ll get the entire support of the Israeli people and the United States, and Iran will be in big trouble because he had … The Israelis have a different…I don’t like to use that word existential, but they’re in a life-and-death situation with no margin of error.

So the Americans, we have kind of a reluctance of targeted assassinations. Barack Obama did 500 of them, but he was Obama, so they weren’t gonna criticize him, even when he killed, I think, three American citizens. But the Israelis have no compunction because it’s an existential fight. So that’s why they haven’t hit Israel, because the retaliation would take out the fourth and fifth tier of their leadership. But if this is traced to them, Israel, it’ll go after all of their grandees that are left running that country.

And it’ll be very interesting in the next few days to see what transpires, and it will ensure Netanyahu’s re-election. If that happens.

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“The president had suggested Clayton would be chosen, and he’s expected to make an announcement on Truth Social as early as Friday.”

• Trump Expected To Name National Intelligence Head Clayton As 1st Ai Czar (JTN)

President Donald Trump is expected to name Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as the artificial intelligence czar. The president had suggested Clayton would be chosen, and he’s expected to make an announcement on Truth Social as early as Friday, NBC News reported, citing an unnamed source.


The selection comes after executives of major technology companies met at the White House on Tuesday, a meeting that Clayton attended. He would assume the responsibilities of the AI czar role alongside those of his current role. A White House spokesperson told NBC that personnel announcements would come from the president and “reporting until then is baseless speculation.”

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Sundance is dreaming of Tulsi.

• Super Interesting, as long as this AI/SI Czar Report is NOT a Leak Trap (CTH)

According to CNN, current Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton is likely to be appointed the AI/SI Czar. If that is accurate, and not a leak trap – which considering the source is sketchy, then that leaves the DNI position open again.


(VIA CNN) – President Donald Trump is expected to pick Jay Clayton to be the White House’s new czar of artificial intelligence, two sources familiar with the discussion told CNN. The president could announce his decision about Clayton, who is director of national intelligence, as early as Friday, one of the sources said.

Trump announced last month that he was planning to create an “AI Force” and name an AI czar as the government faces growing calls to impose guardrails on the technology’s rapid development. Trump gathered several AI and technology CEOs at the White House on Tuesday for a meeting that culminated in the signing of a new commitment aimed at better “self-policing” their companies’ AI models.

If it is accurate that Clayton is going to the Super Intelligence Czar position, and considering the sudden reappearance last week at the White House, is there a possibility of someone returning to the administration as DNI?


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As he’s said for 26 years.

• Putin: Ready To Use ‘All Weapons’ Incl. Nuclear, If Kaliningrad Attacked (ZH)

Now it’s no longer just high-ranking Krezlin officials saying it, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has now directly weighed in amid the ongoing nuclear threat tit-for-tat involving European officials. Speaking at the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow on Thursday, he warned the Western allies to cease their escalation in Ukraine, stressing he’s willing to use “all weapons” in the Russian arsenal in the scenario that Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad comes under attack.


“The drills in the Baltic Sea, following one another… Then the attempts to arrest our ships and vessels. All this is an escalation. And then we began to hear statements regarding the Kaliningrad region,” Putin said. “If it comes to direct attack against the Russian Federation, in this case on Kaliningrad and possibly some other territories, of course the issue of using all weapons in our country’s arsenal will inevitably and unavoidably emerge on the agenda. This is unavoidable,” he asserted in a warning that includes nuclear weapons.


NATO held recent military drills near Kaliningrad which were broadly described as deterrence operations, which Putin referenced in the remarks.Rhetoric has been running particularly hot over the exclave which is sandwiched between NATO members Poland and Lithuania all week, as Associated Press earlier described: The warning sent to NATO echoed statements issued by several Russian embassies in Europe this week which said that Moscow has “information that NATO is preparing (an) air and naval blockade of Kaliningrad and Kaliningrad region.”

The embassies in the U.K. and Ireland posted their statements on their Telegram channels, and the embassy in Belgium released it to the Tass news agency. The ratcheting accusations from the European side have also centered on charges of a Russian sabotage campaign targeting the Baltics as well as Germany. Moscow at the start of the week took the rare step of submitting a formal letter to NATO leadership in Brussels.

The letter accused NATO of an “unprecedented escalation of the military-political situation around Russia’s region of Kaliningrad accompanied by highly provocative public statements by NATO Allies’ officials.””This dangerous and reckless course entails high risk of the outbreak of a direct armed conflict with the possibility of Russian strikes against decision-making centers of the alliance’s member states right from the outset of the conflict,” the letter said. NATO was especially incensed and alarmed at this key line of Moscow’s letter:

“Russia will be ready to use the entire arsenal of forces and capabilities at its disposal, including nuclear weapons, in order to defend its territory, should NATO countries undertake any attempt aimed at isolating the Kaliningrad region from the rest of the country.” Apparently this most recent tense back-and-forth over Kaliningrad was initially triggered by a television show which recently aired in the UK this month.

Preview of the provocative UK series The WarGame which started airing this month. The Kremlin has vehemently condemned it, and sees in it some clear messaging and an ominous threat:


Newsweek described, “The statement follows a miniseries aired by British broadcaster Sky News last week, The Wargame, which traces a hypothetical Russian attack on the U.K. and how the country might respond—including by authorizing operations against the Baltic territory of Kaliningrad.”

Read more …

Nearly four years after Western governments set out to squeeze Russia’s oil revenues, Moscow is shipping crude worth more per week than at any point since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.

• The West Tried To Rein In Russian Oil. What Went Wrong? (RT)

The gross value of Russia’s seaborne crude exports surged to $2.75 billion in the week through September 27, the highest weekly figure in four years, according to tanker-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. Shipments averaged 3.71 million barrels per day over the latest four weeks, their highest since early August.


The rebound exposes a central problem with the Western strategy. Sanctions were designed to keep Russian oil on the global market to avoid a supply shock while forcing Moscow to sell it more cheaply.Instead, Russia rerouted crude from Europe to China, India, and other markets, built alternative shipping networks, and reduced its reliance on Western services. Now, soaring global prices fueled by the US-Israeli war on Iran are making those barrels more valuable.


The plan: Keep Russian oil flowing but slash Moscow’s earnings
When the West moved against Russian oil in 2022, it faced an obvious problem: Russia was too large an exporter to remove from the market without risking a surge in global prices. The EU was also Moscow’s biggest oil market. Europe took more than half of Russia’s oil exports in 2021, while Russia was the EU’s largest crude supplier, accounting for roughly a quarter of its imports. China, by comparison, was Russia’s largest single-country buyer.

The EU banned most seaborne Russian crude imports in December 2022, while the G7-led bloc imposed a $60-per-barrel price cap. Western shipping, insurance, and other maritime services could still handle Russian crude, but only if it was sold below the ceiling. Sanctions on petroleum products followed in February 2023.The logic was simple: cut Russia’s revenues without removing its oil from the global market. The strategy therefore depended on keeping Russian crude flowing while using Western dominance of shipping and insurance services to constrain its price.

The plan backfired. The $60 cap initially coincided with steep discounts on Russia’s flagship Urals crude. But Moscow gradually reduced its dependence on Western shipping and insurance services by which the ceiling was supposed to be enforced.

Even the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) – a Helsinki-based research organization that has repeatedly advocated tougher sanctions on Moscow – now says the policy has “failed to impose a durable constraint on Russian crude export earnings.” It says the measure worked only for limited periods on Urals, while other grades and export channels were largely unaffected.

The EU repeatedly tightened the mechanism, lowering the ceiling first to $47.60 and then to $44.10 per barrel from February 2026. The latter was intended to remain 15% below the average market price for Urals.Yet Urals averaged $60.22 a barrel in July – roughly $16 above the EU and UK ceiling. Russia’s ESPO crude, heavily oriented toward Asian buyers, has also consistently traded above both the old and new caps, according to CREA.

Brussels has responded by sanctioning hundreds of tankers, targeting traders, and tightening restrictions on third-country entities accused of helping Moscow circumvent the measures. Russian crude, however, continues to flow.

Four years later: Where is Russian oil going?
Russia did not stop selling oil when its biggest European customers turned away. It found other customers. China and India emerged as the dominant destinations for Russian crude, while Türkiye also increased its role. In July alone, India imported $6.25 billion worth of Russian crude – a record high for a second consecutive month – while seaborne deliveries to China were 16% higher than a year earlier, according to CREA.

Russia also built up shipping capacity outside the traditional Western system. By June, sanctioned “shadow” tankers were carrying 66% of its seaborne crude exports, compared with just 31% aboard G7-linked vessels, CREA estimates. Sanctions changed the routes, ships, and customers. They did not stop millions of barrels of Russian crude from reaching the global market.

Why is Russian oil worth more now?
The biggest twist has come not from Brussels or Washington, but from the Middle East. The US-Israeli war on Iran and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz have pushed global crude prices sharply higher, while attacks on regional energy infrastructure have further strained supplies.

The result is precisely the type of supply shock Western governments sought to avoid when designing the price cap – and Russia is among the producers benefiting from higher prices.

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There is no Russian nuclear threat. They simply say they will defend themselves if attacked.

“NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has argued that European members of the bloc should have attacked Iran when the US did.”

• NATO Chief Advocates War of Aggression (RT)

European NATO members should have been able to attack Iran instead of relying on the US and Israel, according to Secretary-General Mark Rutte, the head of the self-described defensive alliance. Iran has been attacked twice in two years, both times over allegations that it seeks to develop nuclear weapons, which Tehran rejects as false. Speaking at the Euronews Defence & Space Summit on Friday, Rutte endorsed the idea that European nations should acquire the military capabilities needed to carry out such wars of aggression themselves.


In the future, “the Europeans will be able to take care of their backyard themselves. It should be us doing this, not the Americans,” he said. “Europe was not able to take out the nuclear capability of Iran. We couldn’t. We didn’t have the capabilities. In 10 years, we can and we should,” he added, referring to multi-billion euro rearmament efforts now underway in European members of the military bloc.

Earlier in the day, the NATO chief dismissed Russian concerns over hostile rhetoric by some members of the bloc regarding the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Region. “Basically what we said is, ‘hey, listen, we are a defensive alliance, and stop the nuclear threat’,” he told journalists when asked about a formal warning Moscow had sent to Brussels.

Russia cited remarks by Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who proposed in September deploying additional troops near the Russian border so that Moscow would be “uncertain of what we will do.” Moscow said it would use its “entire available arsenal” to defend Russian territory from a possible attack by NATO states.

NATO was created in the early years of the Cold War, ensuring a continued US military presence in Western Europe. The Soviet Union later established its own military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, which no longer exists. While NATO describes itself as a defensive alliance, it has carried out military attacks against other countries, including the UK- and French-led 2011 intervention in Libya, after which the North African state was balkanized.

Russia considers NATO’s eastward expansion since the end of the Cold War a major national security threat and has cited it as one of the principal causes of the Ukraine conflict. Rutte’s argument in support of the US-Israeli attacks on Iran echoed remarks by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said in June 2025 that the Israelis were doing “[the] dirty work for us.”

Read more …

They will never acknowledge this.

How can your birthrate fall like crazy, and you still have a housing shortage?

“In a system that rejects mass immigration, the population can fall, opening up room for cheaper housing, lower rents, and even an increase in the birthrate.”

• Europe’s Housing Crisis Is An Immigration Crisis (RMX)

Across the West, native Europeans are dying out but rental prices continue to go up every year. While the left would like to point the finger at capitalists and greedy landlords, the primary factor driving the housing affordability crisis is mass immigration. Berlin is a prime example of this trend, as German journalist and author Jens Winter pointed out on X using clear population and housing data.


“Rental prices on the market have more than doubled in Berlin since 2011—plenty of money for corporations. But where is the increased demand coming from? While the native population of the capital has declined by 260,000 since 2011, the number of foreigners and people with a migration background has risen by 650,000 over the same period. That means: Without migration, there would be less demand for housing in Berlin today than in 2011,” he wrote. In a follow-up post, he wrote that the German “conservative” party is just as guilty as the left.

“The CDU-aligned real estate lobby is raking in big money with migration in Berlin. The Germans have a choice: dying out in the CDU’s multikulti capitalism or in the Left’s multikulti socialism. Understandable response: If we’re going to disappear anyway, why bust our asses for it?” he wrote.

While the doubling of rents is real, there is a basic supply and demand reality that the left would like to deny. It is indeed true that predatory property owners, major institutional players, and money printing have played contributing roles to the housing crisis, but no matter how many greedy property owners are involved, if the population of a city falls, rental and housing prices are almost inevitably going to fall.

Mass immigration means that population numbers never fall. Any breathing space for German families to repopulate, have more children, and fill in the gaps left by older generations passing away is immediately filled by hundreds of thousands of foreigners.

The data shows that the population of native Germans fell by 260,000 people. In a system that rejects mass immigration and foreign real estate investors, this could have been a boon for birthrates and increasing home ownership. For one, Germans who already lived in Berlin, and those looking to move to Berlin, would have been more easily able to afford rents and housing due to less competition on the housing market. Secondly, more native Germans would have had a chance to start families — and those who already had families could have afforded an extra child or two — by securing affordable housing.

However, Germany does not reject mass immigration. Instead, 650,000 foreigners arrived in the same period of time and housing and rental prices soared. The left, however, refuses to do simple math. There is of course another solution, but it is far more complicated than simply allowing population levels to fall in a country that has never had so many people living in it. Instead of ending mass immigration, left-wing parties, along with the CDU, demand more housing is built.

However, there are myriad reasons why the required housing is not being built, including high construction and material costs, red tape, zoning, and a lack of skilled workers. The same parties have been making the same demands for years now, but construction cannot keep pace with demand in Berlin or other major cities across Germany.

The Left Party may promise to build more, but the reality is that it will not happen. Nothing the left offers will lead to the necessary building. Before Olaf Scholz of the far-left Social Democrats (SPD) won the chancellorship, he promised that his “goal” was to create 400,000 new apartments per year, which would include 100,000 units of social housing, saying, “That’s not witchcraft, we just have to want to do it.” It never happened under Scholz and it won’t happen under a left-wing government in Berlin either.

Should more housing even be built?
As Western cities race to replace their native European populations, the question becomes whether life really becomes better in a crowded multicultural city when it means more traffic, longer waiting times at hospitals, crowded classrooms, and imported crime — just to name a few ills.

The newcomers also did not fix the skilled worker shortage that could potentially build all the homes and apartments politicians and lobbyists claim Europe needs. While a certain number of new houses and apartments always need to be built, the question then becomes should Western civilization really be involved in endless building to accommodate millions of foreigners.

On top of all of these questions, the buildings developers managed to build are now in fact uglier than ever, more expensive than ever, and are built more slowly than ever. In fact, data shows that the time from start to completion for a project is longer than it has been in decades. Again, where are all these young migrants from Africa and the Middle East to fuel a new construction boom with their master artisan and building skills?

The reality is they largely do not exist. Many skilled builders who are immigrants are from neighboring European countries, such as Poland, and they increasingly see fewer reasons to work in Germany.Winter’s X post is especially relevant given that the Left Party recently won a first place finish in Berlin elections, securing over 25 percent of the vote. Commentators and analysts have contributed the rise of the party in Germany’s capital due a variety of factors, but two major components are the party’s ability to secure the vote of German citizens with a migration background and young voters.

The second factor is Berlin’s housing crisis, which helped drive support from groups like non-voters, the young, and foreigners.

German taxpayer-funded Deutsche Welle, wrote: “That makes sense to 17-year-old Liska, who voted for the socialists: ‘The Left Party did appeal to me, especially because of the social issues — getting prices down, making rents more affordable.’ Rents in Berlin are indeed rising at a massive pace — by some 7% in the last two years alone — and first-time tenants are likely to be the hardest hit. Polls also showed that by far the biggest proportion of Berlin voters — 37% — thought that the Left Party was the most likely to create affordable housing.”

The Left Party and various other left-wing parties have convinced young people that there are easy fixes to the housing crisis. The problem is not relegated to Berlin, as all of Germany has seen tight vacancies as more and more migrants arrive, as Remix News previously reported.In the end, the left and its voters are choosing a path where more and more building only leads to overcrowding and environmental degradation.

Mass immigration and higher housing costs hurt birthrates
Numerous studies have shown that immigration has helped drive soaring rental and housing prices across the Western world — not just in Germany. In turn, studies have also shown that soaring housing prices have depressed birthrates, including in countries like the Netherlands, according to the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI).

Again, the same story is taking place in the Netherlands, with the natural population increase for the Dutch at near zero or negative. Nevertheless, the population rose from about 16.8 million in 2013 to 18.1 million in 2025, with net migration accounting for virtually all of the recent increase. It must also be remembered that just like in Germany, most of these migrants want to head to the major cities, such as Amsterdam.

Official housing-need forecasts in the Netherlands also attribute a large share of future extra demand, often 45 percent or more of the extra dwellings required, to population growth that is itself 95 percent migration-driven. Great for landlords, bad for the citizens. Of course, the Alternative for Germany has tried to tie the housing crisis to mass immigration, and they have successfully made this case to some extent.

https://twitter.com/RMXnews/status/1758244447630811445?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1758244447630811445%7Ctwgr%5E6a6a0002fa81d70c14f1195ae8b1b5c23809cd34%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fmarkets%2Feuropes-housing-crisis-immigration-crisis-berlin-data-confirms


The problem is that as more and more of the population becomes foreign, this argument holds less and less sway. Immigration may raise housing prices but if immigration brought a person to a country in the first place, and if more immigration might also enable more and more of their family members and fellow countrymen to arrive, then these voters have every incentive to keep immigration levels high regardless of housing costs.

Many of these migrants are not paying for rent anyway. There are millions of foreigners on social welfare, which means not only are they taking housing places of native Germans, but they are being paid to do it. They then often have far higher birthrates than native Germans, even with limited space, which entitles them to larger spaces. The cycle is self-reinforcing and relentless. That means unless dramatic action is taken against mass immigration, housing and rental prices may never truly come down.

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One more final frontier lost. We did see the far west, and the new lands to be discovered by Columbus et al.

Now every move we make will be recorded.

• Always Watching (John Stossel)

Do you worry that you’re being watched? If you drive, you probably are. My new video covers the cameras that photograph the backs of millions of cars. A company called Flock has 80% of that market. Flock’s CEO says the goal is to “eliminate crime.” But lots of people hate the cameras. “We are asked to give up our privacy for really nothing in return,” says ACLU lawyer Chad Marlow. “These cameras save lives,” I push back, “catching criminals.”


When a car thief kidnapped a child in Atlanta last month, Flock cameras helped police find the car and arrest a man within 15 minutes. Marlow says, “That car could and would’ve been found anyway without violating the privacy rights of every single person in America … Surveillance doesn’t actually deter criminal activity, with one exception, car thefts in public parking lots.” “I hardly feel like my privacy’s invaded,” I tell him. “It’s just my license plate number. Anybody can see it.” Marlow replies that today, AI lets police use that photo to learn much more about us.

“The data they collect when combined with AI is terrifying. Combine them with all other sources of electronic data from the government and our own personal lives, you are literally looking at what George Orwell warned us about.” Is Flock really that much of a threat? Some cops have been jailed for using Flock data to track women. One Denver police officer casually boasted, “You can’t get a breath of fresh air without us knowing.” But there are limits. When using Flock’s camera database, police must give a reason.

Marlow laughs at that. “They have these security measures, but a 10-year-old could defeat them … (One) law enforcement department, 111 times, listed the reason for their investigation as ‘investigation.’ Twenty times, it was ‘hehehe.’ And it went through!” Public anger about Flock cameras has politicians on left and right moving to limit them. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pulled them from state highways. “Stop Flock,” says a tweet from Sen. Bernie Sanders.

This is a mistake, says Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute. “They are a useful law enforcement tool with really incredible potential to aid investigations.” I point out the misuse, but Mangual replies, “That is no more a reason to ban the technology than it would be a reason to disarm police in response to a handful of bad shootings.”I remind him that when DeSantis shut down Florida’s cameras, he warned about a “surveillance state.”

“It’s not a surveillance state,” says Mangual. “These cameras see less than half a percent of the visible roadway. The idea that they can track you from place to place the way a GPS tracker attached to the bottom of your car is just wrong.”China is an actual surveillance state. Cameras track people’s movements, clothes, cars, even relationships. “It is only going to get worse as technology advances if we don’t stop it now,” says Marlow.

Flock has no plans to stop. The company now promotes surveillance drones. So far, I’m not very bothered by the privacy threat. I worry more about government’s endless wars, increased debt, inflation, growing handouts that make Americans dependent … Flock surveillance is way down on my list.

“That’s a mistake,” Michael Ricci, president of Stossel TV tells me. “Camera surveillance makes it easier for a tyrannical government to track where you go, and who you meet with. It also normalizes surveillance. As storage gets cheaper, maybe they will store videos instead of just photos. Maybe add facial recognition. Maybe they will connect the system to the ‘kill switch’ they’ve mandated in new cars. Government always finds ways to expand its powers.”

He makes good points. China’s surveillance did not start with its current system. They started with a few cameras. This is not a path we want to start traveling.Giving governments more power is always dangerous. Government is force. Only government can legally take our property and freedom.

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“I will throw you in prison. I want Chinese style communism to happen inside of the democratic party right now. I want to do cultural revolution shit.” —Hasan Piker, DSA Spox

• The Ancient Parable (James Howard Kunstler)

Translation: Chuck Schumer knows that the Democrats have already been thwarted from rigging the election, from flooding the polls with illegal immigrant voters, with dead voters, with voters who moved out of state but still got mail-in ballots sent to their old addresses, with voters registered as living in Walmart parking lots, and so on. Chuck Schumer knows that the Civil Rights Division of DOJ is sending hundreds of lawyers to observe the action in swing state polling places. ICE might even be on hand to see who turns up.


So, Chuck Schumer is pretending that the Republicans will try to do what the Democrats actually did in several previous elections (including the last midterm, 2022, viz., AZ, GA, NV), and would have liked to do in this midterm, but can’t. The Democrats will holler like crazy about it before the election to plant this idea in credulous minds. They will jump up and down going woo-woo-woo on Election Day itself to water the idea. And after the election they will blitz every critical precinct with lawsuits to prevent the vote from being certified, using select “activist” judges to issue TROs and writs to delay election results and de-legitimize the vote.

And if none of that avails — which it won’t — they’ll call out their ground troops, Antifa, BLM, Free Palestine, LGBTQ2S+, the furious transsexuals, the hysterical cat ladies, and suchlike to make a giant ruckus so as to provoke the president to invoke emergency powers to quell the mayhem. And then they’ll point at Mr. Trump shrieking, “See! Tyrant!”

Chuck Schumer is such a shithead. Everybody knows that he intends for the Democratic Party to inflict lawfare and commit warfare on the midterm election (in that order), and hence on the American people, behind an Alinsky-grade cloud of gaslight claiming the other side is doing it.

Of course, it’s the president’s constitutional duty (Article II, Section 3) to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. You have seen that Mr. Trump is taking a good deal of care vis-à-vis this midterm election to avoid any hint of interference. You can infer that’s at least one reason we have seen no indictments of the Deep State sedition artists operating so brazenly since 2016.

By the way, doing what’s possible to make sure that only citizens can vote is taking care to faithfully execute the law, in case there’s any question about that. A September 25 SCOTUS decision in Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters (No. 26A308), a 6-3 majority (usual suspects dissenting) paused by lower-court judge Sparkle Sooknanan that had blocked the Dept. of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system — further proof that the Lefty-left won’t abide any restrictions on who can vote.

The SCOTUS stay allows state and local officials to match their voter rolls against federal Social Security records, to sort out who can legally vote. AI could do this with novel efficiency. The catch is, states’ participation is voluntary. Only twenty-seven states have moved to participate in this record-sharing. Another catch is that SCOTUS waited, for unknown reasons, before issuing their ruling until well into the “90-day rule window” (in the National Voter Registration Act) that doesn’t allow actual changes in the voter rolls during this period, only identification of problems. We’ll see if any of that dissuades non-citizens from attempting to cast a vote.

You have to wonder why the Democratic Party is acting like they’ve already won the midterms. After ten years of narrative control through their allies in the network media and what’s left of the major newspapers, the Democrats apparently believe that if you assert an outcome often enough, Oprah Winfrey style, it will come true.

It’s just another gaslighting op. Look at the Democratic Party’s marquee candidates, a ragtag and bobtail of avowed jihadis, communists, neo-Jacobins, and plain old creeps such as Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Melat Kiros in Colorado, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York, Angie Nixon in Florida, James Talarico in Texas, and Troy Jackson up in Maine. The old Chuck Schumer / Hakeem Jeffries wing of the party pretends to support this rabble, who have declared they are merely running under the party’s banner for convenience and aim to deep-six the likes of Schumer and Jeffries at the first opportunity.

Will the Democrats still try to cheat their way through the midterms despite the obstacles and disincentives piling up around them? Probably, yes, because that will trigger conflict between the states and the Feds, and post-election chaos is what the party needs to keep hope alive, as they like to say. They want the results to remain in limbo as long as possible, with maximum lawfare around it to further confuse and confound the outcome. It’s in their nature. They are the scorpion riding the frog across the river in the ancient parable.

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Sounds cute Judge Nap, but did you point this out about Bush, Obama and Biden, too? If not, that’s a problem.

You can claim that Trump is more of a threat, but in the end that’s just a partisan thing to say.

• The Tyranny Of One Man’s Opinion (Judge Andrew P. Napolitano)

Thomas Cromwell was the Lord Chancellor of England for much of the reign of King Henry VIII. He engineered the convictions and executions of many whom Henry wanted out of the way, including his two predecessors in office – one of whom was St. Thomas More – and even the king’s second wife, Queen Anne.


When Cromwell’s son Gregory, who became sickened as he watched his father devolving from counselor to monster, learned that an executioner for the queen had been sent for from France a week before her trial, he asked his father what the purpose of her trial was if the king had preordained the queen’s guilt and prepaid the executioner. Cromwell replied that the king needed a jury to give the appearance of legitimacy to her conviction and prevent the public perception of “the tyranny of one man’s opinion.”

In America, we have a Constitution not only to prevent the perception but also the reality of the tyranny of one man’s opinion. The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment makes clear that if the government wants life, liberty or property, it cannot take it by executive command, but only by due process – a fair jury trial and all its constitutional protections; and Article I makes it clear that if the government wants war, it cannot commence it by executive command, but only by congressional declaration.

We have a Constitution also to assure the separation of powers in the federal government. Congress writes the laws, appropriates the taxpayers’ money and funds borrowed in their names and declares war when the United States is in danger of imminent foreign threat. The president enforces the laws, spends money as Congress directs and wages the wars Congress has authorized. The judiciary decides what the Constitution and the laws mean and, if properly challenged, determines if the president and Congress or the states have exercised their duties lawfully and constitutionally.

The central constitutional question is not whether a president sincerely believes that his policies are necessary. It is whether the Constitution permits personal liberty and limited government to depend upon the opinion of one man. That is the danger of executive government without effective legislative and judicial checks. A fair reading of the Constitution begins with a truism: Presidential power is not whatever the president believes it to be. It is only what the Constitution and laws actually confer.

Consider the administration’s attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats. President Donald Trump says he has directed military forces to strike narcotrafficking vessels and describes the operation as part of his campaign against fentanyl and cartels. But the constitutional question is separate from the president’s characterization of the targets. A person suspected of being a drug trafficker – or even a mass murderer – does not thereby become condemned to death. Criminal guilt always requires accusation, evidence and adjudication according to law, before punishment.

These boat killings are unlawful extrajudicial executions. In the language all Americans can understand, they are murders. The same principle applies to Iran. The Framers deliberately divided the war powers. Article I gives Congress the power to declare war, authorize military force, regulate the armed forces and control appropriations. Article II makes the president commander in chief. The distinction matters. The president commands forces; Congress determines where and under what circumstances the president does so.

Trump has openly declared an American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and said that the United States controls which ships pass through it. He has also imposed sanctions which deny food, medicine and currency stability to millions of innocent Iranians. He even threatened to murder all Iranians – beyond the thousands he has already killed – if a peace agreement is not soon reached. Those statements highlight what the Constitution was designed to prevent one individual from addressing alone: Whether the United States should wage military and economic hostilities against the population of another nation.

Congress has repeatedly resisted treating the Iran conflict as a matter solely for presidential discretion. Just two weeks ago, support for Trump’s war failed to muster majorities in both houses of Congress.Nor can the president’s personal assessment of Iran’s nuclear intentions settle the matter. In 2018, his State Department’s compliance report said Iran was fulfilling its nuclear-related non-proliferation commitments and U.S. intelligence had assessed with high confidence that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

In 2020, his State Department again said that Iran was not then engaged in key activities associated with designing and developing a nuclear weapon. In 2025, his Director of National Intelligence testified that the entire U.S. intelligence community continued to assess that Iran was not building nuclear weapons.Those facts alone establish something constitutionally important: The president’s personal belief – whether informed or uninformed – is not evidence or law or a substitute for congressional authorization.

The same textual principle reaches domestic spending and taxation. Article I provides that only Congress can impose taxes, and money may be drawn from the Treasury only pursuant to appropriations made by law. Even though the Supreme Court has invalidated Trump’s tariffs, he continues to impose them. Even though Congress has not authorized funds for Trump’s vanity projects, he continues to spend tax dollars on them. The Constitution does not grant any branch of government carte blanche. It has separated powers precisely because legislators, presidents and judges can all succumb to the corruption of power – and can all be wrong.

That is the deeper meaning of the tyranny of one man’s opinion. The danger is not merely that one president might be wrong. It is that a constitutional system becomes meaningless if one man’s conclusions about war, crime, taxation, spending, foreign threats or national security become the sole basis for government actions – particularly actions that kill innocents. The Founders separated the sword from the purse and divided governmental power because they understood a truism: Personal liberty and limited government cannot long survive when entrusted to one man’s opinion.

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Debt Rattle September 24 2026

Sep 242026
 
 September 24, 2026  Posted by at 8:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  41 Responses »


Paul Klee Analysis of Various Perversities 1922


• Europe’s Car Makers Are In Crisis. Will The Threat of War Rescue Them? (BBC)
• You Still Don’t Have The Cards: Zelensky Bringing A Bluff To Trump? (RT)
• Something Has Changed and World War Over Ukraine Is Back On The Table (AltM)
• EU Plotting New ‘Scheme’ To Steal Moscow’s Frozen Assets – Russian Intel (RT)
• Zelensky To UN: Russia’s Deficit ‘Bigger’ – More Sanctions Needed (ZH)
• At the UN, Trump Gives Iran’s ‘Vile Regime’ a Stark Choice (Robert Spencer)
• Iran Is Projecting Weakness, Not the Strength It Wants You to See (Florack)
• Melania Trump Outlines Plans for Chairman Xi Jinping Official State Visit (CTH)
• Karoline Leavitt Outs the White House Press Corps (Matt Margolis)
• Campaign Poison Kamala Harris Hopes DSA Commies Can Make Her Popular (Kruiser)
• Good News – Diesel and Gasoline Prices Set to Collapse in Roughly 60-Days (CTH)
• Elon Musk Is Powering The American Renaissance (Victor Davis Hanson)
• Victor Davis Hanson Explains to Canadians (CTH)

 

 

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2102768917001204096?s=20 https://twitter.com/SidneyPowell1/status/2102563722644668678?s=20

 

 

 

 


They missed the entire EV move. How is that even possible?

180,000 jobs in Britain alone.

Russia doesn’t want war. Not with Ukraine and not with Europe.

• Europe’s Car Makers Are In Crisis. Will The Threat of War Rescue Them? (BBC)

It’s green, bulging and intimidating. Ford’s latest vehicle looks like a pick-up truck that has been through an Incredible Hulk transformation. Based on its popular Ranger series, this beefy number parked outside the front door of Ford’s Dagenham plant can carry a load of two tonnes, tow up to four tonnes and is also shouldering the hopes of the 2,000-strong workforce that still makes engines here. Inside the factory, the three-litre diesel engines that will power this camo-painted beast drift down a production line that has seen output cut from 90,000 engines a year to about half that over the last decade.


Ford is hoping that a pivot towards military vehicles can help fill the void created by what the company’s UK boss calls the most challenging environment since the invention of the motor car. Once mighty, the European car industry is starting to look puny and is hoping surging defence budgets as Europe re-arms can help it flex its industrial muscles once more.


Ford is part of a joint venture with defence specialists General Dynamics and Ricardo bidding for a Ministry of Defence (MoD) contract to supply 9,000 vehicles over the next five to seven years to replace the Army’s ageing Land Rover-based fleet. Lisa Brankin, chair of Ford UK, says it is a chance to showcase their abilities to respond quickly to defence needs: “As a manufacturer you look at every opportunity that comes at you and this is a great opportunity that we would love to take advantage of.”

This is not the first time Ford has busied itself with defence work. Ahead of World War Two, Ford’s factory in Dagenham, east London, was the largest car plant in Europe. When war broke out, civilian car assembly stopped completely, and the factory was converted entirely to military production. Between 1939 and 1945, the Dagenham plant built 360,000 vehicles for the Allied war effort.Ford workers in Manchester manufactured 34,000 Rolls-Royce-designed Merlin engines, which powered Spitfires and Hurricane fighter planes. Eighty years later, the UK and European car industries are hoping that the engines of war can help defend against what one supplier told the BBC was a “terminal decline”.


As Europe feels compelled to commit hundreds of billions to ramp up defence spending in the face of the menace from Russia and US reluctance to be Europe’s protector, car makers that are under commercial attack from Chinese rivals have taken notice. So can the rearmament of Europe save an auto industry and a supply chain facing crisis?

The shift to defence
Ford is far from the only car company that sees defence as a growth industry – and one that can utilise the growing overcapacity at car plants across Europe. French car maker Renault has signed a strategic agreement with defence giant Thales to produce military drones – targeting an output of up to 1,000 units per month. The French military and Directorate General for Armament want to tap into Renault’s mass-production capabilities to bypass traditional, slower defence supply chains.

Meanwhile, Volkswagen has agreed to sell an under-used factory in Osnabruck, western Germany, which will become a military manufacturing hub in a joint venture with an Israeli-based defence investor.


Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), which makes the Land Rover, is also bidding for the same contract as Ford – as the Army retires its existing Land Rover-based fleet by 2030. JLR has also established a new dedicated business unit to support its global military ambitions. It makes sense for under-utilised auto manufacturing capacity to switch to defence, says Mike Hawes of the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) trade association.

The UK car industry and its suppliers are heavily reliant on a few big manufacturers – Nissan in Sunderland, Toyota in Derbyshire, BMW in Oxfordshire and the biggest of them all by value of output, JLR at multiple sites in the Midlands and Merseyside. And Hawes says the supply chain is very vulnerable.

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“Ukraine is facing a huge budget hole and a critical missile shortage, while corruption scandals and brutal conscription are eroding Kiev’s authority.”

• You Still Don’t Have The Cards: Zelensky Bringing A Bluff To Trump? (RT)

“You don’t have the cards.”


That was the message US President Donald Trump famously delivered to Vladimir Zelensky during their fiery Oval Office showdown in February 2025. Trump accused the Ukrainian leader of “gambling with World War III” and showing ingratitude for US aid, while pointing out that Kiev’s worsening battlefield position had left Ukraine with few cards to play in peace talks with Russia.

While the clash did not sever US-Ukraine ties completely, the deck has hardly been reshuffled in Kiev’s favor since. Thus the table is set for another Trump-Zelensky game in New York this week on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Even getting a seat at that table was a late deal. Just two days earlier, Zelensky was absent from Trump’s publicly announced list of UN bilaterals, and Ukrainian officials said no meeting had yet been confirmed.

Trump’s tight schedule also leaves roughly an hour for the encounter before his next engagement. The hand Zelensky holds is hardly stacked with aces. Instead, it contains an unexpected $27 billion defense shortfall, a desperate shortage of Patriot air-defense missiles, a fresh trail of corruption scandals, and mounting battlefield losses.

Opening bet: The refinery dispute
Trump has already shown his hand. Earlier this month, he blamed Zelensky for the diesel price spike gripping the US, which the president said was caused by Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries. By the eve of the UN gathering, the US national average had climbed to a record $6.5 per gallon, a topic particularly sensitive for Trump ahead of the midterms.

According to the Financial Times, Trump pressed Zelensky during a weekend phone call to stop striking Russian oil refineries, with the paper’s sources claiming he wanted to ensure Russian supplies could reach the global market.

Trump went so far as to announce that Russia and Ukraine had effectively agreed to stop attacks on energy infrastructure. Neither Kiev nor Moscow confirmed the truce, while Zelensky demanded Russia take the first step, and continued to attack Russian fuel plants.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the prospective truce a “very good idea” and said Moscow was “always on the side of peaceful solutions.” He also argued that protecting refineries alone would not solve the global fuel crunch. The bigger problem, he said, was getting Russian petroleum products onto world markets, which required safe passage for oil tankers – something he said Kiev was not willing to guarantee.

Ahead of the meeting, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also rebuked Ukraine over targeting US-linked ships in the Black Sea, adding that while it did so “probably not deliberately,” “that’s something that needs to be addressed.”

Desperate for Patriot draw
Zelensky has repeatedly sounded the alarm over deliveries of US-made Patriot interceptors, one of the few weapons in Ukraine’s arsenal capable of tackling Russian ballistic missiles. In July, he said the country’s stocks were nearly exhausted and asked Trump for an emergency “winter package” of 300 interceptors, warning that Ukraine needed them “yesterday.” Ukrainian air defenses failed to intercept even a single Russian missile during some recent barrage.

However, multiple media reports have indicated that Washington’s Patriot stocks are also low due to the Iran war, with American Patriot inventories in Europe said to have fallen “beyond critical” levels. While Trump has denied the shortfall, the Pentagon has publicly acknowledged the strain.

Earlier this month, Trump also suggested that Ukraine could receive a license to produce Patriots in a “less sophisticated version,” though no details on the prospective agreement have emerged. Multiple experts have pointed out numerous obstacles to the program, also warning that any production facilities would be prime targets for Russia.

Zelensky is almost out of chips
Late summer exposed a glaring weakness in Zelensky’s gamble: an unexpected $27 billion defense budget shortfall expected by the end of the year – a figure that ballooned almost fourfold over the past several months. Kiev subsequently asked for more money from its European backers – met with a tepid response whereby Brussels even refused to acknowledge the $27 billion figure.

The shortfall arose as a result of Zelensky’s much-heralded 40-day pressure campaign against Russia that involved the very strikes on refineries Trump reportedly asked him to stop. The escalatory attacks also triggered Russian retaliation against Ukrainian military-related logistics, including effectively closing the port of Odessa, which serves as a key hub for agricultural exports. Ukraine’s $27 billion request “surprised and unsettled” European officials, according to the New York Times, with some of Ukraine’s backers reportedly asking questions about how Kiev is spending the cash and if it actually needs as much as it says it does.

The Trump wildcard
Kiev does have one fresh trump card to hope for – except it lies largely up the US president’s sleeve. On Friday, Trump signed a new sanctions legislation first proposed by late Republican Senator and Russia hawk Lindsey Graham last year. The measure gives the US president authority to target Russian officials, banks, and the energy sector, and to impose tariffs of up to 100% on leading importers of Russian oil and gas. Zelensky specifically thanked Trump for signing it when the pair arranged their New York meeting.

However, Trump retains authority over sanctions waivers and the scope of restrictions and tariffs, while the bill does not mention China and India, the key importers of Russian energy. In addition, the Trump administration has a recent history of easing sanctions on Russian oil. During the Iran war, the administration issued temporary exemptions allowing the sale and delivery of Russian crude already at sea to alleviate pressure on energy markets.

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Nothing changed.

• Something Has Changed and World War Over Ukraine Is Back On The Table (AltM)

The eyes of the world have been fixated on the war in Iran for the past six months, meanwhile, the single-most dangerous flashpoint on the planet has gone mostly ignored. Until, that is, waves of Ukrainian drone strikes activated a run on global diesel markets. Suddenly, everyone is paying attention again…


Russia is the second largest diesel exporter in the world next to the United States, supplying around 12% of total global exports (the US supplies 22% of exports). To put this in perspective, only 10% of global diesel exports pass through the Strait of Hormuz under normal conditions – And that supply is coming from seven different oil producing nations including Iran.

After western sanctions, Russian diesel shipments have gone primarily to Turkey, Brazil, India and China. However, because Russian supplies continued to circulate on global markets, these countries did not have to draw fuel from alternative sources.

Conditions have now changed, and not for the better. Constant Ukrainianian drone strikes on Russian refineries have forced the Kremlin to stop all diesel exports and retain their existing supply for the population and the war effort.

If you want to know why diesel prices have been hit hard since July, Russian export cuts are the reason. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has steadily climbed since July according to independent satellite tracking confirmation (anyone using AIS transponder data alone will have a low and inaccurate count). It’s the Russian refinery issue that has inflated diesel prices in recent months.

With Russian sources completely cut off, multiple nations will have to draw from other producers. Meaning, the pie is shrinking, but everyone still wants the same size slice they’ve always had. If the US also stops diesel exports in response, it would be a disaster for foreign markets and result in true supply shortages (Europe would be hard hit; half of their diesel imports come from the US).

In 2024 I questioned why the Ukrainians kept going after odd targets such as nuclear early warning radar stations rather than key resources like oil refineries in order to stop Russia’s attrition strategy. Well, it looks like the Ukrainians finally figured it out.

Russia’s attrition strategy has been highly effective in grinding down Ukraine’s troop strength (to the point that they were recruiting mostly men over 40), but the key flaw of a slow moving front line and a protracted offensive is that it requires a large stockpile of resources. Ukraine’s drone attacks have a low success rate, but if they send a thousand UAVs to attack a refinery and a couple get through, then that’s still a win in the long run because it drags down Russia’s lumbering attrition-based operation.

The Trump Administration has asked Ukraine to stop hitting Russian refineries due to the instability to global markets, but Zelensky has ignored the request. It’s not surprising; they’ve finally found a tactic that works.

Of course, now the rest of the world is being affected by diesel supply shortages when this was not the case a year ago. One would think the Europeans, who have been particularly throttled by price hikes on fuel and energy, would be in a rush to end the war. And maybe they are about to intervene, but not in the way we might hope…

I think it’s fair to say that the Ukraine war would have ended a long time ago had it not been for the interference of European governments propping up Ukraine and encouraging them to NOT make a deal. Ultimately, Russia is going to keep the Donbas region whether Ukraine likes it or not. But Zelensky refuses to accept this outcome, so, the war rages on much longer than it needs to.

The situation gets much more dangerous, though,with the push by European elites to put boots on the ground. They seem to want to start a world war. Beyond the diesel resource problem which puts a timetable on the war for both sides, European governments have increased troop movements to eastern borders and it’s starting to look like they’re getting ready for something big.

Poland has been building extensive trenches and fortifications using German combat engineers on the border of Belarus. Germany has established a 5000-man armored brigade in Lithuania, the first time the Germans have stationed permanent combat troops abroad since 1945. NATO has launched a 9th multinational battle group with regular exercises in Finland near the Russian border. Multiple nations are sending rotating brigades to Latvia, Romania and Estonia. Even the Canadians are sending troops.

Recent weeks have seen repeated Polish and Baltic fighter activations due to alleged drone or aircraft activity near alliance airspace. Allies are pre-positioning equipment and planning much larger stockpiles of ammunition and resources in frontline states. NATO has also published extensive contingency planning for the eastern flank.

There has been a surge in political and civil-preparedness messaging for civilians. Polish warnings about possible disguised drone/missile incidents. French measures to protect critical infrastructure after hybrid-attack briefings. German military-hospital capacity planning. Lithuanian plans for evacuation routes. UK public preparedness bulletins including recommendations for civilians to stock up on food and supplies..

Even Switzerland has been posting security and preparedness messages for citizens, indicating a “deteriorating security situation” in relation to the military build up.

All of this could be viewed as a defensive posture and not necessarily planning for direct engagement with the Russians; but consider for a moment that Russia has not once threatened to attack European or NATO targets and has consistently said that their only interest is Ukraine. Yet, Europe has removed their “trip wire” defense strategy and replaced it with a permanent front. It sure does seem like they are getting ready for an event which might provoke the Russians to strike targets outside of Ukraine.

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“Brussels is considering moving the funds out of Belgium’s Euroclear into a new supranational structure, the SVR has said..”

• EU Plotting New ‘Scheme’ To Steal Moscow’s Frozen Assets – Russian Intel (RT)

The EU is working on a new scheme to “steal” Moscow’s frozen sovereign assets to bankroll Ukraine, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) said in a press release on Tuesday. Around $300 billion in Russian sovereign assets was frozen by Kiev’s Western backers after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. Roughly $240 billion is still being held at the Belgium-based clearing house Euroclear.


According to the SVR, EU leaders have “a vital interest in stealing Russian assets,” because they fear they will not be able to indefinitely finance “the thieving Kiev regime” without appropriating the funds. Eurocrats are now “in a hurry” to pull off the seizure before elections in several EU states in 2027, the agency stated, arguing that future governments in the bloc could be less willing to back further financial support for Ukraine.

The EU has already redirected profits generated by the immobilized funds to Ukraine but has been unable to seize the underlying assets due to strong political and legal resistance. According to the SVR, experts in Brussels are now discussing the creation of a new supranational structure that could take control of Russian central bank funds after they are moved outside of Belgian jurisdiction.

Belgium has repeatedly blocked proposals to seize the assets, with Prime Minister Bart De Wever warning that outright confiscation would expose his country to legal and financial retaliation. Euroclear has also said it could sue the EU if the funds are seized.

Last week, Belgium’s top administrative court also struck down a government decision not to release the assets of Russia’s BCS Bank, which were frozen alongside Moscow’s sovereign assets in 2022. The court found that Belgian authorities had mishandled the case and ruled that the bank could seek a fresh review, potentially setting a precedent for other entities whose requests were rejected under similar circumstances.

Moscow has long denounced any attempt to appropriate its sovereign assets, calling it “theft” and warning that confiscation would trigger retaliation, potentially including measures against Western assets held in Russia. The SVR has also warned that confiscating Russia’s sovereign funds would damage trust in European financial institutions among major foreign investors, including China, India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Singapore.

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He’s willing to waste a million lives. Hard to fight against.

• Zelensky To UN: Russia’s Deficit ‘Bigger’ – More Sanctions Needed (ZH)

Among the more interesting parts of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech before the UN General Assembly on Wednesday afternoon was when he lashed out at North Korea. Zelensky said while issuing leveling a litany of charges against Russia for its war that “The leader of North Korea sent his troops to Russia to support the weak points of the Russian army.” He questioned why a faraway southeast Asian country would be so willing to sacrifice its troops for a Russian endeavor.


Zelensky said: “You probably saw the broadcast from Pyongyang when they honored those who were killed. And this is madness, too. Why should Koreans give their lives in a war against Ukraine?” He further accused Kim Jong Un of using his own citizens “like currency” in return for “improved ballistic missiles and Pyongyang’s much [upgraded] drone capabilities.” Likely these barbs will only cause Kim’s regime to double down, and keep up its military support to Moscow.

By some estimates, hundreds or possibly even thousands of DPRK troops have died so far in the Ukraine conflict. Pyongyang and Moscow have increasingly openly acknowledged the deaths, with North Korea even having held patriotic state funerals for slain troops. Elsewhere in the address, Zelensky sought to portray his country as essentially ‘winning’ the war, claiming immense but unverifiable Russian losses on the battlefield, also while Ukraine’s long-range drones unleash destruction on Russian energy infrastructure.


Concerning the energy war, Zelensky went on to assert that “Oil itself is not Ukraine’s target, not our target, not gasoline or diesel, not factories or ports … Our target is Russia’s ability to finance this war, to drag it out, to make it more brutal and more destructive.” “Russia’s finances and Russia’s production are what must be stopped if Putin is to be stopped,” Zelensky added. On this front, he presented Ukraine’s risky long-range strikes as victorious. But he has also this week expressed willingness to agree to a joint energy ceasefire.

On sanctions, he pointed to Russia’s budget deficit as now being “bigger than in any other year” – claiming that “Russia planned major operations on the front this summer; all of them failed.”[..] Zelensky also used the speech to try and rally Western countries to not grow weak on punishing Russia and keeping its global isolation in place. “Something always seems to stop Putin from saying, ‘That’s it. Enough, Peace,’” Zelensky said. “Can you even imagine him without war? He is ‘Patient Zero’, the one from whom war keeps spreading further. … ‘Patient Zero’ must be stopped.”

He said Russian assets must “remain a target,” arguing that “when someone in the world weakens sanctions, weakens sanctions against Russian oligarchs, it may make life more comfortable for rich Russians, but it also gives Putin more time, to send his people into the kill zones.”

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He doesn’t want to.

• At the UN, Trump Gives Iran’s ‘Vile Regime’ a Stark Choice (Robert Spencer)

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly with his characteristic directness and forthrightness, which had a particular impact in that hall of evasion, diversion, obfuscation and lies. He made it abundantly clear that the time for temporizing regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran is over, and he said that both he and the leaders of the Islamic Republic faced a stark choice.


Trump confronted head-on the claims that he is fighting an unnecessary war, noting the threat from the Islamic Republic has been longstanding, but that his predecessors preferred to appease the mullahs — or just ignore them altogether and hope that the “Death to America!”-chanting hordes would simply melt away.

Iran, Trump noted, posed an immense and immediate threat. “Just imagine,” Trump said, if “such a vile regime were ever empowered to carry out large-scale terror attacks from behind a nuclear shield. This was the reality we had to confront — a reality that far too many preferred to ignore. They all ignored it. Many presidents and many others just wanted to ignore it. They were unwilling to do anything about it, but they knew the problem.”

They knew it, but they did nothing, or even worse, sent billions over to Tehran, thereby financing the Islamic Republic’s jihad against Israel and the rest of the free world. Trump pointed out that he had given the Iranian leadership every chance to come to some kind of negotiated agreement: “After giving Iran every chance for a deal, I took action to ensure that neither the United States nor any nation in this hall would ever have to face such a nightmare, such a catastrophic problem.”

Although the Islamic Republic continues to insist that it has achieved a tremendous victory over the Great Satan, Trump came to the UN with the details: “As a result of Operation Epic Fury,” he said, “all 159 ships of their navy are now lying at the bottom of the sea. Likewise, their air force is gone. Their radar is gone. Their anti-aircraft equipment is gone. Their missile and drone manufacturing capacity is almost gone. Their economy is gone. The only thing that isn’t gone is inflation, which is destroying their country and is now well over 300 percent.” That inflation could be what finally does in the Islamic Republic from within.

Trump also reminded the hostile gang of alleged diplomats that he had bent over backwards to make peace with the murderous mullahs: “Yet even after we agreed to a ceasefire for nuclear discussions, Iran promptly violated it with brazen acts of terrorism against civilian ships from other countries.” He added magnanimously: “I want to thank the UN Security Council for voting overwhelmingly to pass a resolution condemning Iran’s despicable terrorist attacks on commercial shipping. Thank you very much. That resolution, I’m pleased to say, received more co-sponsors from UN member nations than any Security Council resolution in history. That’s something.” Given the UN’s resolute and persistent anti-Americanism, it is indeed striking.

“Now,” Trump continued, “we must be equally united in maintaining pressure. The United States Navy has recently escorted more than 1 billion barrels of oil out of the Strait of Hormuz, and more oil is flowing than at any point since the start of the war. We’re taking 22, 25, 30, 32, and 37 ships out, respectively, every single day, every single night. But I have a big decision to make.”

Trump then characterized that decision as one that is in the hands of the Islamic Republic’s leaders: “Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before — maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East, or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell, with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness for generations?”

This sort of talk drives leftists crazy, and sure enough, Mediaite gave this headline to its transcript of this part of Trump’s speech: “‘Do I Annihilate the Islamic Republic?’ Trump Issues Shocking Threat to Iran in UN Speech.” Never fans of thinking clearly or making fine distinctions, leftists will no doubt fail to note that this time, Trump threatened to annihilate “the Islamic Republic,” not “Iran” itself. He was not threatening the destruction of the nation, but the removal of the regime. And indeed, until that regime is driven from power, there will be no possibility of real peace with Iran.

The leaders of the Islamic Republic have time to think over the choice Trump gave them: “But I believe we’ll make a deal right after the election,” Trump said, “because it doesn’t make sense for them not to. They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election. What they don’t realize is that I’m not running. I did that already, and won in a landslide. We won in a giant landslide, and I’ll be here for two and a half years. The Republican Party is running, and I will be helping them, but I am not running.”

Indeed, he isn’t. And free people around the world can hope that the anti-American left doesn’t gain sufficient power in those elections to stop his efforts to bring the global problem of the Islamic Republic of Iran to an end.

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“A regime negotiating from strength doesn’t convert its leverage into a countdown clock — it converts it when the clock is running against it, not the other way around..”

• Iran Is Projecting Weakness, Not the Strength It Wants You to See (Florack)

In the cleanest tell yet that Iran is on the ropes, a senior Iranian official just put a number on the table Tehran has never put there before. That official told Reuters on Sept. 22 that Iran can reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days if Washington eases military pressure and lifts the blockade on Iranian ports. Per that reporting, this marks the first time Tehran has attached a specific, dated performance window to reopening the strait rather than treating it as an open-ended bargaining chip.


That’s a meaningful shift. A regime negotiating from strength doesn’t convert its leverage into a countdown clock — it converts it when the clock is running against it, not the other way around. Reuters doesn’t name the “senior official,” but it’s a safe bet that it’s either President Masoud Pezeshkian himself or someone standing close enough to him to speak for the office. Of course, there’s always the question of whether Iran actually follows through on its promises, and the standard response should be “they won’t,” since in practice, they never have.

That suspicion only deepens once you look at what other Iranian officials said in the same news cycle. CNBC’s reporting notes that a separate senior Iranian government official told MS NOW, CNBC’s Versant Media partner, that the Reuters and Kyodo reports were “not true.” And according to yournews.com’s writeup, Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency disputed the account, too. So this isn’t a clean, confirmed data point. It’s a single-sourced Reuters/Kyodo report, attributed to one unnamed official, that Iran’s own state-adjacent media machine turned around and contradicted within the same day. CNBC itself states it “could not independently verify the reports.”

That contradiction goes directly to a point I made back in April: Iran’s civilian government under Pezeshkian and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps aren’t singing from the same hymnal, and this flip-flop looks a great deal like the result. It’s reasonable to conclude Iran is fighting something close to an internal civil war right now, waged between the IRGC and whatever still passes for a civilian government in Tehran — one arm offering concessions to end a war it can’t win, the other arm racing to deny it before Iranian state media has to explain the offer to its own people.

Let’s recall that Ali Khamenei was killed in a February 28 U.S.-Israeli strike and his son Mojtaba Khamenei was installed as his successor. Mojtaba is now reportedly walled off from his own government by an IRGC security cordon. Gee, big shock.

The walk-back on the Hormuz offer itself is the more useful data point, because it measures Iran’s shrinking ability to control its own message, let alone its own war. Even Iranian state media has lately taken on a tone bracing its audience for something difficult, a marked departure from its usual self-assured, defiant register. Pezeshkian’s own framing — “we emerged with our heads held high,” vowing to “firmly defend” Iran’s positions — is the language of a leader managing domestic face-saving, not one negotiating from a position that needs no defending.

That combination — tough public talk paired with real, dated concessions offered quietly through mediators — is the classic signature of a regime under genuine pressure, trying to manage two audiences at once: an international one it’s handing specific offers to, and a domestic one it’s still trying to sell a story of resilience. It calls to mind the rhetoric coming out of Berlin in the days after the Allied landing at Normandy — total confidence on the radio, total collapse on the map.

Interestingly, reports have surfaced, as yet unconfirmed, that Pezeshkian submitted an actual resignation letter back in May, arguing the elected government had been excluded from major decisions entirely. The regime reportedly denied this within hours, including through IRGC-affiliated media — the same pattern that just played out with the Hormuz offer this week. Clearly, the IRGC wants the illusion of a popularly elected government presented to the world. Accepting the resignation would risk triggering domestic unrest, which the IRGC can’t afford from a global PR standpoint.

Not everyone reads the power dynamic the same way. Iran analyst Ben Taleblu, quoted by Fox News, cautions against reading Pezeshkian’s sidelining as a dramatic new break — his argument is that the president never held much real power to begin with, so this is an intensification of a long-standing structure, not a sudden coup. And a GIS Reports analysis lays out a genuinely fragmented decision-making body — Pezeshkian, Araghchi, Zolghadr, Ghalibaf, and a hardline chief justice all holding formal seats at the table, with the regime needing Pezeshkian and Araghchi kept visibly in the picture specifically because their public-facing legitimacy is worth something to a regime that still needs to claim popular consent.

Clearly the IRGC holds the cards, and despite that, Pezeshkian is still pushing for a more moderate approach. He’s still alive for one reason: The IRGC needs him for the illusion of legitimacy. At this point, I wouldn’t bet on Pezeshkian surviving the eventual loss of power the IRGC appears headed toward. Someone will need to take the blame for that loss, and it won’t be the men holding the guns.

Put plainly, the messaging coming out of Tehran this week is exactly what you’d expect from a regime managing weakness rather than strength — walking back a leak that looked too accommodating the moment it hit international wires, precisely because Pezeshkian’s “heads held high” routine back home can’t coexist with what amounts, in plain terms, to a public seven-day surrender clock.

Now, before some of you get this twisted, the offer from Pezeshkian’s people came about a week before Trump’s UN speech, not because of it. What brought it to the surface was the speech itself, and the Iranian delegation’s walkout partway through Trump’s remarks on the war. The speech didn’t create the weakness. It just made it impossible for the Iranians to keep hiding it, which is perhaps even more useful.

Thought for the Day: Nixon saved his career by refusing to give back a dog nobody asked him to return — proof that sometimes the shrewdest defense is simply declining to negotiate over something that was never actually up for debate.

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Xi has landed.

• Melania Trump Outlines Plans for Chairman Xi Jinping Official State Visit (CTH)

From First Lady Melania Trump:


President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump will welcome His Excellency Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China and Madame Peng Liyuan to the White House on Thursday, September 24, 2026, for an official state visit. This visit comes more than a decade since President Xi and Madame Peng’s last visit to the White House, marking a significant milestone in the relationship between the two countries.

On Wednesday, September 23, the President will greet His Excellency, Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China and Madame Peng Liyuan at Joint Base Andrews. On Thursday morning, September 24, the President and First Lady will host a State Arrival Ceremony honoring His Excellency, Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China and Madame Peng Liyuan. The ceremony, which will be held on the South Lawn, State Floor, and Rose Garden of the White House, will feature 479 military personnel, representing all branches of the United States Armed Forces.

As the arrival begins, the South Drive will be lined with the Armed Forces Full Honor Cordon leading to a national flag display of U.S. and China flags where the United States Army Herald Trumpets will present a fanfare on the South Portico as the President and First Lady welcome His Excellency Xi Jinping and Madame Peng Liyuan to the White House.

On the State Floor, “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band will play the national anthems of the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America, followed by remarks from both The President and His Excellency Xi Jinping.

The ceremony will also feature a Presidential Salute from the United States Marine Silent Drill Platoon and United States Joint Forces Command on the South Lawn. There will then be a Military Review in the Rose Garden where The United States Army Herald Trumpets will line the roof of the West and Oval Colonnades. Military demonstrations will be performed by the United States Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps, the United States Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon, and “The Commandant’s Own” United States Marine Drum and Bugle Corps. The ceremony will conclude with a military flyover featuring a B-2 Spirit and four F-22 Raptors.

After the arrival ceremony, Mrs. Trump and Madame Peng Liyuan will visit the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art to explore works spanning centuries of artistic achievement and Sino-American cultural exchange. On Thursday evening, the President and First Lady will greet His Excellency Xi Jinping and Madame Peng Liyuan upon their arrival to the North Portico of the White House for a State Dinner in the East Room. The Office of the First Lady will share additional details on the State Dinner on Wednesday, September 23.

On Friday morning, the President and First Lady will greet His Excellency Xi Jinping and Madame Peng Liyuan upon their arrival to the South Portico of the White House for tea in the Red Room of the White House. Afterward, the couples will travel to the National Archives in Washington, DC where they will view a variety of important records and documents significant to the American and Chinese relationship throughout history. To conclude the historic State visit, the President and First Lady will bid farewell to His Excellency and Madame Peng Liyuan at the National Archives.

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“.. the Constitution says nothing about a guaranteed seat in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room or a hard pass to roam the West Wing. CNN can still cover the White House. MS NOW can still spend hours a day ranting like unhinged lunatics about Trump.”

• Karoline Leavitt Outs the White House Press Corps (Matt Margolis)

Karoline Leavitt may go down as the best White House press secretary this country has ever had. Her exit last month stung, but now that she’s no longer behind the podium, she’s dishing about what happened behind the scenes, and what she revealed on Tuesday is a doozy. Appearing on Sean Hannity’s podcast, Leavitt pulled back the curtain on the briefing room and revealed how much of what happens during White House daily press briefings is just for show.


According to Leavitt, reporters who hit her with loaded questions on camera would later come to her privately and apologize once the cameras stopped rolling. “You name people that act one way when they’re questioning you,” Hannity began. “They want their moment, right? They want their clip for the night so they get their time on the evening news.” “Exactly,” Leavitt confirmed. “And then off air they’re totally different people. Do you find that a lot?” “Yeah, that’s true.” “Would you say they’re phony?” Hannity asked.

“Yeah, there’s a performative aspect to the briefing room, in fairness, I think on both sides, right, but definitely with the press. And they have to do that because their bosses are demanding it. There’s been times reporters have even said to me, ‘I’m sorry, I had to ask that today, you know, my bosses really wanted me to ask that.’ They know it’s an unfair question, but they’re not in control of their own livelihood. They are dictated by the editors and the execs at some of these companies.”

Leavitt’s comments come amid the fight over President Donald Trump’s decision to pull White House press credentials from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. The three outlets have sued Trump to get their passes back, and other networks have essentially boycotted pool coverage of Trump in solidarity.

Naturally, the left and its media allies are treating the credential decision as an assault on the First Amendment. That’s a cute argument, but the Constitution says nothing about a guaranteed seat in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room or a hard pass to roam the West Wing. CNN can still cover the White House. MS NOW can still spend hours a day ranting like unhinged lunatics about Trump. Politico can still publish all the anonymous-source gossip it wants. Nobody has stopped a single story from running.

In fact, our republic has survived. Leavitt also pointed to CBS News, where coverage shifted after Bari Weiss took over as editor-in-chief. “You know, we’re seeing big changes at CBS, which I think are great. I think we’ve seen a lot of improvement with them, and again, we’re not asking for, like, positive puff pieces every day. Just fairness. Truth. Accuracy,” she said. “Writing about an executive order that the president of the United States signed should not be a questionable thing… it should just be, ‘Yeah, of course I’ll write about this,'” Leavitt said.


And that’s a pretty darn low bar, and plenty of newsrooms still manage to trip over it.

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The main thing I get from her is she looks so sad.

• Campaign Poison Kamala Harris Hopes DSA Commies Can Make Her Popular (Kruiser)

There is an interesting phenomenon in politics that I have seen play out in different ways over the past 40 or so years. One might think that primary and general elections are the ultimate performances reviews for political candidates. They should be, but they’re not. Having spent my entire adult life working in both the entertainment industry and politics, I’ve seen the role that ego plays in each. Most people have heard the line about Washington, D.C. being “Hollywood for ugly people,” and it’s pretty much true. The difference is that Hollywood is merciless when letting people know that they are past their due date.


Politics is filled with wealthy hangers-on who will keep telling people that they’re pretty. Politicians who have national ambitions just need one or two serious power players in their corners to keep hanging around seemingly forever. I can think of at least one presidential candidate who had two deep runs even though he only had one wealthy backer. Democrats in California who are nationally known got that way because they met the right money people early on in their careers. A Bay Area connection is especially helpful for them. Representative Nancy Pelosi, Governor Gavin Newsom, and former Vice President Kamala Harris all started out there.

While Pelosi is finally off to hit the box wine even harder for breakfast, Newsom and the former Madame Veep still have donors whispering sweet nothings in their ears. Guess who is now looking for love in all the hammer and sickle places? The New York Times:

Kamala Harris campaigned in Detroit today alongside Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the Senate. It was a rare stop for the former vice president, who has received a cold shoulder from many Democratic candidates wary of tying themselves to the unpopular Biden administration. The visit could boost both figures. El-Sayed — who is in a tight race in a state Trump won in 2024 — needs to shore up his support from Black voters and moderates. (It’s not clear that Tucker Carlson’s support will help.) Harris is trying to maintain her influence as she considers a presidential run.

While most establishment Democrats — which the former vice president most certainly is — are trying to figure out the exact nature of their relationships with the upstarts from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Harris is the desperate girl who texted while still in the Uber on her way home after meeting for drinks for the first time. Robert wrote a column back in early July about Harris reaching out for some love from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Queen of the DSA commies.

This could be an indication that Harris is finally coming to grips with the fact that she isn’t very well liked by mainstream money Democrats. She was the first top-tier Democrat they bailed on during the 2020 Democratic primary season, forcing her out of the race before Christmas 2019. Harris became confused when she was forced upon them in 2024 and they pretended to like her for a couple of months.

After that, she couldn’t get enough backing to make a serious run for governor of California. Somebody keeps telling her that she has a shot in 2028, though. Maybe it’s those people who are pushing her in the direction of the DSA.

Harris is driven more by a sense of entitlement than any deep political philosophy, so hitching her wagon to the DSA isn’t difficult for her. “Desperate to be liked” is her default mode and that is certainly on display right now. This could also be a sign that Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign isn’t going as well as the polling and the Dem propagandists in the mainstream media would have us believe. The notion that Harris could be the stabilizer who helps him with moderate voters is rather far-fetched.

Hey, longshots do hit every once in a while. The only certainty here is that Abdul El-Sayed and Kamala Harris are two headaches that those in charge at the Democratic National Committee would rather not have. Oh, and AOC would absolutely kneecap Harris in a primary battle.

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After the elections.

• Good News – Diesel and Gasoline Prices Set to Collapse in Roughly 60-Days (CTH)

Take heart, we only need to wait approximately 60-days until we see a major price decline in diesel and gasoline prices in the USA. Once the midterm election is over, prices will begin their retreat with the finished collapse mid-January.


The non-pretending reality exists within a generally non-western perspective that current “market prices” are not driven by oil supplies, refining capacity or the other various justifications used by the speculators, traders and various regional spot-market control systems. The prices are being controlled in order to influence political outcomes.

Once those political influence operations are concluded, the stakeholders in the market price approach will moderate their justifications accordingly, and prices will plummet. Sound nuts? Well, let me explain who agrees.

On my side of the argument is Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin, who does happen to operate the world’s largest gasoline station – at least, according to the professional republicans. Others on my side include Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salmon, Qatari Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Turkish President Recep Erdogan and Venezuelan interim President Delcy Eloína Rodríguez Gómez.

Others who accept the reality of this position, albeit with various political limits to their ability to speak openly about such matters, include President Donald J Trump, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Unfortunately for this aligned group they are stuck inside the largest western political system who controls global finance and world economic outcomes.

What all of these aforementioned names understand is that “market prices” are entirely detached from the archaic terminology behind supply and demand; a quaint concept that stopped applying years ago – but pretenses must be maintained or else the masses may find their pitchforks, see: DSA pitchfork suppliers.

A second subset of allies who unintentionally support this perspective, includes those who use the terms “sold at a discount” where “sold at a discount” in reality means sold outside the western market pricing approach. How many times have you seen the term “sold at a discount” repeated when you are reading about former Venezuela oil being sold to China, or current Russian oil being sold to India?

It’s such a common term it is accepted without anyone ever asking, ‘what is this discount you speak of, and how is it applied’? No-one seems to ask that part. We accept this terminology created by “western market pricing” advocates just as we accepted the term “service driven economy” in the era before Donald Trump.

The reality is that ‘western market prices’ are not an outcome of supply, demand or even availability or production capacity. Western market prices are determined by speculators, traders and regional benchmarks created by “independent agencies.”

Remember those pesky housing loan bond rating agencies, Standard and Poor’s and/or Moody’s during the lead-in to the 2008 financial crisis. That type of rating ‘independence’ is akin to the benchmarks of these regional independent agencies within the energy markets; which is to say, they are not independent at all – they are part of the manipulated western financial system that determines ‘market pricing’.

Behind that curtain are the traders, speculators, ideological banks and financial systems who create the finance system for the energy market. Want to stop oil exploitation, change the lending requirements to favor windmills and solar panels etc. Not coincidentally changing these lending rules and regulations was Mark Carney’s former job. Does that sound like an open market approach?

Thus, when you really understand how this pricing is structured you begin to realize the price of diesel has nothing to do with the supply of it and the price is more controlled by those who wish to generate financial -or political- outcomes from it.

You don’t have to take my word for it, review the words of the world’s largest oil/gas producer about this rigged game. {SEE HERE} Wouldn’t Vladimir Putin be the subject matter expert?

“How, in fact, is the price of gas formed on the European exchanges? It is not determined by producers, but by exchange traders.” In essence, right now “the west”, specifically Americans, are paying fuel costs based on market commodity prices. The most recent examples are oil, LNG and now the headline leading, diesel fuel. However, the actual supply of diesel fuel is not driving the price. The price is being driven by speculation and trading, which is based on arbitrary price formulas created by western multinational corporations and financial markets.

Read more …

Victor Davis Hanson is being a busy man lately.

• Elon Musk Is Powering The American Renaissance (Victor Davis Hanson)

There’s a lot of controversy about Elon Musk. His reputation took a big hit, remember, right after the election, because half the country voted, roughly 48%, voted against Donald Trump. Elon Musk had flipped from a former Hillary Clinton supporter and Joe Biden supporter to a firm MAGA adherent and voted for Donald Trump in 2024.


As a result of that and his comments opposing illegal immigration, there were people who not only were demonstrating against [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], but attacking Tesla dealerships. Everybody said that Elon Musk’s brand had suffered accordingly, that Tesla was on the way down, that European and American [electric vehicle] makers, along with Chinese EV makers, would dominate the market, given the tarnishing of the Musk brand and in conjunction with the end of the federal subsidy for electric vehicles.

So, people were suggesting that the era of Elon Musk was over. He was very controversial, and he was outspoken on his own platform, X, on conservative issues such as illegal immigration, green energy, [artificial intelligence] in ways that infuriated the Left. And the Left, remember, was considered the natural consumer of electric vehicles.

So, are we watching the decline of Elon Musk? No. No, no, no. The exact opposite is happening. In the second quarter of 2026, Tesla had a rebound, and it captured 52% of all the EVs sold in the United States. It has a market capitalization of $1.2 trillion. The other “Big Three” automakers are beginning to exit the EV market.

China cannot send their EVs into the United States. Why did Tesla rebound? Was it because all of a sudden Elon Musk had a fight with Donald Trump for a while? No. Was it because he apologized to the Left? No. It’s because when you buy a Tesla and you drive it and you compare it with other brands of the Big Three in terms of distancing, acceleration, safety, appurtenances, it’s not just better, but it keeps getting better geometrically, at a geometric rate, not just an arithmetic.

It has the best program for self-driving. It’s the safest. It has the longest range. It’s the most fun to drive, and people like it regardless of their politics. If you move to SpaceX, 67% of all the satellites in low orbit around the world today are associated with Elon Musk’s SpaceX company – 67%, over 12,000 satellites.

The market capitalization of SpaceX is well over $2 trillion – $2 trillion. SpaceX, with its various rockets, has saved a morbid, calcified, ossified NASA. It alone, with its rocketry and space vehicles, has put the United States not just back into the so-called space race and return to the moon and eventually to Mars, it’s made it preeminent over the Europeans, the Japanese, and the Chinese. More importantly, it’s given the United States enormous technological advances in rocketry, ballistic missiles, which have a definite military component to them.

When Elon Musk paid an exorbitant fee for X, people felt that he had made an enormous mistake, that it was overpriced. And yet, people were saying that users would abandon him and go elsewhere. In fact, that has not happened. That has not happened. There are 560 million users of X today. BlueSky, the alternative that was supposed to break X, has 3 million users.

Three million versus 560 million users. And remember that his Starlink satellite platform has captured 97% of all satellite internet usage. There are 12 million people who have a Starlink receiver and are subscribers in 160 countries. Most of the U.S. military and our allied militaries, including the Ukrainians and the Israelis, count on Starlink to guide their missiles and their drones, to protect them from incoming attack.

Let’s just put all of this in some kind of perspective. In terms of market capitalization, Elon Musk has well over $3.5 trillion in his various companies. SpaceX is the largest and it’s the most dominant, and it will either ensure that the United States is first in space exploration and satellite launching.

And, by the way, more satellites were launched on Elon Musk rockets last year than all of the satellites launched elsewhere put together. In addition to that, he created the electric vehicle market. It did not exist. He created the idea. Everyone said it would not work, that he was going to go broke, and he was finished.

He not only created the Tesla electric vehicle, he made it preeminent and dominant today. And he did it because, for the price and a cost-benefit analysis, it was unmatched. In terms of Grok, it is about third. About 16% of all AI platforms and chatbots use Grok. So, let’s just keep that in perspective.

The United States is preeminent today in social media, in artificial intelligence, in satellite launches, in the number of rocket launches in general, in electric vehicles. And all of that put together is due to one person, Elon Musk, who has been reviled and attacked by the Left as either treasonous or insane or cruel or whatever.

One man has combined the talents of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford all in one person, and he’s an American. In other words, much of the success of the United States’ current renaissance in digital media, in satellites, in electrical vehicles, in AI, in software is due to one person. One person can make a difference. In the case of Elon Musk, he made a big difference.

Read more …

“Carney Inc deserves it.”

• Victor Davis Hanson Explains to Canadians (CTH)

President Trump has drawn attention to this segment by Victor Davis Hanson outlining the status of the Canadian position thanks to Prime Minister Mark Carney. Why? Because VDH is the type of American that Canadians actually listen to. VDH apparently talks in the tones and constructs that appeal to Canadians, therefore his remarks on how Mark Carney is manipulating Canada hit more directly than when other pundits do it.


VDH has seen a remarkable uptick in the size of his audience ever since he started talking about Canada, because his new audience is almost exclusively Canadian. Hanson speaks about the Canadian dynamic below. It’s monotone, but the “elbows crew’ like it. WATCH (prompted):


Prime Minister Carney asks why Victor Davis Hanson is doing this to him. I’m not a big fan of Canadians switching positions and suddenly wanting to accept trade terms. CTH would prefer that we sever all ties with Canada, terminate the USMCA and watch them slowly spiral for a year or two. Carney Inc deserves it.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/LunarOptimus/status/2102390687589138513?s=20 https://twitter.com/herbertong/status/2102565863379345806?s=20

 

 

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Debt Rattle September 9 2026

Sep 092026
 
 September 9, 2026  Posted by at 9:05 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  33 Responses »


Mondriaan Amaryllis 1910


• Massive Escalation: Iran Sends Ballistic Missile Salvo On Jordan Bases (ZH)
• In Putin Call, Trump Seeks Swift End To Ukraine War (ZH)
• EU Committing ‘Harakiri’ – Lavrov (RT)
• Lavrov Says ‘Start Of Real War’ Emerging (ZH)
• U.S. Emissary Missions to Russia and Ukraine (CTH)
• Socialists Call for “War in the Streets” and the End of Capitalism (Turley)
• Making the World Great One Nation at a Time (J.B. Shurk)
• Wherefore Art Thou, Christianity? (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Generation That Built America Was the Last of Its Kind (Victor Davis Hanson)
• The Counterrevolution: Victor Davis Hanson Surveys Trump’s Fall and Rise (Rust)
• President Trump Targets Canada Subsidized Bombardier Manufacturing (CTH)

 


 

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2096934391129715076?s=20 https://twitter.com/SidneyPowell1/status/2097350346217508867?s=20 https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/2097252592481087687?s=20

 


 


Not ideal. But Iran with nukes is worse.

• Massive Escalation: Iran Sends Ballistic Missile Salvo On Jordan Bases (ZH)

State Tasnim reports: Iran has launched missiles at targets in response to US strikes, while unofficial sources cited by Tasnim noted that explosions were heard in Jordan following Iranian missile attacks. The below brief recap shows this new flare-up and tit-for-tat came in rapid succession… Senior US officials to FOX:


“US military has struck targets near Kharg Island and Jask. The targets include Iranian oil tankers. This is part of a larger effort to squeeze Iran economically. The strategy includes sinking and disabling Iranian crude oil tankers. -FOX” How many Patriot interceptor missiles are being plowed through this time? More unverified but widely circulating images out of the region overnight:

https://twitter.com/MoloWarMonitor/status/2097442661141455233?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2097442661141455233%7Ctwgr%5Efd1370ed7440d45b27739c1c89f922937bc5fffa%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fhouthis-pummel-southwest-saudi-arabia-ballistic-missiles-yemen-air-ground-war-erupts


Iranian leaders have lately vowed to hit US bases and assets harder in all forthcoming rounds of fighting…

https://twitter.com/MoloWarMonitor/status/2097442661141455233?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2097442661141455233%7Ctwgr%5Efd1370ed7440d45b27739c1c89f922937bc5fffa%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fhouthis-pummel-southwest-saudi-arabia-ballistic-missiles-yemen-air-ground-war-erupts


US Attacks Iran Tankers, After American Navy Ships Targeted IRIB reports that US forces attacked a commercial vessel in the coastal waters of Jask City MULTIPLE EXPLOSIONS HEARD NEAR KHARG ISLAND ANCHORAGE, A KEY IRANIAN OIL EXPORT HUB; CAUSE, ORIGIN & ANY POTENTIAL DAMAGE REMAIN UNCONFIRMED. – MEHR NEWS AGENCY

US is currently attacking Iranian oil tankers, i24 news reports, citing a US source A small Iranian tanker was targeted by a missile attack from the US army 4 miles from Kharg Island, Tasnim reports.

IRAN LAUNCHED UNDISCLOSED SECOND ATTACK ON US SHIPS ON MONDAY: WSJ. NO AMERICAN SHIPS WERE STRUCK IN THE ATTACKS: WSJ.

Oil Climbs, Brent Near $100
Nothing official has yet to emerge, also amid unconfirmed reporting that Iran’s IRGC Navy has launched anti-ship cruise missiles from Jask toward the Strait of Hormuz. According to breaking Al Jazeera News:

“Several explosions have been heard on Iran’s Kharg Island, according to Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency. No official information has been released on the cause or origin of the explosions.”

More from WSJ on the prior Monday attack incident: “No American ships were struck in the attacks, but Iran’s recent attempts to hit American naval assets are raising alarms that the regime is using more sophisticated weapons and could be getting assistance from China or Russia.”

Read more …

“.. & Restoration Of US-Russia Ties..”

Trump wants peace with Putin, as Europe seeks war.

• In Putin Call, Trump Seeks Swift End To Ukraine War (ZH)

On Tuesday morning President Trump and his Russian counterpart President Putin held a “positive” phone call regarding finding an end to the Ukraine war, the Kremlin side has stated. Russian president aide Yury Ushakov has been the first to provide a readout, with little revealed from the US side in the immediate aftermath. The phone call was “constructive and frank” and lasted exactly one hour, but remains “strictly confidential.”


Likely the White House will also be equally scant in what information it chooses to release, given the sensitivity of the timing, coming just off the weekend shuttle diplomacy by Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Their rare, direct meeting with Putin on Saturday lasted than three hours, after which they traveled to Ukraine to meet with Zelensky, in what was a much more chummy atmosphere, naturally.

Ushakov in his fresh comments described of that prior meeting, “Overall, the visit of the aforementioned American representatives was assessed positively.” He further said “European narratives about a Russian threat” were discussed in the call – an issue now “being used to justify support for Ukraine and increased European military spending.” The readout indicates, “Putin supported Trump’s commitment to building a constructive Russia–US partnership and emphasized that Russia has no hostile plans toward Europe.”

Perhaps the most important part of the Russian readout is seen in the following: “Trump said he wants a breakthrough on Ukraine during his presidency and stressed that ending the conflict could open the way to a major restoration of Russia–US relations.” The only additional information that the Kremlin aide provided was that Trump and Putin agreed that work through direct contact as well as diplomatic channels would “continue”.

The Witkoff-Kushner trip had come a little under two weeks after CIA Director John Ratcliffe unexpectedly traveled to Moscow and reportedly floated a trilateral summit involving Trump, Putin, and Zelensky. U.S. President Donald Trump told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday in a phone call that he wanted a swift end to the war in Ukraine, something that would allow U.S.-Russia ties to be fully restored, the Kremlin said.- Reuters.

The only additional information that the Kremlin aide provided was that Trump and Putin agreed that work through direct contact as well as diplomatic channels would “continue”. The Witkoff-Kushner trip had come a little under two weeks after CIA Director John Ratcliffe unexpectedly traveled to Moscow and reportedly floated a trilateral summit involving Trump, Putin, and Zelensky.

U.S. President Donald Trump told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday in a phone call that he wanted a swift end to the war in Ukraine, something that would allow U.S.-Russia ties to be fully restored, the Kremlin said.

Despite the public-facing Washington rhetoric, the Iran quagmire… war… “excursion” has not been going so well as the US seems desperate for a final exit and end to the war. So Trump likely wants a “win” ahead of the November midterm elections, hence the sudden revival of pushing Ukraine talks.

Read more …

“The bloc is making its people suffer while Russia still has plenty of buyers for its energy, the foreign minister has said..”

• EU Committing ‘Harakiri’ – Lavrov (RT)

Sergey Lavrov speaks at the MGIMO University in Moscow, on September 7, 2026.

The EU is effectively committing “harakiri” by abandoning Russian energy in an attempt to hurt Moscow, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. Speaking on Monday to students at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), Russia’s primary college for diplomats, Lavrov argued that European leaders are making their own voters bear the cost of their policies toward Russia.


The EU has committed to phasing out Russian fossil fuels completely by 2027, having drastically reduced Russian oil and gas imports since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. Energy costs have risen across much of the bloc, with the US-Israeli war on Iran adding further pressure. Germany, once considered the EU’s industrial powerhouse, has been particularly affected. Its economy contracted in both 2023 and 2024 – the first back-to-back annual decline in more than two decades – and is forecast to grow by just 0.5% this year.

“Europe is simply committing harakiri and proudly declaring that its people must suffer… for European values,” Lavrov said, referring to the Japanese ritual suicide also known as seppuku. “Apparently, by ‘European values’ they mean Nazism, burying Nazi criminals with honors, and banning the Russian language, Russian-language education, Russian culture and media, as well as the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church,” he added. Lavrov argued that the EU’s attempt to pressure Moscow has failed to deprive Russia of customers.

“There’s no panic here whatsoever. We’ve always had plenty of buyers,” he said, adding that Russian exporters have shifted toward “those who are more reliable.” “If Europe wants to pay $800-900 per thousand cubic meters for American liquefied natural gas, what can we do about it?” he asked. Russia has increasingly redirected its energy exports toward Asia amid Western sanctions.

Its seaborne crude shipments to China hit a record 1.86 million barrels per day in January, up 46% year-on-year. Russia has also remained India’s largest oil supplier, selling around 2.1 million bpd in August, or 45% of the country’s imports, according to maritime intelligence firm Kpler. Lavrov said the shift should not be viewed as a sudden “pivot to the East,” arguing that Russia has long cultivated economic ties in both directions.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who survived an assassination attempt by a pro-Ukraine activist, similarly described the EU as a “suicide ship” in April, accusing Brussels of “ideological blindness and incompetence.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen acknowledged last month that the loss of cheap energy imports had dealt a major blow to the bloc’s economy. Lavrov argued that the policies demonstrate that European leaders “don’t think about the voters that brought them to power.”

Read more …

Germany next. But not if the AfD can help it..

• Lavrov Says ‘Start Of Real War’ Emerging (ZH)

More tit-for-tat between Russia and Germany amid a deepening diplomatic freeze related to the Ukraine war: the Kremlin announced on Monday that it is closing Germany’s consulate in St. Petersburg, with operations ordered to by suspended by September 18. “It was the German authorities who, once again, provoked a new round of escalation in bilateral relations,” the Foreign Ministry stated, charging that Berlin “bears full and complete responsibility” for the consequences.


A prominent German culture center which has long operated on Russian territory, the Goethe-Institut, is also getting the boot across all branches. All of this is a mirror image of the German government’s earlier move to shutter the Russian consulate in Bonn and Russia’s cultural center in Berlin, also as the EU blamed Russia as a “state sponsor of terrorism”.

The harsh words and spiraling diplomatic crisis stems from the drone attack incidents at Germany’s Leipzign Airport last month. There were at least two reported incidents, possibly a third. On the night of August 4, an explosives-laden drone was found on the tarmac near a Ukrainian cargo plane.nThis prompted an urgent airport shutdown, as authorities believes saboteurs were seeking to blow up the plane.

On the following day there was another alleged incident, per German media and officials: Authorities discovered a drone fitted with explosives and a detonation mechanism on the evening of August 4 in the security area of Leipzig/Halle Airport between Ukrainian cargo aircraft and believe a second drone may have collided with a DHL aircraft nearby.

Last week, German media reported a third drone, also loaded with explosives, had also been discovered at the airport. German federal prosecutors described the incident as a “serious attack on Germany’s transport and logistics infrastructure.”

Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul had said after initial investigations, “The means used — such as the drone configuration, components, explosives and detonation systems — are known to us from other hybrid operations by Russia and its war against Ukraine.”

The strongest words out of Moscow have come from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov this weekend. While the US delegation of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were in Russia for a 3-hour meeting with President Putin, he said that a “real war” between Russia and the West is emerging.

He asserted to a Russian state TV reporter: “This is, by and large, the start of a real war. They expelled the consulate general from Bonn. They’re closing the Russian House in Berlin. I remember that before the start of the Second World War… They want war again.”


Added to this is that Western powers are assisting Ukraine with intelligence to help with its long-range drone strikes against Russia, often against oil refineries very far from the front lines, and even more frequently targeting Moscow of late. And in turn, Russia has been ratcheting its own major missile strikes on the Ukrainian capital and other cities, taking aim at ‘decision-making centers’ too. Zelensky has sought to ‘bring to war to Russia’ – but is really risking very severe escalation that might bring NATO powers into more direct war with Russian forces.

Read more …

“Moscow described detailed discussions of major U.S.-Russia economic projects, alongside claims that Bessent is choking off offshore and banking channels funding Ukraine via Europe, the UK, and Canada.”

• U.S. Emissary Missions to Russia and Ukraine (CTH)

Susan Kokinda from Promethean Action PAC picks up on the nuance within the comments from Kirill Dmitriev upon the U.S. delegation meeting in Moscow.


Promethean Action – “The Kremlin released rare footage of a high-level meeting between Vladimir Putin and Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, followed by their first trip to Kyiv this term and a comparatively restrained response from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, signaling revived U.S. diplomacy on Ukraine. The script argues Putin views the American team as a more trusted broker than European leaders and notes a recent sequence of engagements, including CIA Director Ratcliffe’s public Moscow visit and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s G20 outreach to Russia’s finance minister.

With Kirill Dmitriev present, Moscow described detailed discussions of major U.S.-Russia economic projects, alongside claims that Bessent is choking off offshore and banking channels funding Ukraine via Europe, the UK, and Canada. It then pivots to Argentina’s renewed Malvinas/Falklands push as Trump publicly and reportedly reconsiders automatic U.S. support for British sovereignty, recalling internal U.S. divisions during the 1982 war.”

Read more …

“Figures like Newsom have even campaigned on denouncing capitalism as “not working”..”

• Socialists Call for “War in the Streets” and the End of Capitalism (Turley)

“You better get ready for … war.” Across the country, radicals are openly planning for the next stage of their movement, and notably, the Democratic establishment is not part of their plans. Despite the talk of a “Big Tent Party,” socialists are riding high on a surge of support and talking purges and revolution.


In Chicago, radicals gathered for a conference on Marxism during what many view as the heyday of socialism in the United States. The Democratic Socialists of America is now larger and more powerful than at any time in our history. Socialist candidates are winning elections across the country as Democratic establishment figures from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) to Gov. Gavin Newsom pander to the movement.

Speakers in Chicago used the conference to push supporters to the next stage in the movement, including some openly calling for violence and the end to capitalism.

University of California Santa Barbara History Professor Butch Ware said Democrats “must be destroyed” and urged attendees to be ready for “war in the streets.” Notably, in postings on X, Ware has said that candidates such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed are too restrained and are being pushed by the establishment “to contain radicalism.”

The professor “of Africa and Islam” whose faculty page is appropriately found under “bware” is the latest radical to dismiss the “Big Tent Party” rhetoric of establishment figures like Schumer. He declared, “The Democrats cannot be reasoned with. They must be destroyed.” There is little subtlety in the message, Ware has explained: “You cannot call yourself a revolutionary and not be talking about training with weapons.”

It is another example of the delusion that establishment Democrats have that they will be able to use these radicals to destroy their political enemies but not themselves. After one election victory, socialists chanted “You’re Next!” when House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s image came on big-screen televisions.

Hasan Piker has called for a purging of moderates from the Democratic Party. Just last week, Darializa Avila Chevalier declared, “A big tent doesn’t pay your rent, lower your grocery bill, or take on the corporations bleeding our country dry. Democratic socialism does.”

In a video posted to X, Professor Ware called for violence, warning followers that “some of these clickety-clack revolutionaries have never been in a f*cking gunfight.” He menacingly added, “Y’all ain’t nowhere near ready for a war in the streets. You better get ready for both kinds of war if you stay ready, you ain’t got to get ready.”

This is just the latest example of the type of hate-spewing radical that university departments want to teach in higher education. While purging virtually all Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians from departments, faculty candidates cannot be too radical enough to secure positions on colleges and universities. UCSB pays Professor Ware over $211k to spread this type of lunacy.

Notably, this is the same university that saw a professor lead her students in physically assaulting pro-life advocates on campus years ago. Despite pleading guilty to criminal assault, she was not fired and later honored by the University of Oregon for her inspiring leadership.

In other events around the country such as “Socialism 2026 Conference,” City University of New York Professor Ruth Gilmore said in a video, “It’s capitalism we’re after,…There isn’t a capitalism that is somehow not racial. There isn’t a capitalism that does not produce and reproduce all kinds of sexual and gender boundaries.”

At my alma mater, University of Chicago professor Eman Abdelhadi, the half-sister of Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, has denounced the university and explained that she is only teaching there to bring down the system.

One year after the massacre, Professor Abdelhadi offered an “October 7th blessing” over an attack that murdered, raped, and tortured innocent men, women, and children. She was previously arrested for spitting on officers.

She added “I hope you know that we have a lot of work ahead of us and that we need each other to do that work. We have an imperative to not just imagine a better future, but to build one together. I’ll see you on the streets.”

What is so striking is that these radicals are not hiding their agenda or their hostility toward the Democratic Establishment. William Lawrence, who is running for Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, previously called for the end of borders, the nation-state, capitalism, and told a leading moderate Democrat to “hurry up and die.”

In the meantime, some Democrats are admitting that, after using the socialists to retake power, they will marginalize them in actual governing decisions. Rep. Laura Gillen (D-NY) just explained that they will have to block the “crazy” DSA stuff from actually getting to the floor for a vote.

In Rage and the Republic, I discuss how these Democratic leaders are following the same self-destructive delusions of other establishment figures in history who thought that they could use mobs against their opponents while hoping that they could survive.

Figures like Newsom have even campaigned on denouncing capitalism as “not working” as candidates like Texas Democratic Senatorial candidate James Talarico have called to “dismantle” capitalism. Figures like former Vice President Kamala Harris have dismissed loyalty to our core institutions such as the Supreme Court as mere “nostalgia.”

It will not work. These figures are nothing more than “clickety-clack revolutionaries” who convince no one inside or outside the movement. By putting their elections above every other consideration, Democratic leaders are willing to endanger core institutions, values, and even capitalism itself to reacquire power. In so doing, they are embracing the very “mobocracy” that the Founders warned us against in laying the foundations of our constitutional system.

Read more …

“A nationalist revolution against globalism is brewing.”

• Making the World Great One Nation at a Time (J.B. Shurk)

What we call “globalism” has been on the march for eighty years. A system that embraces centralized markets, bureaucratic regulation, international institutions, and so-called non-governmental organizations (predominantly funded by governments), globalism places significant power in the hands of a small collection of wealthy and powerful stakeholders from the planet’s top investment houses, corporations, law firms, universities, central banks, and government bodies.


Globalism speaks in the language of “democracy” while ignoring — or even criminalizing — the will of the people. Across the West, citizens have opposed open border policies that have flooded their nations with unassimilable, foreign immigrants. Globalists have categorized this dissent as “hate speech,” censoring — and even prosecuting — citizens for their social media posts and public speech. Globalists insist that there must be limits on free speech. They seek to punish “thought crimes.” They label opposing points of view “disinformation” or “misinformation.” In practice, globalists protect governments and institutions from public criticism.

Globalism also speaks in the language of “free markets” while heavily regulating industrial production, encumbering the use of private property, and manipulating currency valuation, stock markets, and trade. By effectively “printing money” and intervening in markets, central banks steal from citizens who save their cash earnings, inflate the prices of essential household goods, and protect privileged companies or industries deemed “too big to fail.”

By ginning up “global warming” fears among the public, lawmakers, bankers, and bureaucrats have justified the imposition of “carbon controls” that regulate energy use, economic production, and human activity. By expanding public welfare programs while weakening protections for property ownership, globalists tax citizens at increasingly higher rates, redistribute earned income and savings, confiscate real property, and even permit squatters (often foreign migrants) to occupy private residences.

Globalism falsely clothes itself in principle and tradition. Its proponents speak of “Western values,” while encouraging non-Westerners to migrate to and radically change the culture and demographics of Western nations. Its propagandists claim to represent “the people,” while doing the bidding of multinational corporations and investment banks. Its defenders pretend to respect public opinion, while mandating slavish devotion to “expertise.” Globalism seeks to end the nation state while demanding that citizens sacrifice themselves for government bureaucracies.

It wages war against Christians who refuse to worship government institutions as the highest authorities on “truth.” Globalists divide societies into “victims” and “oppressors,” so that citizens remain too busy fighting each other to notice the surveillance prison being built around them. Globalists criticize opponents by saying things such as, “That’s not who we are,” while taking a sledgehammer and blowtorch to Western identities.

In defiance of globalism’s steady advance since WWII, a revolution has been brewing. Although its messengers have appeared all over the world — including Pat Buchanan in the United States, Shinzo Abe and Sanae Takaichi in Japan, Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Javier Milei in Argentina, Alice Weidel in Germany, and Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom — President Donald J. Trump is the unofficial leader of the rebellion.

What these men and women have in common is a strong sense of duty to their respective nations, a firm belief that culture matters, a preference for common sense, and a commitment to their countrymen over the international institutions, multinational corporations, and globalist NGOs (such as the World Economic Forum) that seek to eliminate national borders and condemn citizens to lives as disposable serfs.

President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement has spawned similar campaigns around the world. Whether in El Salvador or Nigeria, Spain or Australia, Canada or India, there are locals who have appropriated that slogan as part of an effort to make their own nations great. While globalism diminishes the importance of culture and celebrates amorphous “multiculturalism” as an inscrutable ideal, nation-builders around the world know better:

Culture is the lifeblood of every society. It is the glue that binds a people together, fosters cooperation, and turns dreams of the future into reality. Just as members of a family help each other to succeed, members of a shared culture ensure their nation’s success. People who climb mountains do not plant flags from the United Nations, European Union, the World Economic Forum, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; they fly their national flags at the top.

Because no matter how much globalists lecture us about the evils of nationalism and the moral equivalence of all cultures, human beings know better. Our families, traditions, religious convictions, and historical memories matter. And when we ascend the icy peaks that few people have reached, we mark the moment, not as an achievement for “multiculturalism,” but rather as a testament to the inherent greatness of the places we call home.

For decades, globalism has been promoted as a “free market” ideal that would generate economic growth and foster international peace. But how has it operated in practice? Powerful corporations and lobbying groups have worked with governments to construct elaborate trade agreements that benefit the bottom line of political and financial elites.

Rarely are the interests of the common man considered, except in the context of labor unions, standards bodies, or trade groups that purport to represent the average worker. Instead, complex legal documents such as the North American Free Trade Agreement have assisted in the creation of large industry monopolies while squeezing out small businesses. After the creation of NAFTA and similar “free trade deals,” American corporations and investment firms became multinational conglomerates, while Main Street mom-and-pop shops disappeared.

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We need Christianity to defend against islam.

• Wherefore Art Thou, Christianity? (Paul Craig Roberts)

The Episcopal Church has a Very Reverend Dean who trans-identifies as a maThe Dean is married to a woman who also trans-identifies as a man and is a Lutheran pastor. So, what do we have here? A marriage between two lesbians or a marriage between two homosexuals.I think we can see why Christianity, once a powerful force, is today so weak and left undefended. It stands for nothing, with the exception that Christian Zionists stand for Israel, not for Christ.


If a person can deny their biological gender and be accepted as the opposite by trans-indentifying, why can’t they do the same for their race, their nationality, or is this already happening? Democrats seem content for allowing immigrant-invaders declare themselves American citizens and grant them Constitutional protections based on their presence in America.

What is the reason that a person cannot declare themselves to be Napoleon or Genghis Khan without being regarded as crazy, but can be taken completely seriously when declaring themselves to be the opposite gender to what they are? Isn t this some kind of logical breakdown in Western civilization, a denial of fact? It does seem that trans-identifying is the beginning of the end of factual existence.

What kind of existence will a non-factual one be?

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Does he really mean his own generation? Not, say, the founders?

• Generation That Built America Was the Last of Its Kind (Victor Davis Hanson)

Jack Fowler: Our friend, your friend, and I’m a great admirer of David Mamet, the playwright and screenwriter and author. He wrote a piece the other day in National Review. You were just talking about being uplifted by Hillsdale. Well, David is a little—he’s got a little bit of the Eeyore gene going on, and I know you can relate to that. And his essay was titled “America, History, and Futility.” And I just want to read its conclusion, and then, Victor, you can, you know, I’m giving you permission to expound on it. So, here’s what David Mamet wrote:


“A contemporary remarked that perhaps the pendulum will swing back, and that reason, courtesy, and patriotism will reemerge. But he was wrong, for he could only imagine their reemergence in those, our contemporaries, who understood these attributes as essential for a functional and prosperous society. But to the young, the American century is a disgrace and the American dream a shuck. Histories may be debated, but the irreducible core must be verifiable fact. And what a fact is determined only by Big Brother.”

And here’s his conclusion: “I don’t know if the United States will survive in a form recognizable to my generation. I can’t even describe the current form other than as a civilization split into two factions, one decrying and the other exploiting chaos. I don’t know if prophecy as prediction actually exists, but I know, like Cassandra, that if so, it will do so in no useful form. I don’t know if the sun can actually supply enough power to run our cities, but I know there is nothing new beneath it.” Kind of depressing there, Victor, but maybe he’s kind of realistic. Your thoughts?

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I’m prejudiced because I’ve always admired David Mamet, and I like him, and I know him. He’s a very courageous guy. He was beloved by the Left. He was a man not of the hard Left, but he was a liberal. And he finally got sick of it years ago, and, of course, they turned on him, and they turned on him professionally. But he had such a talent and such a name that he persevered. And that essay is kind of a siren song. He’s also saying throughout that essay that the problem with getting old is that you get disconnected, and you become an observer rather than a participant because of the energy levels, physical and mental.

And then second, you get philosophical and you get angry because you know what was destroyed. One thing that’s a subtext, and I think it’s true of all of us, some of us in the boomer cohort actually knew people from the 19th century. And I was blessed because my paternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother and my maternal grandfather were born in 1890 and 1888, 1889. So, they came of age without electricity, without flush toilets, without tractors, using horses. Everything about them, from their worldview, was imprinted on their childhood in the late 19th century.

So, when I got to know them, when I was 5, say, to 20, when most of them had died, everything about them, their language, their accent, their comportment, was completely foreign to the modern world. If I wanted to go outside, my grandmother said, “Be careful out there yonder. Don’t go out yonder. I’ll give the dickens to you.” What did that mean? Or, “I’ll take a switch to you, ha ha ha.” “Ain’t funny, McGee.” She used to listen to Fibber McGee in the ’30s, I guess. And “There’s the sunset, Victor. It’s sinking in the far, far west tonight.” All this.

And they lived by nature. My grandfather would say, “The birds are nesting early. There’s a big wind stirring up in the south, and that can’t be good.” Or when he’d say something, a moral lecture: “And that’s all there is to it. Now, Victor, there’s two types of people in the world. There are those who pay interest and those who get it. You got to be on the right side of the ledger. I wasn’t. Now that’s all there is to it. And when you get a $20 bill you earned, it’s a lot easier to spend it than to put it in the bank, so put it in the bank.”

All of that parsimoniousness, shame culture, be careful. He would say, “When you got your license, I was worried. I don’t want to drive in and see you drive by me in town with a cigarette hanging out of your mouth or ink on your skin. You understand?” I said, “I do understand.” And then I had a Swedish grandfather who was really, really tough. They had that bad-seed notion. They didn’t believe in therapeutics.

There was a neighbor family that was kind of affluent, and every one of them had been in jail.

So, I said, “Why are they … Is it because they had a divorce, Grandpa? What happened?”

“Well, Victor, there’s a bad seed over there. There’s a bad seed. Now one of them’s no darn good. The other one, not much better. So it’s just a bad-seed family. That’s just all there is. They’re just bad seed.”

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“It’s fortunate that Hanson is a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno, in addition to a senior fellow in military history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.”

• The Counterrevolution: Victor Davis Hanson Surveys Trump’s Fall and Rise (Rust)

President Donald J. Trump is unique in American history. Never has a candidate or president suffered so many attacks — legally, politically, and physically — yet still kept rising and carrying on his fight.


To tell the story of what Victor Davis Hanson calls the “Trump Decade” (2015-2025) requires someone versed in the rise and fall of empires. It’s fortunate that Hanson is a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno, in addition to a senior fellow in military history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

Hanson’s newest book, The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement, which will be released on September 8, takes readers from the depths of MAGA despair after the 2020 election, through the wilderness years of the Biden presidency, to the resurgent campaign of 2024, and finally, to the fast-paced, counterrevolutionary second term we’re still living through today. The book ends in January 2026, but an afterword covers events through April 2026.

His erudition is evident, from chapter titles to quotes by Edmund Burke to classical allusions. He describes the Democrats as “The New Jacobin Democrats,” comparing their 21st-century excesses to the radicals of 18th-century France. Who else but a trained classicist could describe Donald Trump after a key figure in Greek literary satire?

The media never really minded all that much when prior Republican presidents called out their liberal bias. They usually either laughed off the mostly impotent charges or considered them welcome proof of their left-wing bona fides, given that the accusations were politely lodged and largely true. Yet Trump was a different sort, an uncensored, loud-mouthed populist out of an Aristophanic comedy. He answered their unprecedented effort to destroy him politically and personally with commensurate or even greater invective.

Each of the nine chapters is so dense with information that each one could serve as a college seminar. A history book club could meet for half a year, examining one chapter a week. I finally had to stop taking notes when I’d dog-eared every other page of chapter three.

Hanson does not emote; nor does he lavishly praise Trump the way an enthusiastic rally-goer would. He is as close to an objective observer as you can find in the world of commentary.

Part One covers the fall of Trump, from the 2020 election to the exhaustive lawfare. It will prove difficult for any Trump fan to relive the days covered in those four chapters: January 6 and the Pelosi commission afterward, as well as the endless lawfare. It wasn’t just the Democrats who were anti-Trump, but at least seven other entities: the media, the administrative state, the Washington political and military hierarchies, the Never Trump Republicans, popular culture, academia, and even other countries that formed what Hanson calls the “Armies of Anti-Trumpers.”

VDH takes us on a quick journey through all the stages of the four-year period of Joe Biden’s presidency, from the quick undoing of Trump executive orders to the failures of “Bidenomics” to the regrettable decision to hurriedly leave Afghanistan.

Consider what was thrown at private citizen and former president Donald Trump in that interim: five criminal and civil suits; a made-for-TV FBI raid on his home, Mar-a-Lago; the efforts in multiple states to remove Trump from the ballot; and, of course, two assassination attempts, one resulting in a death and two injuries, along with an injured Trump.

Part Two, “The Rise,” begins with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Hanson describes Trump as a Nietzschean man, one who survived everything thrown at him. The Aug. 8, 2022, Mar-a-Lago raid might have destroyed him. Yet almost immediately afterward, he moved up in the polls ahead of his primary opponents.

It’s fascinating to go back and look at the 2024 primary. On November 15, 2022, Trump formally announced his candidacy. On November 18, three things happened on the same day. Former Acting Associate Attorney General Matthew Colangelo resigned. He turned up working (at a pay cut) on Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s team prosecuting Trump. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as special counsel “to investigate Biden’s 2024 opponent.” Fulton County special prosecutor Nathan Wade met with Biden White House counsel staff. Hanson drily recites these facts, leaving the reader to speculate on what, if any, coordination was happening at higher levels.

The rest of Part Two narrates the amazing change between Trump 1, 2017-2021, and Trump 2. In this current second term, Hanson believes that Trump truly is launching a counterrevolution to bring back what Trump views as common sense: “reciprocal fair trade, closed borders, legal-only immigration, progress in curbing or at least no increasing deficits and debt, and a fierce effort to end the recent DEI orthodoxy and the anti-prosperity boondoggles of the Green New Deal.”

Chapter 7, “The Road to a New Old America,” relives the glorious rush of the first 100 days of Trump’s second term. The administration used the tactic of “flooding the zone” to keep its opponents off-key and unable to focus on an attack. The next chapter covers foreign policy and how Trump is aiming at what Hanson describes as “Jacksonian deterrence.”

In the last chapter, Hanson looks at what it will take to keep the MAGA movement alive without Trump. He believes it can be done, thanks to the base Trump has built up, the way Trump’s legacy will “haunt and obsess” Dems, and the way the president has adopted “now-abandoned Democratic issues” such as reciprocal tariffs and tax cuts for the middle class. He warns Democrats that unless they can find a charismatic leader like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama — AND tack to the center — they “are likely to lose any election that pits them against a workman-like MAGA Republican candidate.”

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Bombardier used to make only ski-doos.

• President Trump Targets Canada Subsidized Bombardier Manufacturing (CTH)

Bombardier airplane manufacturing sells approximately 55% of its products inside the United States. The company is based in Montreal and manufacturers the airliners mainly in Ottawa; however, component parts are made in the USA and also Mexico. The company has a history of being heavily dependent on Canadian government subsidies and bailouts.


Bombardier employs approximately 5,000 U.S. workers and 12,000 Canadian workers but is also heavily dependent on sales to the USA to maintain over half their business. On the eve of Canada’s retaliatory tariffs against the U.S, President Trump is now recommending a boycott of the airliner. The U.S. airline builder Gulfstream has been blocked from sales in Canada by regulatory slow walking, a non-tariff barrier.

“NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES! Their products aren’t good enough! Over 50% of their revenue comes from the United States — They live off American Buyers, American Companies, American Airports, and American Service — All while Canada blocks our GREAT American Banks, and Companies, throughout the U.S.A. They even blocked Gulfstream Aerospace from doing business in Canada — Completely unjust and unfair! That Era is OVER! If they want our Market, they must build here, and stop treating America like a “piggybank.” BUY AMERICAN. FLY ON AMERICAN AIRLINERS. ENJOY AMERICAN LIQUOR AND BEVERAGES. SAIL ON LAKE AMERICA. AMERICA FIRST! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

~ President DONALD J. TRUMP

There is a reciprocity justification for Bombardier sales restrictions in the USA considering the non-tariff barriers that U.S. company Gulfstream faces against their Canadian competition. It will be interesting to see if the Dept of Commerce or USTR enact a regulatory barrier.

Mark Carney has tariffed $50 billion in U.S. exports.

There are one thousand Billions in a Trillion.

The U.S. economy is 32 Trillion.

Put another way, the U.S. economy is thirty-two thousand billions, and Mark Carney has tariffed 50 of them.

Elbows up, I guess.

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https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2097413216796053703?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle September 7 2026

Sep 072026
 
 September 7, 2026  Posted by at 9:06 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  30 Responses »


Vasily Kandinsky Capricious Line 1924


• One Major Shift Can Solve the Iran Problem and So Much More (CTH)
• Wright and Bessent Explain the Squeeze on Iran (David Manney)
• View from Russia: Experts on why Kushner and Witkoff came to Moscow (RT)
• How Britain Built A War Network Around Russia (Yanovsky)
• AfD Sweeps Saxony-Anhalt Election In First “Far Right” Victory Since WW2 (ZH)
• France Can’t Finance Ukraine Forever – Le Pen Party’s Head (RT)
• Leftists Are Erasing the Truth About 9/11 From Classrooms (Matt Margolis)
• Asylum Denials Hit 94% in June (Catherine Salgado)
• The U.S. Has 13 Times the Economy — Carney Has 13 Times the Pout (Florack)
• U.S. Job Growth of 162,000 vs Canada Job Losses -42,000 (CTH)
• Operation Twist 2.0, 2032 Gold Target & 100,000 Robotic Soldiers (Armstrong)

 


 

https://twitter.com/PeterSweden7/status/2096209394350412223?s=20 https://twitter.com/Q_TheStormRider/status/2096174693157876147?s=20 https://twitter.com/RippleXrpie/status/2096187155953357192?s=20 https://twitter.com/thewriterme/status/2096314115060887761?s=20

 


 


This from Sundance is brilliant, and he thinks Trump is aware. . If Trump makes peace with Russia, their oil comes in to the market and lowers the price enough to sink the Iran regime. End the war with Iran, end the war in Ukraine. Lower the price at the pump. One fell swoop.

• One Major Shift Can Solve the Iran Problem and So Much More (CTH)

History has a tendency to rhyme. There is one move on the geopolitical chessboard that can put all of the U.S. and President Trump’s problems into an immediate checkmate. However, the forces against the alignment are significant. If President Trump can end the Ukraine-Russia conflict and end the sanctions regime against Russia, everything changes.


Bringing Russian oil, gas and natural resources back into the global economy not only removes all leverage held by Iran, but it also wipes out intransigent resistance against the geopolitical reset and upends over a hundred years of EU and Commonwealth financial manipulation.


Not only does the Iran problem immediately shift, but so too does any/all leverage carried by Canada on behalf of London and the broader commonwealth structure. With a U.S-Russia strategic economic alliance, something factually stated at the end of every message from Moscow, the dynamics of global structures is entirely different. However, all the oppositional interests are well aware of the consequence and their actions reflect it. The United States and Russia ended World War II. A U.S-Russia alliance would change everything.

Who would benefit from such a strategic partnership? The USA, Russia, India, China, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States (GCC), ASEAN countries and even Japan and the Caribbean, including Cuba.

Who would oppose such a seismic shift? The U.K, specifically the financial constructs within the City of London, Canada, the EU-NATO states, all the Commonwealth countries and the Five-Eyes group (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the U.K and the U.S. Intelligence Community).

Now we have appropriate context for the dynamic of the issue, along with context for exactly why all oppositional elements are conducting current activity. A strategic partnership between the U.S. and Russia represents an existential threat to all the old systems – everything. The first step would be solving the Ukraine-Russia conflict. So, let’s look at that problem specifically and how a transactional approach might frame the four corners of an end to it.


Russia now occupies approximately 20% of the Ukraine land mass in eastern Ukraine and they are not going to ever concede it again. For the Federation of Russia, represented by Vladimir Putin and the overwhelming majority of those within influence inside the Federation, the NATO encroachment is an existential threat long term. Russia views the objective of the legacy system powers as intent on taking Russia apart. Ukraine represents their immediate shot to stop this from happening. All prior agreements and treaties by EU and NATO agreements were violated. Russia will no longer allow the wolves to circle their camp.

Looking at the challenge through the transactional prism, a ceasefire may include Russia retaining their current land gains, while giving up the confiscated $500 billion sovereign wealth fund as the purchase price. The fund could be considered reparations by Zelenskyy and his EU-NATO handlers, it matters not. What matters more than the sovereign wealth fund in this transaction, is the elimination of western sanctions.

With sanctions removed, immediately the Russian economy surges with sales of oil, gas, minerals and raw materials back to the global market. With the Iran conflict still afoot all that oil and gas carries a higher value. That is the pricing dynamic that makes loss of the Russian sovereign wealth fund more contextualized. However, with all of those abundant natural resources now back in the global supply chain, the leverage for all other western countries that rely on their natural resources, specifically Canada, is diminished.

Russian oil and gas could flow immediately and easily back into Europe. Currently, the power structures within the EU, those more concerned about raw power and control than the financial health and livelihood of their citizens, are against a return of cheap and abundant energy. They should think about the return of lower energy costs as a value to their economies and people; however, the EU ‘leaders’ are more concerned about the geopolitical reset -ultimately their diminished power, that would lay in the background.

As a consequence, the EU doesn’t really care about how much financial benefit there would be to their economic condition. For them this is a zero-sum power issue. Just as Russia doesn’t want to be torn apart by the grand ambitions of London, so too does the EU not want to lose the power to assist in the tearing apart aspect.

The rest of the problem is one of the future. A problem of security guarantees; of agreements that are bolstered against some significant non-wavering constant that can ensure no further expansion of NATO intent and no further threat to create purposeful conflict. The United States has constant regime changes, that takes the U.S. out of the ability to be the guarantor. However, THAT level of security guarantee is possible through the one construct that has put tentacles into every geopolitical economic structure in the world, CHINA.

There is a visible deal where President Trump sets up the transactional end to the conflict, the payments and economic mechanisms that conclude the Ukraine-Russia war, while Chairman Xi sets up the security guarantee aspect by leveraging everything that Beijing has created for decades. As paradigm resetting as that sounds, it’s not impossible. In fact, I would argue that’s exactly what China is saying HERE.


The Washington Post is getting the direction correct, but they are unaware of the destination. TDS infects all media analysis. They put the review of Chairman Xi’s comments through the prism of anti-Trumpism. That’s not at all what this looks like to me. From my perspective, Trump is looking to solve problems beyond his tenure in the White House. After all, how many times has each Trump supporter said, “well yeah – great, but what happens after Trump leaves office?”

Think about it carefully, through the prism of peace and stability – while understanding that President Trump is structuring long-term U.S. economic stability and retaining the perspective that Beijing influence in U.S. economic matters must be removed. Handle the transaction. Solve the Ukraine-Russia crisis. Form a strategic partnership and build fortress north America. Leverage the systems that Beijing has already put in place, including leverage upon the EU, and make Chairman Xi the minder for everything OUTSIDE our hemisphere.

President Trump looks to have gamed this out quite well. The tool that cuts the gordian knot is in the relationship.

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Operation Economic Outcast.

• Wright and Bessent Explain the Squeeze on Iran (David Manney)

Energy Secretary Chris Wright got a blunt question Sunday morning: After seven months of fighting with Iran, are Americans looking at a new normal of tanker strikes, military escorts, and an open-ended confrontation in the Persian Gulf? Wright didn’t duck it. The United States remains open to negotiations, he said, but its immediate military mission includes stopping Iranian oil and gas exports. He plainly described the goal: “We are strangling their economy” to force a change in Tehran’s policies or leadership.


From the Conservative Daily News: “Secretary of Energy Chris Wright outlined America’s long-term goal for securing global trade passing through the Strait of Hormuz even as its conflict with Iran threatens such traffic. Wright touted the sustained traffic transiting the Strait of Hormuz before telling Dana Bash during a “State of the Union” interview Sunday that securing the passageway “shouldn’t be just the United States’s responsibility” looking forward. His appearance on the CNN show comes the day after U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces reported taking out three Iranian oil tankers.

“The president says the Strait of Hormuz is under U.S. control. Just yesterday, the U.S. struck three Iranian tankers in retaliation for Iran firing missiles at U.S. warships. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that Iran struck at least 23 merchant ships in the Strait in the last two months,” Bash said before asking Wright, “Does that sound to you like it’s a situation completely under control?” “Our transits through the Strait are averaging over 9 million barrels a day now. And with the access pipelines that go around the Strait, we’re probably two-thirds or more of pre-conflict flows,” Wright responded. “So Iranians are still causing trouble, but the United States Navy is winning that battle.”

Bash then asked Wright if he is suggesting that the U.S. Navy is going to have to stay in the Strait “indefinitely” to maintain the current flow of oil and tankers. “Oh, I think we’ll see a change in the Iranian regime, or certainly a change in their policy if they want to become a trading nation again and engage with the world,” Wright said. “But they have not lightly given up their nuclear weapons program.”The comments came after U.S. forces struck three Iranian oil tankers Saturday. U.S. Central Command said Iranian ballistic missiles had targeted American warships.

Two tankers were disabled, while a third was destroyed. The military said the ships belonged to a shadow network helping finance Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.


Wright’s argument was straightforward. President Donald Trump still prefers a negotiated settlement, but the administration isn’t counting on one. Wright said Iran’s nuclear capabilities are being degraded militarily while its economy is being squeezed through reduced energy exports and sanctions. He also left open the possibility that a nuclear agreement might have to wait for a different Iranian government. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been delivering the economic half of the same message.

Bessent said Saturday that Trump’s blockade and Treasury sanctions amount to “one of the most powerful one-two punches” ever used for economic isolation. From Breitbart News: “During an appearance on FNC’s “My View” on Saturday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent praised the impact of U.S. policy regarding Iran. According to Bessent, the blockade paired with economic sanctions was having a crippling impact on the Iranian regime. “Just to stay with the Strait of Hormuz for a moment, you’ve also noted that you say the U.S. and China actually have more in common than we disagree on when it comes to safely navigating the Strait of Hormuz,” host Lara Trump said.

“I think the question for a lot of Americans is really how much can we trust China? They are still taking oil from Iran, so how do you navigate that situation?”Bessent replied, “Well, one of the things we’ve done, and what the president’s done, is fantastic sequencing. So we are running Operation Economic Outcast right now, and this is the greatest economic isolation operation in the history of the world. We are going to asphyxiate this regime.”

“Now we have the blockade, and because of the blockade, the oil is not getting out,” he continued. “So there’s probably only about 30 million barrels of Iranian crude oil left that China hasn’t bought. So that will run out soon, and there will be no problem with China buying because they have no product, so the blockade is — the blockade is working. It’s working like nothing we’ve ever seen, and the combination, everyone says, “Oh, sanctions don’t work. I can tell you, blockade and sanctions are one of the most powerful one-two punches in the history of economic isolation.” He argued that China’s purchases of Iranian crude will eventually become irrelevant if Iran can’t move the oil out of its ports.

The administration has given the financial campaign a name: Operation Economic Outcast. Treasury launched it Aug. 24 with the stated goal of cutting Iran off from the financial networks, banks, oil revenues, and sanctions-evasion systems keeping the regime funded. The campaign moved again Friday when Treasury sanctioned a Turkish financial institution and its subsidiaries for allegedly helping Iran’s Revolutionary Guard move money internationally.

From the Treasury Department: Announced by Secretary Bessent on August 24, 2026, dubbed Economic D-Day, Operation Economic Outcast is severing the remaining economic lifelines that sustain the Iranian regime. Treasury has mapped the networks, facilitators, and financial channels that Iran uses to smuggle oil, evade sanctions, and fund terror. Working with partners across the U.S. government, the European Union, United Kingdom, Gulf partners, and others, Treasury is targeting any source of the regime’s illicit revenue, as well as its sanctions evasion schemes to move funds.

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What/which part of the above did they discuss?

The man in the middle is Kyrill Dimitriev, Putin’s go-to guy.

• View from Russia: Experts on why Kushner and Witkoff came to Moscow (RT)

The latest visit to Moscow by Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff has triggered a fresh wave of speculation in Russia about what Washington is really trying to achieve. With US President Donald Trump under pressure at home and much of his administration’s foreign-policy bandwidth consumed by Iran, the trip has been interpreted less as a breakthrough mission than as a signal – one that may be aimed as much at domestic American politics and alliance management as at Russia itself.


Russian analysts see the visit in different ways. Some believe the Americans are simply sounding out Moscow before returning to Kiev, trying to gauge whether any space remains for movement on Ukraine. Others argue the mission is part of a broader performance of diplomatic activity by the Trump White House, intended to project momentum where little real progress is possible. Still others view it as an exercise in ‘shuttle diplomacy’, useful mainly for information-gathering and atmospherics rather than for producing concrete results.

Roman Romanov, American studies specialist, lecturer at the Faculty of International Relations, Political Science, and Foreign Regional Studies at RSUH
I have two explanations regarding the visit and the format of this visit. First, the American side has already shown several times that it is interested in maintaining dialogue with both Moscow and Kiev. And this visit – or rather, this tour – is aimed at “synchronizing watches.” What does that mean? The Americans are trying to understand what conditions might be acceptable to the parties for resuming an active negotiating process. In other words, what can be offered to both sides so that they are prepared to move the dialogue in the direction of progress.

The second explanation is purely domestic-political for the United States. Against the backdrop of the failure of the Iran campaign, it is necessary to demonstrate some other kind of political activity that at least theoretically resembles progress with a concrete result. Trump has done this kind of thing more than once.

Do they have any ready-made proposals? I do not think so, because, first, at the moment a significant part of US foreign-policy resources is concentrated on Iran, and second, because despite the constructive role of both Witkoff and Kushner, they still act more as envoys of the American president on a specific issue than as direct participants formulating the American president’s position on this issue.

It is difficult to explain why they first went to Moscow and then to Kiev. One can assume they first want to hear Moscow’s stance, because it is in a more advantageous position – Russia is advancing, winning on the battlefield – so the US believes it would be more expedient first to hear out Moscow’s demands and gauge how much they’ve changed since August 2025, since the meeting in Anchorage.

At the same time, although we do not observe public participation by the EU, through closed channels the European Union surely communicates its interests. Their representatives are not there, but the position the Americans are shaping includes the EU’s position as well.

Dmitry Dtobnitsky – Russian political scientist specializing in American studies, expert in US foreign and domestic policy
These negotiations will continue – that’s the only perspective they have. What are we negotiating with the US about? About how to stop the conflict in Ukraine? Let’s be serious. First, this conflict is much broader than Russia’s military operation. It is a geopolitical conflict with very high stakes, the kind that happens with Europe once every several decades or even centuries. The Cold War period with the US was still an exception in that there were at least attempts to play at détente from time to time.

The world has entered an era of major transformation. In that sense, the narrow focus is – will they reach an agreement on Ukraine? No. Every time you think about that, you have to recall how it all started, why it is like this, how wrongly the world is structured, how important it is for Russia to insist on its interests, why the European bureaucracy itself cannot accept that, because otherwise that would mean the end of both it and the political class of many countries. Why can’t this conflict stop? Because it can’t be settled.

Someone has to win. Just as with the US and Iran (which, incidentally, is a much more local conflict) – it is impossible to agree, there can be no deal. There can only be some movement in which one of the sides explicitly or implicitly recognizes its defeat. It may not be total defeat, but at least at some stage one side wins and the other side does not recognize it. Such a process will last a long time, but in the end there will still be some de facto consolidation of the results of this conflict. Not a negotiated one, unfortunately, but a factual one. Diplomats may formalize such a conclusion, or they may not. Frankly, that is no longer important.

When we talk about Russia-US negotiations on Ukraine, there are two extremes, and both miss the essence. Yes, we are negotiating, and we constantly demonstrate that Russia and the US have nothing to fight over. We are ready to coexist with the US on the same globe. That is exactly why Putin says: “Of course, Kushner and Witkoff are welcome guests, come. What else should we show you from Moscow’s kitchen?” You see, the US cannot conduct negotiations on Ukraine because it cannot force either Kiev, London, or Brussels to accept Russia’s reasonable demands. And how are they going to pressure Russia? I think the Trump administration more or less understands that it is pointless. So what kind of negotiations on Ukraine can there be?

Some say [Russian Finance Minister] Siluanov and [US Treasury Secretary] Bessent will come to some understanding, and perhaps there will be incredible financial, economic, or investment cooperation between the US and Russia. I have said many times that there can be no serious cooperation between Russia and the US. There are neither material nor geopolitical grounds for it. Are we now supposed to throw away all the achievements of localizing our civilian aviation industry and start buying Boeing again?

Are we going to hand over half of the most convenient Arctic territory on the planet to the US? Is that it? Or are we going to sell all Russian oil through Mr. Kushner? How do you imagine that? Some say: “Investments will come here.” But that would mean that instead of creating a sovereign financial system, we would say: “No, let’s reintegrate ourselves back into the collapsing dollar system. Let’s support it with our achievements of the past five years.” It’s obvious that there can be no real cooperation.

One can have symbolic cooperation. It is a wonderful look when two great countries can do something together. The most we will get is a hockey match and an ‘Apollo-Soyuz’. It must be understood that these are purely token steps, which only demonstrate that nothing particularly substantial can happen. It does not mean it will be forbidden. It simply will never play a substantial role. Even in 2019, before Covid and the military operation, trade turnover between Russia and the US was negligibly small. And that is understandable: it is geopolitics, geoeconomics – you cannot jump over that. And now, after so much effort has been spent to become independent and to work with Eurasia on a new basis, to say, “No, now let’s start doing something again with the Americans” is just laughable. That will not happen.

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“The UK is spinning a web of influence designed to survive any Ukraine peace deal..”

While Trump is making peace?

• How Britain Built A War Network Around Russia (Yanovsky)

Last week, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced in Kiev that defense manufacturer MBDA had been authorized to disclose information concerning the British components of the SCALP missile, the French version of the long-range Storm Shadow, to Ukraine.Officially, the decision concerns documentation required to organize local assembly, but in practice, it could facilitate the transfer of blueprints, components, assembly kits or finished missiles.


Moscow regards this technology transfer as the UK crossing a red line, as London hasn’t even attempted to shift responsibility onto intermediaries and the decision was publicly authorized by the prime minister. Britain has therefore assumed direct responsibility for the resulting escalation and deepened its involvement in military operations against Russia.

SCALP was developed through a joint British-French program and its assembly requires classified information about British components and French sub-assemblies, as well as access to a secure facility. Ukraine doesn’t possess a complete production cycle, but even a partial transfer of classified data would integrate Ukrainian assembly into the British-French manufacturing chain and bind all three parties together for years.

Before this decision, Britain had been far more careful about covering its tracks. For example, the Flamingo missile, marketed as a product of the Ukrainian company Fire Point, is identical to a design unveiled in 2025 by the British-Emirati Milanion Group. That arrangement allowed London to keep its distance, with formal responsibility for the missile’s development and deployment resting with Kiev.

Britain is also attempting to free future missile projects from the American vetting process, so under Project Brakestop, the Ministry of Defense has commissioned MBDA UK, MGI Engineering and Rotron Aerospace to produce three prototypes of long-range missiles for Ukraine. The purpose is to reduce dependence on US authorization and, consequently, on the position of the administration in Washington. London wants to determine for itself when and under what conditions such weapons are transferred.

British drones are already being used by Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russia. They include the Nyan jet-powered drone, manufactured by Callen-Lenz, a subsidiary of BAE Systems. For its developers, the battlefield offers something particularly valuable: operational data with which to refine the weapon. Russia has also repeatedly pointed to the direct involvement of British specialists in the deployment of Storm Shadow missiles.

On the same day as the SCALP announcement, London secured access to Avengers AI Labs, an extensive body of data gathered by Ukrainian frontline sensors, so now British companies will be able to use this information to train target-recognition and autonomous-control systems, greatly shortening the journey from development to battlefield deployment.Five British governments have come and gone during the active phase of the Ukraine conflict, but the country’s anti-Russian course has remained remarkably consistent.

Boris Johnson began a program to develop the Ukrainian navy, Rishi Sunak signed a ten-year security agreement, Keir Starmer followed with the Centenary Partnership Agreement and Burnham has now authorized access to classified missile technology. Each government has built upon the commitments made by its predecessor.

The same continuity is visible in Britain’s strategic doctrine, where Sunak’s Conservative government described Russia in its 2023 Integrated Review Refresh as the “most acute threat” to British security and Starmer’s Labour government retained that position. The 2025 National Security Strategy called Russia “the most obvious and pressing example” of confrontation, while the Strategic Defence Review described it as an “immediate and pressing threat.” That review established the principle of “NATO first, but not only NATO” and committed Britain to preparing for war.

These doctrines are supported by long-term financial obligations, given London has promised Ukraine £3 billion, approximately $4 billion, annually until at least the 2030-31 financial year. The century-long partnership agreement provides for joint production, technology transfers and cooperation in the Baltic, Black and Azov seas where Britain’s presence is intended to endure for decades, regardless of when the current military campaign ends.

The declaration signed by Britain, France and Ukraine on January 6, 2026, already outlines arrangements for the postwar period. These include multinational forces, military logistics hubs, secure facilities and a special legal regime for foreign personnel. In London’s calculations, a ceasefire wouldn’t end its involvement, but it would consolidate a new phase of Britain’s military and industrial presence.

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Saxony-Anhalt is small, 1.7 million voters, so it says little. But it makes me realize that this went fast! Where was AfD a year ago? Stuck in court.

Dutch news: AfD has 39 out of 83 seats. But the “populist” BSW party, which promised to support it, unexpectedly got its 5 seats, and could bring it to 44.

And the labels keep coming: far right, radical right, extreme right etc. That’s just for not wanting more immigrants?!

• AfD Sweeps Saxony-Anhalt Election In First “Far Right” Victory Since WW2 (ZH)

Update(1400ET): In a political earthquake, the AfD has taken a massive lead, per exit polls, at the Saxony-Anhalt election in what the party’s state leader hailed as sending a resounding “signal to Berlin.” This moment marks the first time what has been dubbed a German “far-right party” taking power at a state level since World War II. This is absolutely historic. “The exit polls, published by German public television stations, suggested that the party, known by its German initials AfD, would win between 39 and 41 seats in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt,” NY Times reports. “That would leave it just short of an absolute majority of 42, but far ahead of its nearest rival.”


But it remains unclear whether it will be able to form a government. Below is the latest via Deutsche Welle: Alternative for Germany (AfD) co-leader Tino Chrupalla says his party secured a mandate to govern with its strong election result in Saxony-Anhalt. “We have halved the CDU, so from that point of view it’s a great evening,” Chrupalla told journalists in Magdeburg, referring to an earlier remark by Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader and chancellor Friedrich Merz that AfD’s result could be cut in half.

Chrupalla called the outcome “sensational.” “Ulrich Siegmund will be the new premier of Saxony-Anhalt,” he said. “From here, we will change Germany.” If the party falls short of an absolute majority, Chrupalla said it would be open to talks and even suggested an AfD minority government could be tolerated by other parties. AfD has signaled it is open to a coalition partner that would be open to changing its migration and energy policy – though this option doesn’t seem to be on the political map realistically at this early point. Youth turn to AfD in droves…

 


 

From last night:

Voters in Saxony-Anhalt head to the polls today in an election that could deliver Germany’s most massive political shock in decades, with the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland on track to beat Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats.

Final polling estimates put the AfD at 40% to 41%, nearly double the CDU’s 23%. The party’s lead candidate, 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund, has ruled out governing in a coalition, suggesting the AfD would need an outright majority to take power of its first German state government.

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2096575571568255471?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2096575571568255471%7Ctwgr%5E855b88b12e1dd9c69d1daa6ec38f09e58692f2c5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fafd-predicted-win-saxony-anhalt-merz-panics-antifa-floods-streets

About 1.7 million people are set to vote today, with polls closing at 6 p.m. local time. AfD’s rapid ascent comes as voters are furious over Germany’s stagnant economy, deindustrialization, energy costs, and the Third World migrant invasion. The Polymarket bet on how many seats the AfD is expected to win today assigns a 74% probability to 38 to 41 seats, with 42 to 45 seats at 16%. Ahead of the historic election, thousands of far-left Antifa crazies took to the streets wearing all black and holding Antifa and LGBT flags. Others were seen carrying signs reading “FCK NZS” and “FCK AFD.”

https://twitter.com/COMPACTMagazin/status/2096309332111507721?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2096309332111507721%7Ctwgr%5E855b88b12e1dd9c69d1daa6ec38f09e58692f2c5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fafd-predicted-win-saxony-anhalt-merz-panics-antifa-floods-streets

A reported 15,000 left-wing activists joined a so-called pro-democracy festival in the state capital, Magdeburg, on Saturday, organized by the “Saxony-Anhalt Open to the World” alliance. Yet the whole globalist cult in Germany has likely run its course. It has been nothing more than what some call a nation-killing experiment, pushing uncontrolled mass migration and deindustrialization policies that have sent Europe’s largest economy into a tailspin.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Saturday threatened the AfD, saying, “We will not let these people, who trash Germany and everything we have achieved in recent years and decades,” before adding, “We will not let these people talk our country into ruin!”

https://twitter.com/MarioBojic/status/2096535311597662449?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2096535311597662449%7Ctwgr%5E855b88b12e1dd9c69d1daa6ec38f09e58692f2c5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fafd-predicted-win-saxony-anhalt-merz-panics-antifa-floods-streets

Yet what did Merz actually achieve? Destroying Germany’s economy? That is something he certainly accomplished.

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“Paris needs guarantees that Kiev will repay the money it’s been getting during its conflict with Moscow, Jordan Bardella has said”

• France Can’t Finance Ukraine Forever – Le Pen Party’s Head (RT)

France lacks money for itself and simply cannot keep funding Ukraine indefinitely, Jordan Bardella, the president of Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally (NR) party, has said. The main French opposition party faced harsh criticism from its rivals earlier this week after its vice president, Louis Aliot, said that NR “would turn off the tap” for Kiev if it comes to power after the 2027 presidential vote. Le Pen is seen as having strong chances to succeed in the election next year, no matter who her rival will be in the second round.


Bardella weighed in on the issue during his speech at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy on Saturday, saying that Ukraine needs support from France and other Western nations during the conflict with Russia, but “our objective should not be to finance the war ad vitam æternam,” which means ‘forever’ in Latin. France has a national debt of €3.5 trillion ($4.6 billion) and cannot be “giving money that we no longer have” to Vladimir Zelensky’s government, he argued.

“The extremely serious and worrying state of French public finances means we can’t give money without any guarantees or assurances that this money will be repaid one day,” the National Rally president said. Paris has been one of the strongest backers of Kiev in the EU after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, providing it with billions in military aid and supplying various sophisticated weapons, including CAESAR self-propelled howitzers and Mirage fighter jets.

According to Bardella, the Americans were “much smarter” than the Europeans when it came to assistance for Kiev “because the money they gave to Ukraine is secured against rare earth mining.” He was referring to the deal agreed upon between Washington and Kiev last year, which grants the US preferential access to Ukrainian mineral resources. During US President Donald Trump’s second term, Washington also significantly reduced aid to Ukraine, making European NATO members pay for American-made arms supplied to the country.

Earlier this week, Trump warned that he intends to present Europe with a belated bill for billions of dollars that Washington spent arming Ukraine under his predecessor, Joe Biden. He previously estimated that Biden gave Zelensky more than $300 billion worth of weapons for “free.” Le Pen said on Thursday that the National Rally is skeptical about further assistance to Ukraine because it believes that the conflict with Russia needs a diplomatic solution.

A poll by Harris Interactive in late August suggested that Le Pen has the support of 34% of the French public, which should guarantee her a place in the second round of the presidential election, where she would likely win comfortably against either her left-wing rival Jean-Luc Mélenchon or the centrist candidate, former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe. Russian officials said repeatedly that foreign weapons being sent to Kiev will not prevent Moscow from achieving its military goals, but will merely prolong the fighting, while increasing the risk of a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO.

Read more …

You mean we know that truth?!

• Leftists Are Erasing the Truth About 9/11 From Classrooms (Matt Margolis)

Friday marks 25 years since 19 terrorists hijacked four planes and murdered 2,977 people on American soil. In the wake of those attacks, this country made itself one promise: Never Forget. Twenty-five years later, it’s clear some people are working hard to make sure we do exactly that: forget.


Here’s the number that should make every American furious: only Arizona and Florida legally require public schools to teach about the September 11 attacks. Ten states have statutes that merely encourage some form of 9/11 instruction, according to an August University of Wisconsin study, and that can mean anything from a moment of silence to a full lesson. New York, where the towers actually fell, mandates only a moment of silence and a passing mention in Board of Regents standards. No statewide curriculum exists.

Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), who is pushing legislation to require 9/11 education in all 50 states, told the New York Post, “We made a promise to ‘Never Forget’, but today, only a handful of states require 9/11 to be taught in their schools.” But it gets worse. So much worse.

According to the North America Values Institute, an education watchdog group, leftist activists, some backed by George Soros, have produced 9/11 lesson plans now used in schools nationwide, including in New York City. One, “Teaching Beyond September 11th,” spends exactly one paragraph on the actual attacks and never once calls the hijackers terrorists, instead building entire units around “Right-Wing Extremism” and “Islamophobia and the Oval Office.” It describes Osama bin Laden only as a man the United States “accused” of masterminding the attacks, leaving out his own confessions and his declared jihad against a country he called the “worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind.”

The curriculum was developed by the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education beginning in 2019 and is now recommended by education departments in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Oregon. Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, said this kind of material teaches kids “that America is responsible for the atrocities around the world to develop a moral framework that can be activated very quickly to get policies that reduce America’s power and sovereignty.” She said the tactic mirrors what the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps use to target young people. “Ayatollah Khamenei said the best audience to target is students,” she added.

It still gets worse.Adam Feinberg, a teacher at Brooklyn’s City Polytechnic High School, assigns ninth through 12th graders Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” alongside a worksheet asking them, without a hint of irony, “Why do you think Osama bin Laden hates Jews so much?” He uploaded it to the American Federation of Teachers’ own lesson-sharing portal back in 2020. He never denied writing it.

None of these curricula bother to mention that nearly 10,000 first responders and civilians have since died from illnesses tied to Ground Zero toxins, or what any of this does to the families left behind. Gail Silke’s brother, NYPD officer Stephen Driscoll, 38, died in the South Tower. She didn’t hold back: “They’re not affected by it, they’re not in our shoes, and they don’t want to be in our shoes. Those people can kiss my a*s.” A Manhattan mother whose father-in-law died on 9/11 said, “They were disgusted with the [expletive] they were taught, it’s not fair, they lost their grandfather.”

New York state Assemblyman Matt Slater (R-N.Y.) said, “Nearly 3,000 innocent people were murdered by al Qaeda on September 11th. They were the victims. The terrorists were the perpetrators. Any curriculum that blurs that fundamental truth, or makes the victims secondary to a political narrative, isn’t teaching history, it’s rewriting it.”

When Soros-linked groups are writing lesson plans that soft-pedal the hijackers and focus on “Islamophobia” instead, we have a problem. The left is so devoted to its woke ideology that it is trying to rewrite the history of 9/11.

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Takes some getting used to. But you get to keep your country.

• Asylum Denials Hit 94% in June (Catherine Salgado)

A combination of judicial firings and federal reforms has led to the denial of most asylum claims, an area where illegal aliens are known to exploit our system egregiously. In June 2026, over nine out of 10 asylum claimants did not receive what they requested. That’s good news for America.


I have emphasized many times here at PJ Media that huge numbers of illegal alien criminals, particularly under Joe Biden’s administration, simply claimed asylum and stated they were too afraid to go back home, which in prior years was practically enough to ensure they would receive asylum in the U.S. But in most cases, these people do not actually meet the legal standards for asylum. In some cases, indeed, they are afraid to go home, but only because they are gang members or convicted criminals fleeing justice.

On August 31, TRAC Immigration reported the following: “The number of individuals Immigration Judges grant asylum to each month has been falling. In June 2026, only 771 individuals were granted asylum—less than a quarter of the number of individuals awarded asylum just three years ago. At the same time, the number of asylum decisions has grown resulting in soaring asylum denial rates. In June 2026, 94 percent of all asylum cases were denied.

It appears that President Donald Trump’s administration has replaced many immigration judges with individuals less likely to take illegal alien criminals at their word. TRAC seems extremely upset about the change, but it is great news for Americans, as we can be sure that illegal aliens will have much less of a chance of abusing this loophole in order to obtain U.S. residency.

The Center for Immigration Studies’ (CIS) Andrew R. Arthur explained that the percentage of granted asylum claims is actually even lower than TRAC indicated, because it did not take into account claims that were withdrawn, administratively closed, or not adjudicated. He elucidated in some technical detail what all of those categories meant, but essentially, not every claim ends up going all the way through the process to denial or approval for various reasons.

Of the 254,680 asylum decisions IJs issued in the first nine months of FY 2026, 7,231 (2.8 percent) were grants, 89,740 (35.2 percent) were denials, 44,062 (17.3 percent) were not adjudicated, 18,251 (7.2 percent) were withdrawn, and 3,315 (1.3 percent) were administratively closed — but 92,081 (36.2 percent), the largest single category of IJ asylum decisions, were ones in which the claim was “abandoned”.

So actually, based on these figures, fewer than 3% of asylum applicants this fiscal year received the asylum they requested. That’s how few of the applicants were able to prove in court that they truly needed asylum. Many illegal aliens also abuse the asylum process to try to obtain work authorization, after which they never show up in court again, Arthur warned.

In short, if there is a record high of asylum denials, it is because the Biden administration encouraged excessive and widespread abuses, and the Trump administration now has to restore the integrity of the asylum process.

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“Ottawa appears to have shown up to a knife fight with a strongly worded press release.”

• The U.S. Has 13 Times the Economy — Carney Has 13 Times the Pout (Florack)

At first glance, it looks almost silly. Here we have two countries sharing the world’s longest undefended border, deeply intertwined economies, decades of trade agreements, and an enormous volume of commerce crossing back and forth every single day. Surely, one might think, reasonable adults could sit down and work this out over a Tim Hortons double-double. But, see, that’s the problem with looking at this purely as a spat over tariffs. It isn’t about tariffs at all. It’s about leverage — and Ottawa appears to have shown up to a knife fight with a strongly worded press release.


Here’s the inconvenient math sitting underneath the whole argument. According to current GDP data, the U.S. economy runs about $30.8 trillion, against Canada’s roughly $2.3 trillion. That’s not a rival negotiating across the table — that’s a difference of about $28.5 trillion, which means Canada isn’t negotiating with a comparably sized economy. It’s negotiating with one more than 13 times its size, and acting surprised when the bigger guy gets to set the terms.

Then there’s energy, where the gap gets even more embarrassing for Ottawa. The United States produced a record 13.6 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2025, the most any country has ever pumped, and also hit a record 39 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — America has been the world’s largest natural gas producer since 2011 and isn’t giving that title back. Canada’s oil sands are a genuinely valuable resource. The trouble, from Ottawa’s side of the table, is that Washington already has plenty of its own.

And Canada still can’t quit the American market even if it wanted to: in 2025, the U.S. imported 3.9 million barrels a day of Canadian crude, making America overwhelmingly Canada’s dominant customer. Canadian oil matters to the United States. The United States is Canada’s oil industry, full stop. That’s not a negotiation between equals — that’s a landlord reminding a tenant who holds the lease. Carney might try to shut that oil off, but it’s a surefire way to make Alberta the 51st state, which he can ill afford.

Then there’s the part of this fight Washington has been increasingly willing to say out loud: Canada’s approach to government spending, immigration, and social policy. The Trump administration has argued that Canada’s expansive government and rapid population growth eventually become someone else’s problem — namely, the strained housing market, the overloaded infrastructure, and the public services buckling under the weight.

Before anyone waves that off as typical American bluster, it’s worth pointing out that Ottawa has been saying the same thing about itself. Canada’s own government has acknowledged the pressure population growth put on housing and social services, which is precisely why it’s now slashing its own targets — permanent residency holds flat at 380,000 a year through 2028, while temporary-resident arrivals get cut from 2025’s 673,650 down to 385,000 next year and 370,000 the two years after, with the explicit goal of getting the temporary population under 5% of the country by the end of 2027. Trump didn’t write that policy memo. Carney’s own government did.


And the numbers behind it are genuinely striking. According to Statistics Canada’s 2021 Census, 26.4% of the population was first-generation — born outside Canada — and another 17.6% was second-generation, meaning Canadian-born with at least one foreign-born parent. Add those together and you land at roughly 44% of the country having an immediate immigrant connection. That’s not a talking point. That’s the census.

None of which means immigration itself is the villain here — Canada was built by it, and immigrants contribute to the economy. The actual question is whether the rate and mix of that growth can be reconciled with housing, infrastructure, employment, and a social safety net that has to be paid for by someone. Even Ottawa seems to have concluded the honest answer, for now, is “not at the pace we were running it.” Gee, guys, welcome to reality. You might start by noticing what others have noted from afar: the huge percentage of these immigrants are dependent on large social support outlays.

Even the OECD’s own 2025 economic survey of Canada — an organization not exactly known for MAGA sympathies — flags weak business investment and a widening productivity gap between Canada’s best firms and everyone else as structural problems, not passing headwinds. And that’s where this whole trade fight starts making a lot more sense.

The United States walks in with the world’s largest economy, record domestic energy production, a massive consumer market, and an industrial base most countries would trade their currency reserves for. Canada walks in with real resources, a well-educated population, a serious industrial economy, and one very good card: energy and commodities the U.S. genuinely wants. That’s a relationship worth keeping. It just isn’t a relationship between equals, and pretending otherwise, as Carney seems bent on doing, doesn’t change the scoreboard.

Maybe that’s the part some people in Ottawa are struggling to swallow. It isn’t that Washington discovered some secret new lever to pull. It’s that Washington has always had this much leverage, simply by virtue of being what it is. When one side shows up with a $30.8 trillion economy, record energy output, and a consumer market Canadian exporters can’t afford to lose, and the other side shows up with a $2.3 trillion economy that depends heavily on access to that exact market, the interesting question isn’t why Washington thinks it can ask for concessions. It’s why anyone in Ottawa, Carney in particular, assumed it couldn’t.

Sometimes the uncomfortable part of a negotiation isn’t finding out the other guy is bluffing. It’s finding out he isn’t — and that he’s been holding the better hand the entire time. That’s the position Carney finds himself in just now. The reality is Carney doesn’t have nearly the cards he’d like Canadian voters to believe he does. I’ve already pointed out the leftist proclivities Carney harbors.

Before becoming PM, Carney sat on the board of Canada 2020, a think tank Maclean’s has called the outfit that effectively runs Liberal Party policy behind closed doors, with documented ties to Obama-world Democrats and access to Soros Open Society funding streams. More recently, Carney delivered the closing keynote at a closed-door Global Progress Action Summit in Toronto, sharing a stage with Barack Obama, Alex Soros — George’s son, now chairman of OSF — John Podesta, Pete Buttigieg, and Sen. Elissa Slotkin.

Every critter listed in that paragraph considers Trump an enemy. No serious analysis of Carney’s actions would be complete without acknowledging this. Carney has run on standing up to America and particularly standing up to President Trump. The trouble for Carney is that he simply hasn’t got the leverage to do that. It’s time for either Carney to grow up and face reality, or for Canadian voters to remove him. Preferably the latter.

Read more …

Painful.

• U.S. Job Growth of 162,000 vs Canada Job Losses -42,000 (CTH)

In this episode from Promethean Action’s Barbara Boyd she takes a look at the U.S. economy and the Main Street policies of President Trump versus the banking/Wall Street Canadian economy. In the August jobs report the U.S. economy added 162,000 jobs, while the Canadian August jobs report reflected 42,000 job losses.


Boyd – “A blockbuster U.S. jobs report showing 162,000 jobs created is contrasted with Canada’s 40,000 job loss under Mark Carney, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tells Steve Bannon that Wall Street and major outlets like the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal stoke economic panic and spread “fake news,” citing a misframed story about Norway’s sovereign wealth fund shifting from Treasuries into higher-yield Fannie and Freddie securities.

This episode frames today’s challenge as a “Red Queen economy,” arguing America must grow productivity fast enough to outrun debt, China’s advances, and infrastructure and skills obsolescence, while blaming Biden-era inflation and spending. It spotlights Trump administration workforce initiatives, including expanded training and Pell Grant use and the new Foundry School—an advanced manufacturing program with a Stanford curriculum and international PAX Silica partners. Finally, it covers Trump executive orders aiding ranchers’ beef processing and DOJ antitrust scrutiny of major meatpackers and retailers.”

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No more people in armies, but robots.

• Operation Twist 2.0, 2032 Gold Target & 100,000 Robotic Soldiers (Armstrong)

In Part 2 of this interview, economic cycle expert Martin Armstrong breaks down the immediate impact of the Fed’s latest operations on precious metals, the underlying drivers of the market, and why he projects gold’s long-term macro peak won’t arrive until 2032. Plus, Armstrong shares insights on the shift toward autonomous warfare, including the military’s development of 100,000 robotic soldiers, and why traditional AI still falls short of human curiosity.


Read more …

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/ivan_8848/status/2096176506523304402?s=20 https://twitter.com/warDaniel47/status/2096288093531730158?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle September 2 2026

Sep 022026
 
 September 2, 2026  Posted by at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  37 Responses »


Henri Matisse Sorrow of the King 1952


• Dangerous Talk of Putin’s ‘Loss’ in Ukraine (VIPS)
• Russia Moving Towards Resolving Ukraine Conflict – Putin (RT)
• Ukraine Tried To Copy Russia’s Battlefield Tactics, Walked Into A Trap (RT)
• Le Pen Would Beat Every Rival In 2027, Major French Poll Finds (ZH)
• Supreme Court Rule 5-4 to Eliminate Lawsuit Against White House Ballroom (CTH)
• Eye of the Beholder: Aesthetic Injury and the White House Ballroom (Turley)
• Wolf Blitzer’s Trump Mail-In Voting Lie Blows Up in His Face (Margolis)
• 400,000 California Voters Didn’t Provide Any ID at Registration (Salgado)
• EU Can’t Raid Europeans’ Savings Accounts, and It Drives them Nuts (O’Brien)
• Carney Picked a Trade War With Trump—But Why? (Victor Davis Hanson)
• BYD Inquires to Purchase Stellantis Auto Plant in Canada (CTH)

 


 

https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/2094537377557688323?s=20 https://twitter.com/Q_TheStormRider/status/2094711609705087445?s=20

 


 


I think Trump already knows. The notion that Ukraine can win is idiotic.

• Dangerous Talk of Putin’s ‘Loss’ in Ukraine (VIPS)

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Dangerous Talk of Putin’s ‘Loss’ in Ukraine


VIPS tells President Trump that once apprised of the reality on the ground (and in the air) by his intelligence advisors, he might choose to do what is in his power to end the disaster in Ukraine.

Dear President Trump:
The New York Times is reporting that the outlook for Russia in Ukraine is “bleak.” C.I.A. Director John Ratcliffe is said to have explained that to the Russians while in Moscow Tuesday. He reportedly urged them “to cut a deal before their military and economic situation gets worse.”

We write you on the chance you may be taken in by this latest song and dance. We believe it is orchestrated by the same kind of geniuses who told President Joe Biden to announce on July 13, 2023, in a major speech in Helsinki, that the Russians had “already lost the war” in Ukraine.

We suggest that you “kick the tires,” if they try to sell you that same car. Nothing could be further from the truth. Your predecessor was ill-served by intelligence. We suspect you are getting the same tendentious treatment from your own advisers. Indeed, many of them seem unconscionably relaxed about risking wider war with Russia over Ukraine.


We offer you, as we offered Biden, the following jogs to memory:

— December 3, 2022: “Russia is using up ammunition quite quickly. It’s pretty extraordinary. Our sense is that Russia is not capable of indigenously producing what they are expending at this stage.” (National Intelligence Director Avril Haines)

— March 18, 2022: “Russia has lost in Ukraine. The West should recognize this Russian defeat.” (Anatol Lieven, Quincy Institute)

— July 1 & July 7, 2023: “Putin’s war has already been a strategic failure for Russia – its military weaknesses laid bare; its economy badly damaged for years to come.” (C.I.A. Director William Burns)

The Church of Latter-Day Pundits
Two NY Times journalists who specialize in intelligence matters report Thursday that this latest version of the Russia-has-already-lost story is “the current C.I.A. director’s assessment.” They warn somewhat quizzically that, despite this, President Putin might ignore it “and choose to keep fighting.” But why would Putin do that? Indeed, the Gray Lady and her intelligence sources seem quite baffled by why Putin would keep trying when, according to U.S. officials and pundits, he started losing three and a half years ago and continues to lose. Could it possibly be that it was they that were wrong – terribly wrong?

Dismissing that as a possibility, they perform a somersault, straighten up, and chose to blame Putin’s advisers who, the Times says, have not “given Putin honest assessments of the war’s trajectory and toll.” If Black Humor is at work here, we do not find it funny. The slaughter in Ukraine brings hundreds of victims daily.

Russia is methodically advancing in Donbass along a thousand-mile front, it is weathering drone attacks on its oil and civilian infrastructure with enhanced interception and has enforced a virtual blockade on Ukraine’s largest port, Odessa, with withering aerial attacks. Ukraine’s manpower and interceptor shortages make it impossible for it to ever recover its lost territory, as you acknowledged after your meeting with President Putin in Alaska.

Mr. President, if you were given access to reality-based, honest intelligence, you would be able to decide for yourself whose advisers have gotten it right over these past five years. And, once apprised of the reality on ground (and in the air), you might choose to do what is in your power to end the disaster in Ukraine.

Déjà Vu
This is not the first time we advised a president to seek unbiased advice with a view toward avoiding unnecessary, catastrophic war. We did that just a few hours after Colin Powell’s deceptive presentation to the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003. Today, we strongly suggest that you broaden your circle of advisers, as we urged President George W. Bush to do then, in our first VIPS Memorandum, which ended with this recommendation:

“After watching Secretary Powell today, we are convinced that you would be well served if you widened the discussion beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”

FOR THE STEERING GROUP, VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY (VIPS)
• Fulton Armstrong, former National Intelligence Officer (ret.)
• Marshall Carter-Tripp, Foreign Service Officer (ret.); Division Director, State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research
• Philip Giraldi, C.I.A., Operations Officer (ret.)
• Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq and Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
• Larry C. Johnson, former C.I.A. and State Department Counter Terrorism officer
• John Kiriakou, former C.I.A. Counterterrorism Officer and former senior investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
• Karen Kwiatkowski, former Lt. Col., U.S. Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003
• Douglas MacGregor, Colonel, USA (ret.) (associate VIPS)
• Ray McGovern, former U.S. Army infantry/intelligence officer & C.I.A. analyst; C.I.A. Presidential briefer (ret.)
• Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer/NE, National Intelligence Council & C.I.A. political analyst (ret.)
• Scott Ritter, former MAJ, USMC; former U.N. Weapons Inspector, Iraq
• Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
• Sarah G. Wilton, CDR, USNR, (ret.); Defense Intelligence Agency (ret.)
• Ann Wright, retired U.S. Army reserve colonel and former U.S. diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq War

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“Moscow is making every effort to end the hostilities as soon as possible, the Russian president told Indian PM Narendra Modi..”

• Russia Moving Towards Resolving Ukraine Conflict – Putin (RT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin holds a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the SCO summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on August 31, 2026. © Sputnik / Pyotr Kovalev Russia is actively seeking to end the Ukraine conflict, President Vladimir Putin told Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Kyrgyzstan on Monday.


The two leaders discussed the Ukraine conflict among other issues, with the Indian prime minister calling for a peaceful resolution to the ongoing hostilities and urging the sides to “move in this direction.”“Thank you, dear prime minister. That is the way we’re heading for,” the Russian president replied.Moscow has repeatedly said that it is ready to resume Ukraine peace talks at any time, provided that they are focused on addressing the “root causes” of the conflict, including Ukraine’s plans to join NATO. Russia insists that the conflict has its roots in the 2014 Western-backed coup in Kiev and subsequent attempts by the new Ukrainian government to suppress the rebellion in Donbass by force.

Ukraine later failed to implement the 2014-2015 Minsk agreements, which were intended to reintegrate the breakaway regions into Ukraine by granting them broad autonomy through comprehensive political reform.In a June article for Politico, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that Moscow had explored every diplomatic avenue to defuse the Ukraine and Europe security crisis, but the US and NATO rejected Russia’s proposal for legally binding mutual security guarantees in January 2022.

Kiev’s Western backers also sabotaged the Istanbul talks between Russia and Ukraine that were launched soon after the Ukraine conflict escalation in February 2022.Then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson infamously traveled to Kiev in April of that year to tell Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky to drop any negotiations and “just fight,” thus slamming the door on any genuine diplomacy in the short term, according to Lavrov.

Moscow has consistently stated that it hopes to achieve a lasting settlement to the conflict and not simply a temporary ceasefire. Russia is demanding that Ukraine abandon its plans to join NATO and adopt a neutral status, accept restrictions on its armed forces, and formally recognize Crimea and four former Ukrainian regions as Russian territory.Russia also presented a roadmap towards the final settlement, which involved a ceasefire along the current front line linked to the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from parts of Russian territory they control, an end to mobilization, and an end to Western military aid to Ukraine.

Kiev has repeatedly rejected any proposals put forward by Moscow, while continuing to claim sovereignty over the four former Ukrainian territories as well as Crimea.

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“Behind Kiev’s claims of ‘liberated’ territory lies a failed operation, abandoned assault teams and an increasingly unstable southern front..”

• Ukraine Tried To Copy Russia’s Battlefield Tactics, Walked Into A Trap (RT)

Last week, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky, along with the new Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) Mikhail Drapaty, visited a section of the front line in Dnepropetrovsk region. Zelensky stated that this year, the AFU has almost completely regained control of Dnepropetrovsk Region, with only about 10 square kilometers of territory remaining under Russian control. What is the logic behind this PR campaign? Did the AFU really make progress in this direction? What were the real goals of the Ukrainian operation, and to what extent have they been achieved? We explore all this below.


The southern sector is the most strategically important part of the 1,500-kilometer-long front. On one end it borders the Dnieper River, while the other end stretches northeast to Pokrovsk, where, as it is generally considered, the central sector of the front begins.

In 2023, Ukraine’s only strategic offensive took place in this area. The AFU’s aim was to reach the sea and cut off the land corridor to the Crimea by means of two decisive blows. If successful, this operation would have radically worsened the situation for the Russian army and, according to Kiev’s plans, changed the course of the conflict. Even though the 2023 offensive failed, this section of the front did not become less important for the AFU. In the spring of 2026, with the aim of cutting off supply routes to the Crimea, the AFU launched a middle strike campaign, particularly targeting the highway located 50-70 km from the front line. These attempts have so far proven unsuccessful.

For Russia, the southern sector of the front is extremely important for three reasons. Firstly, as the front is pushed further north, Ukrainian middle strikes become less effective. Secondly, the capture of the city of Orekhov will pave the way for an advance toward Zaporozhye, a regional center with a pre-war population of over 700,000 and one of the largest industrial cities remaining under Kiev’s control.

Ukrainian soldiers from the 65th Separate Mechanized Brigade drive in the evacuation buggy near the road sign ‘Orikhiv’ damaged by Russian shelling. © Andriy Andriyenko / SOPA Images / Sipa USA Thirdly and most importantly, an advance north from Zaporozhye will allow the Russian army to approach the central sector of the front from the rear, either encircling it or at least significantly disrupting its supply lines.

Last year brought troubling news for the AFU in the southern sector of the front as the defense near the city of Gulaipole collapsed. At the time, all forces were pulled for the defense of Pokrovsk and Mirnograd, while several areas in the south were left with no one to defend them. As a result of the successful campaign of Russia’s East Group of Forces to identify and destroy drone crews, the AFU were forced to abandon approximately 300 square kilometers between the Yanchur and Gaichur rivers without fighting. To restore the front, then Commander-in-Chief Syrsky was forced to curtail the counteroffensive near Pokrovsk and essentially abandon the encircled garrison in neighboring Mirnograd.

This situation determined the priorities of the 2026 spring-summer campaign for the AFU: the aim was to restore the southern front at all costs, eliminate the threat to Zaporozhye, and push Russian forces as far east and south as possible to relieve strategic pressure on the central sector of the front.

We don’t have any information from the Ukrainian General Staff, so we can only assess the operation’s goals based on indirect evidence. Apparently, the AFU planned two auxiliary strikes in the Stepnogorsk and Uspenovka area to cut off the pincers of the Russian army, which threatened to close in around Orekhov. The main strike, however, was to be directed at Velikaya Novoselka. If it had been successful, the entire defense system of the East Group of Forces from Gulipole to the junction with the Center Group of Forces near Pokrovsk would have collapsed and the Russian army would have been pushed back 30-40 kilometers.

The AFU’s attacks began in the spring and were accompanied by an unprecedented media campaign. The operation was labeled a second counteroffensive, Ukrainian authorities claimed dozens of “liberated” settlements and hundreds of square kilometers of reclaimed territory, and once-respected Western publications churned out articles about a turning point on the front, a heroic Ukrainian offensive that would change the course of the war, and other such nonsense.

However, by mid-summer, news about the AFU’s success on the southern front became less frequent and after Syrsky’s removal, disappeared completely. Instead, news surfaced about the plight of Ukrainian storm troops which, advancing through the gray zone, got stuck there for weeks and even months. It was reported that due to disruptions in aerial deliveries, the soldiers hid in stashes, lacked food, and were forced to drink their own urine.

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The future of Europe hangs in the balance. Last chance to beat the globalists.

• Le Pen Would Beat Every Rival In 2027, Major French Poll Finds (ZH)

Marine Le Pen would win France’s 2027 presidential election against every major rival now being measured, according to a major survey by Elabe published on August 29 for BFMTV and La Tribune Dimanche.


France elects its president in two rounds: a crowded first round on April 18 cuts the field to the top two – no one will win outright – and the survivors meet again on May 2. Elabe has Le Pen at 34% to 35.5% in round one depending on who else runs, far clear of the pack, then beating every potential runoff opponent it tested. The new poll comes on the heels of a Nomura report which showed Le Pen with a commanding first-round lead.

The rest of the field is fighting over second place. Édouard Philippe, the former prime minister and the most plausible face of the post-Macron center, leads that pack at about 17% when he stands alone. Jean-Luc Mélenchon is on 14% to 14.5%, having lost his summer lift. Raphaël Glucksmann, now in the race, is between 11.5% and 14%. Gabriel Attal’s presence mainly splits the moderate vote.

According to the poll, here’s Le Pen:
• versus Philippe: 52.5% to 47.5%
• versus Attal or Glucksmann: 57% to 43%
• versus Mélenchon: 69.5% to 30.5%

For a generation, French presidential politics assumed a front républicain: a cross-party second-round squeeze that would keep the National Rally out of the Élysée. It elected Chirac 82-18 over her father in 2002 and Macron twice over her; yet the margin has narrowed every time. According to the Elabe poll, that squeeze is no longer automatic. Le Pen is not only first in April. She is ahead in May against every opponent Elabe put up. Even against Philippe, the closest of them, she leads by five points.

Le Pen’s popularity has perhaps been boosted by her status as a martyr – created by what some might consider establishment efforts to throw her off track. On July 7 the Paris court of appeal upheld her embezzlement conviction in the European Parliament assistants case. It shortened the ban on holding office enough for her to stand and imposed a year of house arrest with an electronic tag. Her appeal to the Cour de Cassation freezes that sentence while she campaigns. The court has said it aims to rule before the first round. A confirmed tag would not take her off the April ballot. It would frame the May runoff. Le Pen herself has said she could not campaign tagged – though sentence remission could free her by early 2027 either way. Jordan Bardella remains the party’s designated stand-in.

At the summer gathering of MEDEF (France’s main employers’ federation) at Roland-Garros on August 27 she set out a €125 billion savings path and a plan to let long-tenure workers retire at 60 to 62, costed at about €9 billion and described as a “societal choice.” French banks are still wary of financing National Rally campaigns. On these numbers, voters are less so.

Bond markets are pricing the wider strain – as French 10-year yields have been near 4.1%, their highest since late 2008. The extra yield over German Bunds is about 80 basis points, the wide end of a 59-to-85 range over the past year. That premium reflects a hung Assembly, a government that has already stumbled on the budget, a 2027 finance bill due in October that may not pass in ordinary form, a deficit still near 5% of GDP, and IMF debt figures already around 118.5% this year and through 120% in 2027.

The working rule of French politics was that Le Pen could reach the steps of the Élysée and not the door – but rules were made to be broken.

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“Supreme Court Rule 5-4 to Eliminate Lawsuit Against White House Ballroom and National Defense Complex – Chief Justice Roberts Joined the Minority..”

• Supreme Court Rule 5-4 to Eliminate Lawsuit Against White House Ballroom (CTH)

Somehow Chief Justice John Roberts found that a single person who walks past the White House every month and doesn’t like the proposed appearance of the ballroom has some standing to sue and block construction. Go figure. Roberts also decided that the Obamacare mandate wasn’t a tax. Roberts joined with the minority DEI judges in his position. However, the majority decision was against the woman having standing to sue. Therefore, the lawsuit was dispatched and the building can continue.


SCOTUS BLOG – […] On Monday, a divided court granted the government’s request for a stay, permitting construction to move forward while the litigation continues in the lower court. The majority’s opinion focused primarily on its conclusion that the National Trust likely does not have standing to challenge the project. The trust had submitted a declaration from Alison Hoagland, a member who lives in Washington, D.C., and said that she visits the area where the White House is located approximately once per month.

Hoagland, who has “expertise in historic architecture,” claimed that the project caused “‘injuries’ to her ‘aesthetic, cultural, and historical interests’ because she finds the ‘scale,’ ‘height,’ and ‘massing’ of the government’s design distasteful.” But those are not the kind of “concrete” and specific injuries required to bring a lawsuit, the majority explained.

The majority also concluded that the government would be permanently harmed if Leon’s order were allowed to go into effect – another key criterion in determining whether to grant emergency relief. Among other things, it noted, senior government officials “attest[] that constructing something approximating the height and mass of the intended above-ground ballroom is ‘crucial’ to the security of the below-ground military installation.”

In his six-page dissent, which Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined, Roberts countered that “[a] historic preservationist such as Hoagland can be aesthetically injured in a concrete, particularized way by the transformation of a historic building that she frequently enjoys, just as,” based on prior court precedent, “an environmentalist can sustain a concrete, particularized aesthetic injury from the extinction of a particular animal or the transformation of a particular forest or river that he regularly enjoys.” Roberts ended the opinion by quoting Winston Churchill, who said that “[w]e shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” “All the more reason,” according to Roberts, “to ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”


President Trump – “I am pleased to report that the United States Supreme Court has just ruled in favor of the Ballroom/Military Complex being built without any further contingency, doubt, or threat. We are living in the Golden Age of America, and this Building will be one of the Greatest ever constructed in Washington, D.C. When completed in the Summer of 2028, the magnificent Ballroom and Military Complex will be something that the entire Country is very proud of. The Project, despite the baseless lawsuit brought by the so-called National Trust for Historic Preservation of the United States, which is not in any way affiliated with the United States Government, is under budget and ahead of schedule. The Ballroom is totally funded by Great Patriots and Corporations and, therefore, is a Gift — At no cost to the American Taxpayer. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

President DONALD J. TRUMP

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“She asserts that having to view the finished ballroom the government is constructing would cause her to suffer “injuries” to her “aesthetic, cultural, and historical interests” because she finds the “scale,” “height,” and “massing” of the government’s design distasteful.”

• Eye of the Beholder: Aesthetic Injury and the White House Ballroom (Turley)

The Administration won a major victory before the Supreme Court this week, securing a 5-4 decision allowing the resumption of construction of the new White House ballroom. Notably, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a dissent with his three liberal colleagues to oppose the move. The case turns on the standing of challengers to bring the case. However, as a torts professor, what intrigued me was what the case says about aesthetic injuries.


In torts, I teach aesthetic nuisance cases where courts tend to reject claims of injury due to eyesores and blight. Such claims are disfavored in both codes and cases: “Things merely disagreeable, however, which simply displease the eye or offend the taste, or shock an oversensitive or fastidious nature, no matter how irritating or unpleasant, are not nuisances.” 81 N.Y. Jur. 2d Nuisances § 17 (2014).

As one court ruled in Missouri in Ness v. Albert, 665 S.W.2d I (Mo. Ct. App. 1983):“Aesthetic considerations are fraught with subjectivity. One man’s pleasure may be another man’s perturbation…Judicial forage into such a nebulous area would be chaotic. Any imaginary good from doing so is far outweighed by the lurking danger of unduly circumscribing inherent rights of ownership of property and grossly intimidating their lawful exercise.” The decision in National Park Service, et al. v. National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States raises a parallel issue on standing. At issue is the right of a private group to stop a major construction project based on claims that the ballroom is oversized and obnoxious to some.

The Court has long maintained a demanding standing doctrine under Article III of the Constitution, requiring a showing of an “injury in fact” that is based on the “invasion of a legally protected interest.” Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U. S. 555, 560 (1992). That requires an injury that is “(a) concrete and particularized . . . and (b) actual or imminent.” The claim, upheld by the D.C. Circuit, is based primarily on the eyesore injury of one person who would have to walk by the structure:

“To establish its standing to bring this case, the Trust relies on a declaration from a single of its members, Alison K. Hoagland. Hoagland says she lives in Washington, D.C., and expects to visit the neighborhood around the White House “about once a month.” App. to Application 73a–74a. She asserts that having to view the finished ballroom the government is constructing would cause her to suffer “injuries” to her “aesthetic, cultural, and historical interests” because she finds the “scale,” “height,” and “massing” of the government’s design distasteful. Id., at 75a. On the strength of that declaration, the Trust contends, it has Article III standing to challenge the East Wing project.”

The per curiam opinion rejects the aesthetic injury at the base of the standing claim. The majority notes the importance of the project, including security elements such as the bunker below the ballroom. It then states: Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger and against these harms, the only harm the Trust claims is the offense one of its members will suffer from having to view a structure of the “scale,” “height,” and “massing” the government intends…These harms and equities are not nearly in equipoise.

The size of the ballroom has drawn criticism from many, including many who agree with the President that a ballroom has long been needed. Architects associated with the project demurred as the President demanded a large structure. However, the question is whether that injury alone can sustain judicial review. The Supreme Court has reaffirmed that an eyesore is no injury when it comes to Article III standing.

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Why do I think he must be 120 years old? He’s been there forever. And a day.

• Wolf Blitzer’s Trump Mail-In Voting Lie Blows Up in His Face (Margolis)

On Friday, Wolf Blitzer decided it was his job to help Democrats lie about President Donald Trump. At least this time, he was forced to issue a correction.Blitzer made a blatantly false claim during Friday’s episode of The Situation Room, when he sat down with Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) to discuss a multi-state Democrat lawsuit fighting President Donald Trump’s March executive order meant to ensure only eligible citizens can vote by mail.


It started when Spanberger, without any evidence, accused the Trump administration of trying to intimidate voters into staying home. “The continued attacks that we’re seeing from the Trump administration is really just an effort to get people fearful, to get people to stay home, and, in many cases, to eliminate what is a valid, safe, secure way for people to be able to have their voices heard and to vote,” she said.That’s when Blitzer decided to imply that Trump’s order would impact the military. “And in Virginia, you have a lot of military personnel who totally rely on mail-in ballots if they want to be able to express their opinions,” he told her.

“That’s true,” Spanberger said, even though it wasn’t. “It’s members of the military service, of our diplomatic service, intelligence services, people serving overseas in service to our country who get their ballots mailed to them at the various postings throughout the world.” Now, one of two things happened here. Either Spanberger and Blitzer were legitimately clueless about the facts, or they knew the facts and just decided to push falsehoods anyway. Dare to guess which it is? There’s no excuse for either. Spanberger is part of a lawsuit fighting the order, yet clearly doesn’t understand what the order does. Blitzer, as a member of the media, should have known better.

Trump signed the executive order Blitzer lied about on March 31, 2026, and it has been picked apart, litigated, and debated in public ever since. There was plenty of time to get the facts straight before going on television and telling however many viewers CNN still has that Trump was coming for military ballots. Blitzer didn’t bother. He repeated a scare story handed to him by a Democrat governor, let her validate it, and let it sit there unchallenged for three days until he finally walked it back.

On Monday, Blitzer had to issue a “quick note of clarification,” which is CNN-speak for “we got caught.” “We discussed legal challenges to the Trump administration’s directives for the Postal Service on mail-in voting,” Blitzer said. “A comment I made suggested that U.S. military and overseas voters’ ballots would be impacted by these directives. I want to be clear right now: Those ballots are exempt from the Postal Service’s new rules implementing the president’s March executive order.”

He added, “Those groups are covered under the Uniformed and Overseas Absentee Voting Act [UOCAVA], just to be specific on that point.”Blitzer’s correction came only after the false claim had already served its purpose: feeding viewers a panic narrative about Trump and mail-in voting. By the time the correction was made, it barely even mattered. Military and overseas voters remain protected under UOCAVA, and the new Postal Service rules expressly exempt their absentee ballots. CNN should explain how such a basic fact escaped a network that calls itself the “most trusted name in news.”

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Now count the whole country.

• 400,000 California Voters Didn’t Provide Any ID at Registration (Salgado)

Because the state of California allows people to register online without providing any proof of identity, anyone could register to vote and under any name. Hundreds of thousands of people have done just that, and it once again raises the question of just how solid Democrat control in California would be without fraud.


Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, just arrested a Honduran national who illegally registered to vote in California. But it is incredibly easy to do; anyone, indeed, could do so as long as he or she has a fake address ready and checks the options for no ID and no Social Security. Apparently, almost half a million people have taken advantage of this scam.

In the clip below, Fox News co-anchor Bill Hemmer talks with Essayli about Darwin Rivera Flores, a “noncitizen born in Honduras, and you at DOJ were able to get your hands on his voter registration forms.” Last year, Rivera “falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen. He checked the box attesting he’s a U.S citizen born in the United States; he signed it under penalty of perjury,” Hemmer went on. “Bill, in California, there’s no one checking this, right? Entirely the honor system.”

Essayli confirmed that and continued, “This case really highlights the vulnerability in California’s voter rules. They basically allow anybody to register to vote on the honor system. There’s nobody in government that is checking to confirm you’re a citizen, and in fact, in this case, he, on the form, [put] down a California driver’s license and a Social Security [number], which he had, because he has a visa, [but] that does not prove you’re a citizen. And according to the Secretary of State, they say at least half a million people don’t even provide that information when they register to vote.” In his post, Essayli put the number more precisely at 400,000.

California allows a crazy number of IDs as proof for registering to vote, including health club memberships, welfare checks, senior citizen cards, and drug prescriptions. But 400,000 voters didn’t even provide that much.

Registered Republican Spencer Pratt ought to have advanced to the general election for the Los Angeles mayoral race. Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton has rapidly closed the gap between him and Democrat Xavier Becerra in the polls. And there are still enclaves of Republicans throughout the state of California. But so long as Democrats can vote-harvest from homeless people, encourage illegal aliens to vote, and “count” for several weeks after Election Day, we can be sure no GOP candidate will ever win a major race in the state again. Of course Democrats don’t want to audit their voter rolls or require proof of ID to register and vote in the state of California. That could upset their whole insurance plan for staying in power.

After all, why worry about audits and reforms if you know your candidates could win honestly? The only reason for fighting federal reforms tooth and nail is if election officials and other politicians know perfectly well that their elections are compromised.

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“… it will never be like the U.S. for one simple reason: it doesn’t have the guts or the will.”

• EU Can’t Raid Europeans’ Savings Accounts, and It Drives them Nuts (O’Brien)

When it comes to business and investment, the European Union (EU) thinks it can be like the U.S. It wants to be like the U.S., and it’s actively trying to be like the U.S. But it will never be like the U.S. for one simple reason: it doesn’t have the guts or the will.


The contrast between Europe’s risk-averse business culture and the American winner-take-all culture was on display last week when the president of the European Commission (EC), Ursula von der Leyen, delivered remarks at the annual French Entrepreneurs Conference. She’s not happy that, according to her, Europeans are keeping a collective 10 trillion euros in their bank accounts and not investing that money in European startups and other companies.

“In Europe, we have no shortage of technology or savings,” von der Leyen said. “But we still lack sufficient capacity to develop European companies on a large scale. Too many projects are stalled because the initial investment is too risky, demand is too uncertain or capital is too expensive. Our companies know how to start in Europe. But they also need to be able to grow here.” The EU president said that European startups tend to go outside of Europe for financing, and this is where she says, “They shift their center of gravity. Or they are bought out.”

I’m going to borrow a better description of von der Leyen from my colleague, Stephen Green, who calls her a “Euro-Scold,” which is so apt. So yeah, the Euro-Scold said the EU cannot finance the entrepreneurial growth with public funds alone. She said that Europeans have savings, quite a bit, actually, and she wants to get her hands on it. But regretfully for her and for her globalist allies, it’s not that easy. It seems that you can’t just raid people’s bank accounts in Europe if you want that money, at least not yet. That doesn’t prevent her, however, from lusting after that money, coveting it, and seeing it as just lying there unused in bank accounts.

The owners of those accounts may not see it that way. They may see those savings accounts as a safe haven from the likes of her and so many others whom they know could burn through 10 trillion euros pretty quickly and still have nothing to show for it. “Europe must now to put these savings to work for their companies,” she added. “This is the objective of the Economic and Investment Union. We have put forward proposals on securitization, investment by banks and insurance companies, and the integration and supervision of our markets. Together, these measures could unlock up to 470 billion euros in additional investment.”

https://twitter.com/coinbureau/status/2094655132747321387?s=20

I’m not sure about you, but ever since the COVID pandemic, any time I hear from this Euro-Scold and the globalists on the other side of the pond, I find myself immediately trying to read between the lines and looking for the secret word sequence where she introduces the Fourth Reich or some other. That’s not the case here. If her jargon sounds like jargon, it’s because that’s what it is. It’s neat-sounding terminology to mask the cultural impotence that is the European business climate, which can’t get its mind off of those 10 trillion euros it wants so badly.

Just in the way the EU is framing all of this, the culture is very top-down. The agenda is set by the government, not the marketplace, and that represents all the difference. In America, the entrepreneurial spirit is marked by a thriving private investment marketplace. In Europe, they like to talk about uses for the invested funds. In America, we talk about opportunity for investors to grow their money through the best possible return on investment (ROI).

These are two completely different mindsets, and the difference between the two says everything about why Europe is so terrible at fostering business and economic growth.What the Euro-Scold and her friends understand is that they’re not set up at the moment to give Europeans incentive to invest at scale in European ventures. They’ve come to realize that they simply don’t have the kind of investment infrastructure that incentivizes individual Europeans to invest.

Americans are different. It’s in this country’s DNA to try new things, to take risks, to innovate, to invent, to sometimes fail, to get back up, and to start over – all with as little government involvement as possible.

We love our stories of companies like Apple starting in Steve Jobs’ parents’ garage. We love it when we see Elon Musk make a ton of money and then gamble it all on multiple companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, to really blow expectations away and change the world. Americans don’t need a government to incentivize them into investing in these world-changing companies. The default impulse in America is for large swaths of potential investors to compete against each other to get in on some of that action.

Our markets are vibrant and exciting, sometimes too exciting, but still, they are nothing like the lukewarm European startup climate. Individual Americans, through their 401(k) plans at work, are collectively invested in mostly American companies to the tune of $10 trillion. IRA accounts represent another $18 trillion. Americans invested directly in mutual funds total close to $6 trillion. All U.S. retirement assets total more than $47 trillion, and that doesn’t even touch on the sheer level of individual investing that happens on a daily basis on Wall Street.

Metaphorically speaking, while American entrepreneurialism has been rockin’ and rollin’ for well over 100 years, the EU can’t decide whether it wants one lump of sugar or two in its afternoon tea, right before it takes its afternoon nap. And so, the Euro-Scold is seeking baby steps in trying to gently nudge Europeans to move chunks of their money from the safety of savings accounts to the risky world of startup funding. Good luck with that.

[..]

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It’s his identity. His Canadian followers demand he defeats Trump.

• Carney Picked a Trade War With Trump—But Why? (Victor Davis Hanson)

Canada, everybody likes Canada. Come on. We all have—I have a brother-in-law who’s Canadian and a very nice person. But there’s three things to remember about Canada, this dispute. Number one are the issues, and they’re real. Number two is the timing. Why now? And number three, why does Mark Carney seem so angry?


He’s not a Stephen Harper, that wonderful prime minister that I think all of us on the conservative side, but all Americans in general, really admired. And he’s not Brian Mulroney, whom I admired, who just passed away not too long ago. So there’s three issues. There’s Carney, there’s the timing, and there’s the problem. The problem is that Canada pretty much got into a habit the last few years of running up a $50 billion to $70 billion surplus with the United States. Not as bad as Mexico, but under Donald Trump’s vision of symmetry, he wanted to address it.

And what made it egregious is we had a North American Free Trade Association, which was supposed to eliminate the need for tariffs and taxes on imported and exported goods because there would be fair dealing and there would not be differences very much. What Ross Perot… Remember he said that, that huge sucking sound of jobs—the sucking sound … and money. Yeah. That wasn’t gonna happen, we were told by [Bill] Clinton and [Al] Gore. And it did, and Mexico had a $200 billion. And the weird thing is, we told Mexico, “You’re not going to get Chinese cheap dump parts and assemble them and be the gateway for China to evade tariffs, to get, undercut our jobs.”

And they said, “Okay, we won’t do it.” Then we said, “We’re going to tax, we’re gonna start your remittances at 1%, $65 billion …” And we said that because we had 30 million illegal immigrants, mostly from Latin America and Mexico, who were largely recipients in some fashion of American largesse: housing, education, food, health care subsidies. We’re not gonna pay that and free them free cash to become the largest source of foreign exchange in Mexico, which we are.

Jack Fowler: Money, that probably had not been taxed in the U.S. either.

Victor Davis Hanson: No. No. And never had. It was probably cash. Then we tried to tell them about the cartels, and the point is, we were making progress, but not so much with Canada. They kept running this surplus. And then we said there were other peripheral issues. You promised to meet your NATO goals, and you never did. Last year they may have done it, but they may have done it by bookkeeping that counted salaries and infrastructure rather than just militarily strict budgeting.

And if they did, it was like 1.98%, 2.01% of GDP. So they were reliant on America’s nuclear shield and protection, and nobody in their right mind in America ever thought that if the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans threatened Canada, they would not be protected by us, either through anti-ballistic missile systems or forward … And they have no military. I think they have 79 jets that are functional. Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Kuwait have 300. Israel has 400.

Jack Fowler: And their landmass just begs to have broader coverage.

Victor Davis Hanson: So the issue was Trump said, “Let’s reopen negotiation.” They were all set. They agreed on everything. And by the way, it only affected 5% of all of the total amount. And he said through his agents, Howard Lutnick and the others, “If you do what Mexico is doing and you import cheap aluminum and steel from China that does not have a market economy, then you’re breaking the understanding because you are assembling things in cars and autos and sending them here that are not solely Canadian-made.

“And you’re doing it at the bequest of China. And number two, you are telling all of our social media companies, Meta and sales companies that are online, Amazon, Google, Twitter,” the old Twitter, X, excuse me. “You’re telling them they have to pay 5% so that they don’t smother Canadian culture just off the top of all their revenues, hundreds of, I don’t know what it was, hundreds of millions of dollars. Why are you picking on these companies? And this is in addition to any other import fees or anything.

“We don’t do that with yours. When I read the National Post, the government doesn’t say to the National Post, ‘You are influencing American public opinion and you’re stifling our culture, so we need to tax you 5%.’” So that was the issue. And the other issue was that after a certain percent, tariffs went up 250% on dairy and farm products to Canada. And Canada said they were supporting independent entrepreneurial family farms. But like everything Carney says, it’s not accurate.

If you’re a Canadian farmer or you’re a Canadian egg producer, whatever, you get an allotment from the government. You can’t just go out and start something, just like you can’t set up an X-ray or a CT center. Everything is controlled. So the idea that the United States was gonna drive you out, maybe it could hurt you if we ever got up to the 250. They said, “It’s 250%” but we never really charge you.” And we said, “We never really charge you because all of our companies, when they meet your little quota, they can’t send anymore because it’ll be up to 250%, so they self-restrict it.” So that was the situation. Carney then blew up and said, “We’re not going to let the United States destroy our sovereignty and tell us who we have to trade with.”

Subtext: If we want to help communist China dump product in the United States by assembling it into our automobiles, trucks, etc., at cheap stuff, which even our steel and aluminum people don’t want, and our companies and unions want to agree with the Americans and restrict it, we’re gonna walk out. And more importantly, if you don’t wanna pay, then you’re stifling the French language. So it was all misdirection, number one, and it didn’t really make that much difference because, as I said, it was only a tariff. So why did he blow up?

[..]

Yeah. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Exactly. And there are key Senate races in where? Maine, right on the border, Michigan, right on the border, and Wisconsin. And so, what Carney was trying to do was to get people in the United States sympathetic to Canada, and here’s Donald Trump again. And Donald Trump helped fuel that when he said he was gonna rename Lake Ontario, Lake America. Lake Ontario’s 55% of its mass is in Canada. I think most Americans don’t care that it’s called Lake Ontario. This was the way he was trolling them. But the Left went crazy as if they never rename things, which they rename everything.

So my point is, he took two issues that were not really issues. He blew them up, he stormed out, and he did this to tell the Canadian electorate, “Don’t try to break away or flirt with America or flirt with yourself as an independence providence—whatever it is, ’cause I am standing up for Pan-Canadianism against the Americans.” And then he was telling the Americans in Michigan, in Maine, and in Wisconsin, “Your prices are higher? It’s because your stupid president has tariffs and went after us.” What he didn’t really tell them is that, when Alberta’s, I guess it was Mr. Ford, said we might cut off oil exports, the Americans shrugged their shoulders and said:

“Go ahead. We’re the largest producer of oil and gas in the world. The Persian Gulf is settling down. Price of oil is going down. But more importantly, you have a heavy crude sulfurous product. Your own provinces will not let you send it easily on pipelines to transport centers where you can send it to China. You send it right across the border to the United States. “We refine it, and guess what? Natural gas, in the case of natural gas, you can’t even send it to Montreal through your own territory because you have these provincial restrictions, environmental nuttiness. So we take your natural gas and we pass it along and plug it into our pipelines, and then it goes back up to Montreal.”

They didn’t even know that when they walked out.

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I like Sundance, obviously. But he shouldn’t claim Musk is wrong for something he said 15 years ago. BVD was in a very different situation back then.

“China even goes so far as to fund alarmism research about climate change because they are making money selling carbon credit certificates..”

“BYD is, in essence, not a car per se’, but a mechanism to generate a carbon credit certificate that can be sold to other car companies.”

• BYD Inquires to Purchase Stellantis Auto Plant in Canada (CTH)

For about a year CTH has predicted Chinese auto manufacturers BYD and GEELY would take over shuttered auto plants in Canada. Specifically, six months ago, against the backdrop warning of Stellantis, Toyota and Honda telling the Canadian government that without the USMCA they would shift auto production to the USA, CTH predicted BYD and GEELY would make moves on those closed facilities. he move by China is easy to predict. Prime Minister Mark Carney has opened the door to Chinese EVs. It would be in Beijing’s best interest to retool and take control of closed plants to begin mass production in North America.


Chinese EV manufacturing in Canada serves two purposes. First, they would not be limited in production to the cars that remain in Canada as part of the agreement. Factually, China would use their Canadian footprint as an export hub into Europe and save money on current distribution. Remember, Europe is losing their auto manufacturing base to China and Germany is laying off 100,000+ auto workers. Second, the appearance of Chinese auto manufacturing in North America would put pressure on the United States to permit their cheap EVs to enter the market.

Today Bloomberg is reporting exactly what we predicted. Chinese automaker BYD (Build Your Dream) is asking local officials about the currently idled Stellantis auto plant. Things are following a very predictable timeline.

BLOOMBERG – Chinese carmaker BYD Co. inquired about taking over an idled Stellantis NV plant in the Toronto suburbs, according to a local politician, signaling possible global interest in Canadian auto hubs in the midst of a trade battle with the US. Patrick Brown, the mayor of Brampton, Ontario, said BYD approached him about six months ago to talk about making buses at the factory. Stellantis had been retooling the plant to manufacture the Jeep Compass, but the company halted that plan last year when the US adopted a policy of tariffs on foreign autos.

Brown said he also received inquiries from Leapmotor International, a joint venture between Zhejiang Leapmotor Technology Co. and Stellantis, as well as from an Italian automaker. Bloomberg News reported in April that Stellantis was discussing options for building electric vehicles in Canada with Leapmotor. Most of the vehicles Canada produces are exported to the US, but the trade war and the lack of a new product earmarked for the 40-year-old factory have clouded the future for thousands of people who work there. Unifor, the union representing those workers, said this month that Stellantis is considering selling the plant. (read more)


I went to Russia in 2024, because what I was hearing in western media about the sanctions did not align with what I was seeing from reports inside Russia. Before I went into Russia, I spent several weeks in Northern and Eastern Europe visiting various institutions, reading material and checking to see how systems in Europe were engaging with commerce given the Russian sanctions. It wasn’t very exciting work, and sometimes I literally just sat in the lobbies of banks listening to conversations.

When I went into Russia (April, May, June and July ’24) I noticed many of the “Uber cars” were BYD brand, Chinese electric vehicles. It made sense given two years of existing sanctions and few cars from Europe or America available except under costly brokerage fees for acquisition. The Russians like the Geely brand better, but BYDs are much cheaper. A brand new BYD costs around $5,000 to $10,000 USD, in some places even less. Then later I noticed even more of these BYD cars in Europe. I started to pay attention to them and saw them everywhere.

When I went back into Russia a year later in 2025, there was a very noticeable increase in BYD cars. It was crazy, they were everywhere. My travels also took me to southeast Asia and again those damned BYD’s were all over the place. In Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, these BYD’s were everywhere, maybe even 30% of total vehicle traffic at times – most certainly well over 50% of all EVs – and there are digital billboards for “Build Your Dream” (BYD) all over the place throughout Asia.

Australia is stocked full of those things, and the middle east, yup, even there too. It became increasingly weird to notice. So many were visible I was wondering how the heck China can mass produce and ship this many cheap EVs so fast. Then as serendipity would have it, I ran into a Chinese guy, professionally an actuary, in a hotel restaurant. He explained to me that China produces the BYD not to make money from the automobile, but rather to sell the carbon credits the automobile generates within the auto industry.

The actual value to Beijing is in selling the carbon credit worthiness to various automakers who are fined or penalized by their government for producing gasoline powered vehicles. BYD is, in essence, not a car per se’, but a mechanism to generate a carbon credit certificate that can be sold to other car companies. It’s the carbon credit certificate that generates the revenue, not the sale of the vehicle. As my dinner guest explained, the auto insurance industry was having fits about this because the actuaries couldn’t accurately put a correct figure on the cost of the insurance warrantee within the industry (that’s another story).

The bottom line is that China is manufacturing a product to create a carbon credit certificate in response to the demand for carbon credits from all the world auto-makers. Any nation that has a penalty or fine attached to their climate goals is a customer. Those are nations with fines or quotas associated with the production of gasoline powered engines if the auto company doesn’t hit the legislated target for sales of electric vehicles.

In essence, EU/AU/CA/RU/ASEAN car companies buy Chinese car company carbon credits, to avoid the EU/AU/CA/RU/ASEAN fines. The Chinese then use the carbon credit revenue to subsidize even lower priced Chinese EVs to the EU/AU/CA/RU/ASEAN car markets, thereby undercutting the EU/AU/CA/RU/ASEAN car companies that also produce EVs.

Big Panda brilliantly exploits the ridiculous pontificating climate scam and has an interest in perpetuating -even emphasizing- the need for the EU/AU/RU/ASEAN countries to keep pushing their climate agenda. China even goes so far as to fund alarmism research about climate change because they are making money selling carbon credit certificates on the back end of the scam to the western fear mongers. This is friggin’ brilliant.

My dinner buddy was in the business of identifying the cost/benefit equation between the climate change fines and the prices Big Panda could charge for the carbon credit certificates. If, as an example, Brussels dropped the quotas for EVs, China would need to lower the price for the carbon credit certificates. So, Beijing wants Brussels to make sure they don’t drop the quotas. See how that works?

The climate change alarmists are helping China’s economy by pushing ever escalating fear of climate change. You just cannot make this stuff up. What does the outcome look like? Well, in this example we see thousands of unsold BYDs piling up in countries that emphasize climate regulations with no restrictions on the import of EVs (which most don’t even manufacture), which is almost every country. Big Panda doesn’t care about the car itself; they care about generating the carbon credit certificate to sell in the various carbon exchanges.

Put this context to the recent announcement by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney about his trade deal with China to accept 49,000 EVs this year. Prime Minister Carney bragged about getting the Chinese to agree to only super low prices for the Canadian market. Mark Carney was very proud of his accomplishment to get much lower priced vehicles for Canadian EV purchasers. No doubt Big Panda left the room laughing as soon as Carney made his grand announcement.

1. China sells EV’s in Canada, creating credits available on the carbon exchange scheme. Europe et al will purchase the carbon credits because Bussels has fines against EU car companies.

2. With a foothold already established in Europe, China will then take the money generated by the carbon credit purchases and lower the prices of the Chinese EV cars sold in Canada.

It’s gets funnier.

3. Carney bragged about forcing China to only sell low price EV’s as part of the trade agreement. The low price of the EV’s in Canada will be subsidized by Europe. China doesn’t pay or lose a dime.

But wait….

4. Carney can’t do anything about the scheme he has just enmeshed Canada into, because Canada has a Carbon Credit exchange in law.

Big Panda wins again.

[…] In a statement published Thursday, BYD said sales of its battery-powered cars rose nearly 28% to 2.26 million units.

Musk openly laughed at the mention of BYD while being interviewed on Bloomberg TV in October 2011. He said he did not see the company as a competitor to Tesla, adding: “I don’t think they have a great product.” Meanwhile, Tesla said Friday it delivered 1.64 million vehicles in 2025. [SOURCE]

Elon thinks BYD are building cars. They aren’t.

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Debt Rattle August 23 2026

Aug 232026
 
 August 23, 2026  Posted by at 9:51 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  36 Responses »


René Magritte Blow to the heart 1952


• How Trump Tried To Bribe The Head Of The IRGC (Pepe Escobar)
• President Trump Could to Be the Greatest Statesman of the 21st Century (PCR)
• Russia Says Ready For ‘New Ideas’ From US On Ending Ukraine War (ZH)
• With Ukraine’s Corruption, You Haven’t Seen The Worst Yet (Amar)
• Who Needs Islam? (A.J. Christopher)
• US Islamic Leaders See Ballot Box as Path to Paradise (Paul Sperry)
• Democracy R.I.P. (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Trump Takes the Ballroom Fight to the Supreme Court, Wins a Reprieve (Manney)
• Trump Destroys Tucker, MTG and Massie in One Epic Post (Matt Margolis)
• Why Embracing AI Is Essential for Higher Education (Kent Ingle)
• JPMorgan Saw Humanoid Production Inside Tesla’s Fremont Factory (ZH)

 


 

https://twitter.com/GuntherEagleman/status/2090917635227562425?s=20 https://twitter.com/ConstitustionX/status/2090968455067717689?s=20 https://twitter.com/DOGEQEEN/status/2090876838071472229?s=20 https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2090837797460427097?s=20 https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/2090926183063933344?s=20

 


 


“Empire of Chaos, Lies, Plunder, Piracy. And bribes.”

That’s the US according to Pepe… Then what would Pepe say about Iran, one wonders.

NB: If Trump can gain advantage by bribing the IRGC head, kudos for him.

• How Trump Tried To Bribe The Head Of The IRGC (Pepe Escobar)

Empire of Chaos, Lies, Plunder, Piracy. And bribes.


Mike Pompeo, former aspiring Tony Soprano, admitted: “We lie, we cheat, we steal.” And we bribe.

A Transition Protocol source, as we revealed live, is unequivocal: The President of the United States – despite having “won” the war on Iran countless times, at least in the Vociferation stakes – made a major attempt to induce IRGC Commander-in-Chief Gen. Ahmad Vahidi and senior Iranian military leadership to break with the government in Tehran through enormous financial inducements. So here we have POTUS playing good ol’ Divide and Rule – which the Brits learned from the Roman Empire – to fracture the IRGC from the inside.

This was not a mere exploratory diplomatic contact. Trump did not merely want to determine whether Vahidi supported U.S.-Iran negotiations.According to our source – placed in the tight inner circle of Leader Mojtaba Khamenei – this was a full leadership-buyout operation, modeled on the Venezuela playbook, to fracture the Iranian state.The attempt miserably failed. Because Ahmad Vahidi completely rejected it.

The Trump administration had already created a somewhat direct conduit to Vahidi through Nechirvan Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Region in Iraq, way back in May 2026. Then-DNI Tulsi Gabbard contacted Barzani – fully authorized by Trump and Vice-President JD Vance – and an encrypted connection to Vahidi was subsequently established through Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. The channel stayed dormant – or in coma, for nearly 3 months. This time though Trump attempted to turn the channel into a de facto fracturing of the Iranian leadership, employing the conceptual precedent in Venezuela: isolate the central command; handsomely bribe those immediately around it for “cooperation”; and create the internal conditions for regime decapitation.

The source describes “billions of dollars” being waved as inducements to several members of the senior IRGC leadership through Vahidi. All that while Trump was on Hardcore Vociferation mode threatening Tehran and spinning his “control” of the Strait of Hormuz. Nothing so far has been independently confirmed in public. And probably will not. But that does not mean the source is not credible. The source is part of Leader Mojtaba’s tight inner circle; heard all about it directly from Vahidi; and later was fully authorized to disclose the extremely sensitive information to Pakistani mediators, especially Field Marshal Asim Munir, who Trump keeps calling virtually every day asking for “help” getting the Iranians back at the negotiating table (when he in fact blew up the negotiating table).

I bribe, therefore I am
Vahidi is not a peripheral military figure. Far from it: he is the commander of the IRGC – the institutional center of gravity of Iranian hard power. The Trump administration wanted access to the top of the IRGC itself.But they bet on the wrong man. The number two man in Iran right now, overseeing everything including top IRGC decisions, is Mohsen Rezaee: the new secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and personal representative of Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

Mohsen Rezaee is a former IRGC commander and his leadership is uncontested – as proven by the trust placed in him by the Leader. The overarching framework guiding his decisions – and people like Vahidi – is the Shi’te sense of moral duty, ethics, self-sacrifice and the spirit of Sovereign Resistance, values completely alien to an Empire of Grifters. It’s no wonder that a crass neo-Crassus in War-a-Lago/Washington actually believed that a battle-tested military leader – and those around him – could sell the fate of a civilization-state for a mere bribe, and induced to defect, stand aside or facilitate regime change.

Applying the exact same Venezuela methodology means that the Trump administration actually believed they could translate it to a Shi’ite Iran context. That proves once again an astonishing degree of cultural stupidity. The methodology may work for corrupt Latin American political/military elites: History tells us it happened so many times. But to believe that offering protection, political survival, loads of money and/or a future share of the spoils to an IRGC that is far from being a loose political entourage around a vulnerable presidential palace fully demonstrates how the Empire of Grifters has no clue about the institutional cohesion of the Iranian security state.

All across the Global South, this will be regarded for what it is: another episode of the neo-Crassus Art of the Deal. Complementing another recent episode, where the capo fraternizes with the DPRK then asks South Korea – “I asked for $10 billion” – for protection money. That’s the pizzo. Not to be confused with pizza. Pizzo is Sicilian slang for extortion money.

Mafia, piracy, bribing, extortion: talk about a flexible Empire at work.

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“President Trump Has the Opportunity to Be the Greatest Statesman of the 21st Century But there is No One in Trump’s Government to show Trump his Opportunity..”

Paul Craig Roberts

Trump should admit Iran was a mistake?! But it wasn’t.

• President Trump Could to Be the Greatest Statesman of the 21st Century (PCR)

Some responses to my discussion with Nima on Dialogue Works https://www.youtube.com/live/RSeBWcdz9vI and to my posted column https://paulcraigroberts.org/admitting-a-mistake-is-the-road-to-peace/ agreed that


[..] my proposal that President Trump end Washington’s conflict with Iran by admitting it was a mistake and stating that the war was over made a lot of sense. But they questioned whether a narcissist, such as Trump, could admit a mistake even it the admission rescued him from a dilemma for which he has no solution except talk of using nuclear weapons.

Think about it for a moment. A narcissist wants the rest of humanity to think as well of himself as he does. By admitting a mistake and, thereby, disposing of a dangerous conflict, the narcissist Trump receives praise from the world. He is elevated from buffoon to Statesman. So, of course, President Trump can admit a mistake and, thereby, deliver into his hands the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump can raise his estimation in the eyes of the world by admitting that Washington’s war with Russia using Ukraine as the proxy was also a mistake and is over.

The world would explode in applause for President Trump. America would be redeemed for all of its illegitimate wars. America would be re-established as the moral leader of the world. The problem is not that Trump is a narcissist, but that he is surrounded by Zionists, including his son-in-law to whom he trusts various negotiations. There is no one to tell Trump how easy it is for him to become the most successful and admired Statesman of the 21st century. Trump himself is too preoccupied issuing threats to see his opportunity.

When I made my suggestion I made the point that there was no one around President Trump to show him his opportunity. Trump’s government, essentially, is allied with Israel, and this leaves Trump with the likelihood of going down as the worst president in US history instead of the Greatest Statesman Of All Time.

Read more …

Chase out the nazis. Is Russia’s first “idea”. Call them when you’re done.

• Russia Says Ready For ‘New Ideas’ From US On Ending Ukraine War (ZH)

The Kremlin has newly said it is ready for dialogue with Washington and open to ideas for ending the conflict in Ukraine, but still says it will not compromise on Russia’s core aims. A senior Russian diplomat has stressed that any future talks must align with President Vladimir Putin’s position. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov stated in an interview published by national media on Friday that Russia is open to proposals that are in line with “realities on the ground.”

“The Russian Federation is ready to listen to any reasonable proposals and ideas that are in line with the goals set by the Russian president and meet the ‘realities on the ground’,” Ryabkov said. “At this stage, it is more important to what extent Washington is able to influence the decisions of the Kyiv regime and its European sponsors, who still dream of a ‘strategic defeat’ of Russia,” he added.

The remarks suggest that the Kremlin is responding positively and openly to recent overtures initiated by Washington. “US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has indicated the need to put forward new ideas toward a settlement, and we are ready to listen to them if this constitutes the mentioned ‘efforts’ of the Americans,” Ryabkov continued. “We remain open to dialogue with Washington, but that does not mean that we will abandon our fundamental positions,” he added. Time is working against Ukraine and its Western backers in Europe, “something they will have to reckon with,” Ryabkov additionally pointed out.

President Trump has this summer signaled that his outlook on Ukraine’s chances on the battlefield may have softened or changed of late: By the time Trump and Zelensky met at a NATO summit in July, the American president said the Ukrainian leader had “been very effective” in the war. “We’ve actually developed a good relationship,” Trump added. But as Ukraine’s strikes have intensified, so have Russia’s — and Kyiv faces major challenges in defending against them because of shortages of American Patriot air defense missiles.

Zelensky, for his part, has been explicit that the new long-range strikes are meant to force Moscow to the negotiating table under conditions that favor Kiev. The LA Times has recently outlined significant developments this summer, which are part of this risky strategy:

As part of the campaign against oil infrastructure, Kyiv said it hit Russia’s largest oil refinery, more than 1,550 miles from Ukraine.
Kyiv has also targeted defense manufacturing centers. It hit a factory making navigation systems multiple times, including with its own Flamingo missile.
In July and August, Ukraine struck warehouses for major Russian online retailer Wildberries. Kyiv said the company helps supply the Russian military. Moscow denies that.
Many of Ukraine’s strikes on Russian air defenses and radar are around Russian-held Crimea and are often carried out with drones.


But there are still no signs that Russia’s own retaliatory strikes are letting up – instead they are intensifying and becoming more and more deadly – also at a moment Ukraine’s air defense munitions and capabilities are dwindling fast.

Read more …

Each new scandal around Zelensky’s circle exposes a system of theft, cover-ups and rival clans – while suggesting worse still lies beneath..

• With Ukraine’s Corruption, You Haven’t Seen The Worst Yet (Amar)

The politics of Vladimir Zelensky’s Ukraine remain a smelly swamp, producing a ceaseless seepage of scandals occasionally percolating to the surface in big, toxic bubbles that pop with a noxious stink. Recently, for instance, the returning ambassador to the US – no less – has become the subject of a corruption case bad enough to require bail equivalent to $130,000.


The very latest Zelensky regime stink bubble to burst, however, is centered on a former double minister. Before ending up at the center of yet another big pile of dirt, compliments of Zelensky and cronies, Herman Galushchenko had served as minister of energy and then of justice. And if you know Kiev’s political culture – for want of better terms – you won’t be surprised to hear that, in the end, he ended up arrested under suspicion of very large-scale corruption.

To be precise, Galushchenko is one of the main suspects in the massive scandal featuring the Energoatom, aka Mindich-Gate after Timur Mindich, an intimate friend of Zelensky who, clearly tipped off about his impending arrest, has long fled to Israel. Galushchenko, too, tried to run, but was not fast enough, or more likely, lacked the same level of premium protection, namely from the president himself, and got caught at the border.

Yet if the story had ended there, this would not be Ukraine. Now we are into the sequel, and it’s at least as bad as the first part. Because in essence, Galushchenko in a cell was a thought that Zelensky and his crew could not tolerate. Surely out of sheer mafia-like camaraderie! Perish the thought – they were afraid of any deals the former minister might strike and names he might name. But getting Galushchenko out was expensive: Here as well the court had set bail, and as Mindich-Gate was a $100-million case, the bail wasn’t cheap.

Hence, this time the scandal is not about the embezzling, extorting, or stealing of humungous amounts of money, Ukrainian-establishment style. But that’s only because the stealing had been done already and phase two had started: laundering the loot. In legalese, the official case is about an attempt to “legalize criminally acquired property.” In practice, this meant weaving up a web of criminal deception to pay Galushchenko’s bail, well above $3 million – we are in the big league now – with dirty money made to look clean.

Central to this operation and the highest-ranking official to have lost her position at this point is Irina Mudraya, the deputy head of Zelensky’s very own office, as well as a former deputy minister of justice. But the circle of suspects is much wider, as always in Ukraine where corruption is the passionate national sport of those running and ruining the country, while its ordinary citizens are hunted by military press gangs in broad daylight.

Also officially under suspicion and investigation are Maksim Mikitas, a former parliamentary deputy; Vadim Stolar, a currently serving parliamentary deputy; Viktor Dubovik, another high official from Zelensky’s presidential office; Elena Ferens, a deputy minister of justice; Nikolay Gladishchenko, Oleg Stupak, Liudmila Snygur, all three high up in the management of state-owned Sens Bank, which served as the financial vehicle for the launder-and-pay-for-Galushchenko scheme.

Then we also have “businessman,” a “person linked to Mikitas,” the director of the Metrostroy company, a driver who also happens to run Montazh Servis (a construction company by the name of it – good for concrete foundations to bury the talkative), and a bodyguard who doubles as the director of a firm calling itself The Philosophy of Development.

These, in sum, are typical pillars of the Ukrainian establishment as it really is. Suffice it to say that, in 2018, high-flyer Irina Mudraya, trained at Lviv University, received a ‘Best Legal Adviser in Banking and Financial Law’ award (sure, just be honest next time and call it ‘Best Consigliere in Mafia Ukraine’). In 2021, she won ‘Women Leaders who have Influenced the Development of the Legal Community’ (and unfortunately, she probably has). And just two years ago, Business Woman magazine honored her achievements in “Politics and Diplomacy.”

In short, if the Cohen Brothers were to make a very dark, caustic comedy about corruption in Ukraine, this would be their cast. Not all of it, of course, because rest assured, many accomplices and even leaders have not been caught and won’t ever be caught, including the man everyone is always thinking about but can’t ever name when the latest stink bubble pops – the president himself.

Yet one man who may be looking at an uncertain near-future in conjunction with ‘Operation Forrest Gump’ – the code name for this investigation – is the current head of Zelensky’s administration, Kirill Budanov. Formerly mostly busy with black ops, lies, and terrorism, Budanov has taken his office as Zelensky’s top manager only recently. His predecessor Andrey Yermak, another very close, intimate friend of Zelensky, had been forced out because of his deep involvement in Mindich-Gate. Or probably, really due to both his own crimes and those of Zelensky himself that needed a fall guy.

As caught by eavesdropping, Mudraya reminded an accomplice that “he says that corruption needs to be organized and controlled; we must not fight it.” According to Ukrainska Pravda, the mysterious “he,” the real author of that arrogantly direct and brashly cynical statement, was her boss Budanov.

It is intriguing, as another Ukrainian publication has pointed out that it is precisely Ukrainska Pravda that has dared name Budanov. For the outlet is among the supporters of Mikhail Fedorov, the tech whizz kid and former minister of defense, who has turned from a Zelensky regime insider into a challenger by calling for presidential elections even during wartime. That is, in reality, for calling for an end to the Zelensky regime, because the incumbent, polls show, can be beaten.

Let’s set aside that Fedorov has demolished, in passing, a favorite propaganda lie shared by official Kiev and the West, namely that the Ukrainian constitution does not allow for such elections during wartime. In reality, the constitution does no such thing. Politically, the key fact is that Fedorov has thrown his hat in the ring. And in that coming fight, it is very likely that one of his main rivals will be Budanov.

The swamp that is Ukrainian politics keeps festering. The greed and cynicism of Kiev’s ‘elite’ knows no limits. At the same time what may be even more tragic for Ukraine is that any attempt to reign in the rampant corruption by finally holding everyone accountable, no matter how high up, is not only unlikely to succeed but dishonest too.

Naming Budanov? Yes, but not because he should face scrutiny and accountability but because he needs to be weakened so that another ambitious establishment representative has a better chance at beating him at coming elections. In Kiev, stories of messianic redeemers are popular again and again. Zelensky was once the most enthusiastically endorsed of them all. And yet it is his regime that has become the very worst. Why would Fedorov be any different? Or for that matter, anyone else. Ukraine does not need personnel change; it needs a massive reset.

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It’s either Christianity or Islam. There is no space in between. but the Christians who leave the Church, think there is. Ask the French. You can only fight a religious war with .. religion.

• Who Needs Islam? (A.J. Christopher)

Short answer: Nobody.


Long answer: Not only does nobody need it, but the world would be better without it. Nowhere does Islam touch that doesn’t get worse. Nowhere does Islam conquer that doesn’t leave its inhabitants more oppressed. Nowhere does Islam “flourish” that doesn’t witness a new dark age in terms of freedom, education, and human progress. And nowhere does Islam reign that doesn’t unleash the darkest impulses of man’s insatiable desire for power.

Look around the world. Where are the trouble spots? In Nigeria and Sudan, Muslims are massacring Christians. In Israel, Muslims are massacring Jews. In India, Muslims are massacring Hindus. In Bangladesh, Muslims are massacring Buddhists. All across Europe, Muslims are massacring atheists. And within majority-Muslim countries, Muslims are murdering women. Muslims are murdering gays. Muslims are murdering religious minorities. Muslims are murdering men whose beards aren’t long enough. Muslims are murdering young, unarmed protesters marching for the right to their own consciences.

And for practitioners of selective history who sniff that Islamic Spain was a far more tolerant and learned place than anywhere else in medieval Europe, I’ll remind them that this “tolerance” extended only insofar as Christians and Jews accepted permanent status as second-class citizens. The Islamic caliphate ran the most brutal slave trade on the entire continent, outdone only in later years by the Ottoman slave trade on the other end. Not coincidentally, the only places in the world that chattel slavery still exists are in Islamic countries.

Now, I imagine that Muslims would counterargue that the vulgar terrorism and oppression and slavery aside, the point of religion is not to make your life easier, but to make you a better person. And they would argue that, to this end, the average Muslim lives a more austere, pious life than the average Western Christian. And fair enough. One of my biggest peeves against modern Christianity in America is that too many so-called “Christians” simply church shop until they settle on some woke, easygoing, “you do you” church which tells them they’re fine exactly the way they are. The “Christian” then gets to feel spiritual and check a box every Sunday without ever having to do the hard work of self-betterment.

I’m not arguing for the beards and white dresses for all men, nor the bee suits for all women. But there is something to be said for cultures that value at least a little modesty, where tween girls don’t walk into the local Starbucks dressed like pole dancers, and where tween boys don’t slouch around in dirty basketball shorts while sporting those repugnant “llama” haircuts. There is fair criticism to be lodged against a culture that worships “choice” and then uses that “choice” to make the absolute worst choices available every single time in every walk of life. There is a human decency and maturity that resists the temptation to immerse oneself in lifestyles that value only the immediate gratification of the vulgar sensual pleasures.

But wishy-washy Christianity and materialistic atheism are still preferable to arrogant, sociopathic Islam. Living a more austere lifestyle is meaningless unless it results in making you a better person. How does Islam make you better? If it makes you a devoted father, a faithful husband, a merciful brother, and a humble neighbor, that’s great. But if it makes you an abusive father, a misogynistic husband, a genocidal brother, and a tyrannical neighbor, then Islam has made you far worse than you would have been without it. And it will not have mattered how much pork you avoided or how many times a day you prayed.

The Muslim who plows his truck through a Christmas market in Europe, who throws acid in the face of an uncovered woman in Pakistan, or who shoots fellow soldiers on an American army base is raging not against the unbeliever, but against his own impotency. And the same goes for their millions upon millions of Muslim sympathizers worldwide. The allure isn’t a desire for a relationship with God. The allure is control and revenge, with envy and resentment fueling it. Islam is toxic masculinity in its vilest form.

You don’t rage against the West because you think it’s God’s will. You rage against the West because we outperform you in every measurable metric of human achievement and success, and you hate us for it. And spare me the talk about the inherent mercy of your religion. Sure, you’re peaceful enough when you’re less than one percent of the population. But in every instance where enough Muslims amass to gain the upper hand over non-Muslims, you instantly turn on them.

Dearborn. Minneapolis. Paris. Ceuta. Marseille. Rotterdam. London. Malmo. Brussels. New York City. Rinse. Repeat. This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It is woven into, and inseparable from, the edicts of your religion. And if the entity you worship is commanding you to commit slavery, rape, and genocide against innocent people, I got some bad news for you. That’s not God you’re worshipping.

It’s the other guy.

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“We are letting Muslim Brotherhood jihadists set up an apartheid system inside America, a double society that will give them a dangerous foothold when they have the numbers to really push their broader jihadi agenda,”

• US Islamic Leaders See Ballot Box as Path to Paradise (Paul Sperry)

The call to prayer is sounding across America. From Hamtramck, Michigan, to Paterson, New Jersey, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, rooftop amplifiers remind growing numbers of Muslim faithful five times a day of their duties with the Arabic message that “Allah is the Greatest! There is no god but Allah!”


The so-called “adhan” is just one sign of how Islam is transforming pockets of the nation. As more Muslims participate in the country’s political life, running for office, influencing, and in some cases, even controlling local governments, they are putting their own stamps on their communities: renaming city streets after Arab homelands and mandating Islamic holidays and halal-only lunches in public schools, while even changing noise ordinances to the consternation of many non-Muslim neighbors.

Like Polish, German, Irish, and Italian immigrants before them, American Muslims now control several small cities. These include Hamtramck, which has an all-Muslim city council, as well as midsize cities like neighboring Dearborn. They are also wielding influence in large metropolises like New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s top staff is composed almost entirely of Muslims.

In one sense, this is just the continuation of the country’s deep tradition of offering newcomers the opportunity to contribute their own customs to American society. But some critics say this iteration of the immigrant story offers a distinct challenge. A number of leading Muslim candidates for office, for example, are so opposed to America’s longtime ally Israel that their rhetoric veers into antisemitism. And some, such as the Democratic Party candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, are being supported with campaign funds linked to Hamas front groups and the radical, pro-jihad Muslim Brotherhood, which federal authorities say has a secret plan for “destroying” America “from within.”

El-Sayed won his primary with at least $315,000 in Muslim Brotherhood-tied funds, a RealClearInvestigations examination of Federal Election Commission filings reveals, and he hopes his harsh attacks on “evil” Israel will help him become the first Muslim to sit in the U.S. Senate. Other Muslim candidates have ties to groups that have officially been designated as terror organizations, including al-Qaeda. Adam Hisham Hamawy, the Democratic nominee running for New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District, once maintained close ties to the late al-Qaeda “Blind Sheikh,” who was convicted for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, including acting as his translator, driver and defense witness.

Critics say electing Muslims to public office is freighted with other concerns. Many come from Islamic nations where corruption is the norm, and those ways have carried over to places like Hamtramck, where the majority of the city council is under active investigation for election fraud; and to Minneapolis, where Muslim lawmakers and the Muslim attorney general have been accused of protecting, even enabling, Somali immigrants who stole hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from state and federal welfare agencies as part of a massive fraud ring, according to the Justice Department. The 2026 Directory of Elected Muslim Officials reports that there are currently 228 American Muslim elected officials serving across 26 states.

Critics also warn that, unlike mainstream modern Christianity, Islam does not distinguish between the spiritual and political realms. Sharia law, for example, applies to religious and civic life because they are one and the same in Islam. Based on the Quran and other holy Islamic scripture, Sharia regulates Muslim worship, dress and diet. But it also sanctions practices at odds with not only American culture but also the U.S. legal system including domestic violence, polygamy, female circumcision, forced child marriage, honor killings, and militant jihad.

European Warning Signs
Republican lawmakers and counterterrorism experts fear that as Muslims win control of towns and cities, they may weaken the nation’s separation of church and state while creating the kind of dangerous “no-go” areas for non-Muslims that authorities now identify in some 900 enclaves of Europe with heavy concentrations of Muslim immigrants. Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Portugal, and Switzerland are among EU members that have passed laws aimed at curbing radical Islam. The French Senate also passed a law in May aimed at countering “Islamist Infiltration” of the country following a 2025 government report, “Muslim Brotherhood and Political Islam in France,” and a poll that year finding a majority of Muslims in France aged 15 to 24 prefer Sharia law over French law.

Many Republicans say Europe offers a warning sign. “Tolerating beachheads of radical Islam in our country is literally civilization suicide,” said Missouri Rep. Bob Onder during a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing on the growing internal threat from Islam. “We’re seeing in many cases a lack of assimilation [from Muslim immigrants]. They join these very closed groups that are committed to imposing Sharia law.” Tolerating that seems to be utter insanity, Onder added, especially if we see what s going on in Europe right now, what s going on in Germany, in London, in France. Democrats and Muslim-rights groups counter that fears of Sharia creeping deeper into society are overblown and a symptom of Islamophobia.

Actually, it doesn’t appear to be an issue anywhere in this country, countered Pennsylvania Rep. Mary Scanlon. In my district, we have a growing cultural center, Africatown, founded by immigrants-turned-citizens, many of whom are Muslim and have made huge contributions to our economic, cultural, charitable and civic life. There’s no evidence of any plot to impose Sharia law on non-believers of Islam, she added./ It s just not happening. ”

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PCR blames the Democrats. “[..].. it seems abandonment of citizen responsibility to vote for a Democrat Party that deliberately builds fraud into the voting system.”

• Democracy R.I.P. (Paul Craig Roberts)

The Democrats have completely corrupted the electoral system. Mail-in voting and street corner ballot boxes permit a significant number of fake ballots to be received at the last minute in order to “win” an election. Reasons have been institutionalized for throwing out ballots that vote “the wrong way.” Voter lists are crowded with dead people who are voted. The CARS system in Michigan is programmed to automatically register non-citizens to vote. Electronic voting machines are programmed to count Republican votes as fractions. It could take several votes for a Republican candidate to equal one vote. And the list goes on.


The Republicans are unable to correct these corruptions, because the Democrat judges and election officials will not permit it, declaring the corrective measures to be “racist.” Republicans would do likewise, but the Democrat judges won’t let them. What is allowable for Democrats is “racist” for Republicans. In Minnesota, a registered voter can personally vouch for the validity, and thereby right to vote, of eight unregistered voters without IDs, and a healthcare facility worker can vouch for an unlimited number of residents in healthcare facilities.

James O’Keefe has also demonstrated that this is the case. He appeared in Minnesota voting precincts dressed as a Muslim and was assured that it was possible for a registered voter to vouch for 8 others without IDs who could vote on the basis of his vouch for them. This is indeed Minnesota law since 1973. However the Minnesota Democrat Secretary of State was angered at the visual demonstration that such a law was really on the books and denounced the visual demonstration as “outrageous and totally unacceptable misconduct. We have zero tolerance for lying, lawbreaking, and disruptions at our polling places.”

There was no disruption, only politely asked questions answered matter-of-factly by election personnel. The corrupt Minnesota Democrats are trying to find some way of criminalizing impersonation of a Muslim. This is America today, a foreign country for someone of my generation.

In North Carolina, the Jewish Democrat governor vetoed a bill that would have required the state to cross-check voter registration rolls with death records. By vetoing the bill, he protected the Democrats’ ability to continue voting the dead. With Republicans representing Israel and Democrats adding socialism to their representation of immigrant-invaders, there is no one to represent Americans, who have no stake in the system.

To understand how corrupt the US electoral system is, consider that Judicial Watch had to bring lawsuits to force blue state Oregon to remove 800,000 ineligible voters from the voter rolls, and blue state Colorado to remove 372,000 ineligible voters. The US Justice Department has just joined Judicial Watch’s lawsuit to force blue state California to remove 873,000 ineligibles from voter rolls in order to comply with the National Voter Registration Act.

There are plenty of reasons not to vote for either party. But it seems abandonment of citizen responsibility to vote for a Democrat Party that deliberately builds fraud into the voting system.

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Good history lesson.

• Trump Takes the Ballroom Fight to the Supreme Court, Wins a Reprieve (Manney)

Chief Justice John Roberts gave President Donald Trump something Friday that lower courts were determined to deny him: time to keep building. Roberts issued an administrative stay allowing construction of Trump’s White House ballroom project to continue while the Supreme Court considers the administration’s emergency request. Work that was supposed to stop Friday can keep moving.

https://twitter.com/nicksortor/status/2090866000010805446?s=20


This isn’t the final Supreme Court ruling, and Roberts didn’t settle the larger dispute. His order simply freezes the lower-court restriction while the justices consider what comes next.

For Trump, though, a project already about 65% complete doesn’t grind to a halt while lawyers argue over whether he was allowed to improve the White House in the first place. Trump was understandably pleased. Trump described the ballroom and military complex as vital to national security. The complex includes the ballroom above ground and extensive security facilities below it. Here’s where the outrage becomes harder to swallow. Presidents have been altering the White House for generations. Theodore Roosevelt ordered construction of the East and West Wings in 1902, while William Howard Taft enlarged the West Wing in 1909 and built the first Oval Office.

From White House History:
• 1909: The West Wing was doubled in size and included the first presidential Oval Office centered on the south facade. William Howard Taft became the first president to work in the Oval Office.
• 1912: On February 14, President Taft signed legislation in an Oval Office ceremony authorizing statehood for Arizona and New Mexico. He became the first chief executive to preside over 48 states.
• 1917: President Wilson signed the declaration of war against the Central Powers on April 7. The Executive Office Building immediately became a war center open around the clock as 60 to 75 clerks and other personnel manned the telegraphs, telephones, and the equivalent of a map room.
• 1923: Warren Harding became the first president to die in office since the construction of the executive offices. His desk in the Oval Office was draped with black crepe in memoriam.

Franklin Roosevelt later expanded the West Wing from 15,000 to 40,000 square feet, added another story, enlarged the basement, and moved the Oval Office.

White House History:
• 1929: Herbert Hoover was the first president to have a telephone installed on his desk on March 27. A fire on Christmas Eve 1929 gutted the executive office building and a reconstruction began immediately.
• 1934: President Franklin D. Roosevelt increased the office area of a now permanent office wing from 15,000 to 40,000 square feet. A “penthouse” story and an enlarged subterranean office area with a light well were built. The Oval Office was relocated to the West Wing’s southeast corner-its present location-to overlook the Wilson Rose Garden.
• 1935: The Social Security Act was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a bill-signing ceremony in the Cabinet Room on August 14.
• 1941: Crowds of angry Americans surrounded the White House grounds on December 7 as news spread of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Secret Service installed bulletproof glass in the windows of the president’s Oval Office, sentries patrolled the roof with machine guns, and builders constructed a bomb shelter under a new East Wing (1942).
• 1945: On April 12, Harry S. Truman was sworn in as president in the Cabinet Room. The ceremony, according to Truman’s recollections, took one minute, 7:08-7:09 p.m. On August 14, 1945, President Truman held a press conference in the Oval Office to announce Japan’s surrender and the end of World War II.
•1949: To avoid confusion the White House Executive Office Building became known officially as the West Wing when the adjacent Department of State Building (Eisenhower EOB) was converted for use as executive offices.

Franklin Roosevelt also expanded the East Wing in 1942 and added a second story, with a bomb shelter built underneath. Harry Truman went much further; from 1948 to 1952, the White House interior was essentially gutted, leaving the exterior walls while the inside was rebuilt with steel and concrete.

White House History:
• 1942 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt expanded the East Wing’s footprint and added a second story. He originally intended it to house a White House museum, but the space became filled with offices and support staff. During the expansion, an underground bomb shelter was constructed as the United States had recently entered World War II. President Roosevelt also converted a room previously used as a coat room into a movie theater.

• 1965 – First Lady Lady Bird Johnson dedicated the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden in honor of the former first lady. The garden, adjacent to the East Wing and Colonnade, was designed by Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, who also designed the Rose Garden outside the Oval Office during the John F. Kennedy presidency and intended the two gardens to complement each other.

• 1977 – First Lady Rosalynn Carter moved her office to the East Wing, becoming the first presidential spouse to have her own office there. A year later, Congress passed the White House Personnel Authorization Act, creating the official Office of the First Lady. Since then, all first ladies and their staff have worked in the East Wing.

• 2025 – On July 31, 2025, the White House announced plans for construction to begin on a new Ballroom, citing the need to host major functions for world leaders, dignitaries, and guests. The White House stated: “The site of the new ballroom will be where the small, heavily changed, and reconstructed East Wing currently sits.” White House public tours were closed by September, and demolition of the East Wing began on October 20. Two days later, the White House Historical Association announced that it had supported efforts to digitally preserve the East Wing and Jacqueline Kennedy Garden with comprehensive scanning and photography projects.

Presidential alterations to the White House are hardly some Trump invention. What’s different is the familiar reaction whenever his name gets attached to something. A renovation becomes a constitutional crisis; a construction project becomes another lawsuit; a ballroom somehow requires the federal judiciary to determine whether the elected president can continue building at the presidential residence. The ballroom itself was announced as privately funded by Trump and other donors. The White House originally put the cost at about $200 million, later updating its project page to $250 million. Court filings now say roughly $200 million in private donations has already been spent or committed, while the larger project includes separate security work.

Nobody complained that Theodore Roosevelt permanently changed the White House by creating the modern West Wing. We don’t demand that Franklin Roosevelt’s additions be torn apart because the purpose looked different afterward. Truman practically rebuilt the place from the inside out, and America survived.

Trump wants to leave behind a ballroom future presidents can use for state dinners and major events, while modernizing security underneath it. Naturally, his opponents have fought him through the courts. For now, the Supreme Court has told them the construction can continue.

Sometimes even a ballroom needs nine justices nearby.

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No prisoners.

• Trump Destroys Tucker, MTG and Massie in One Epic Post (Matt Margolis)

President Donald Trump unloaded on three of his most persistent critics late Friday night, and he didn’t hold back. In a scorching Truth Social post, Trump branded Tucker Carlson, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) “losers” after learning the trio had huddled together. “Tucker Carlson just met with Lightweight ‘Former’ Congressman, Thomas Massie, and Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Greene, LOSERS ALL!” Trump wrote. “Tucker’s ‘Views’ have fallen through the floor, and will only get worse.”


Make no mistake about it: Carlson has spent the past few years torching every bridge he ever built with the MAGA movement. He’s morphed into an anti-Israel conspiracy theorist who says whatever wild thing pops into his head, and his audience has noticed. I remember being excited when he started his show on X. It stopped being a must-watch a long, long, long time ago. And Trump certainly has noticed, too. “Nobody cares about him any longer in that he has become totally irrelevant, and happens to be, surprisingly, a very Low I.Q. individual,” Trump said. “He could barely get out of College, and maybe he didn’t, but only really dumb people can’t make it through that wonderful four year time in life!”

Trump wasn’t finished. He suggested Carlson’s reported political ambitions ought to come with a screening process first. “Tucker wants to run for political office, but he should be required to take a cognitive test,” Trump said. “He’s got no chance, but could probably take a couple of points away from whatever the Republican ticket happens to be!” Then came Greene, who has spent recent months chasing the Epstein Files story with the enthusiasm of a woman auditioning for a regular spot on CNN or even MSNOW. She ditched the conservative movement that made her a star and started parroting left-wing talking points instead. Trump wasn’t shy about connecting the dots.

“Marjorie Taylor Brown (Green turns to Brown under stress!), a highly neurotic young woman, went from Ultra Conservative to a Liberal ‘Fool,’ all in a matter of weeks, because I refused to return her phone calls — Not because I didn’t like her, just because I had no time,” Trump said. “She was way down in the Polls in Georgia (because I took away my Endorsement), and would have had no chance at winning, so she, just like everyone else, ‘QUIT!'” And then came Massie.

“Thomas Massie has turned out to be a failed politician, and a real JERK,” Trump said. “He thought it was really wonderful to vote, ‘NO,’ on everything, no matter how good, strong, or proper the Legislation would be.” Trump summed up the meeting of the minds with a line that will live in political infamy. “What a team this would be, THREE LOSERS, and a pocketful of change!” he wrote, adding that their only real shot at relevance now is jumping ship entirely. “The only chance they have is to join the Radical Left Dumocrats, and try breaking into the Primary System.”

Carlson, Greene, and Massie each burned their MAGA credibility chasing headlines and relevance, and Trump just handed them a receipt for it.

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We need to embrace something smarter than us. Something we can’t understand. I wonder how that would work.

• Why Embracing AI Is Essential for Higher Education (Kent Ingle)

Rather than fearing generative tools or treating them as mere compliance threats, higher education must train students to master AI as an exponential multiplier for innovation, career success, and national prosperity. Generative artificial intelligence is vastly more prevalent, sophisticated, and accessible today than it was even six months ago. Today’s incoming students arrive on campus with the collective knowledge of human history sitting directly in their pockets.


They are navigating a digital landscape that is fundamentally rewriting how information is processed, analyzed, and created. Predictably, administrators across the country are responding with panic. Elite institutions are rushing to expand their rulebooks, update honor codes, and purchase unreliable detection software in a futile attempt to police the classroom. This reactionary mindset misses the entire point. When higher education views artificial intelligence primarily as a cheating hazard, it defaults to censorship and control. But when we approach technology through the lens of human potential and future readiness, our entire perspective transforms. We should be asking how to train our students to master it responsibly from the ground up.

Attempting to ban these platforms is like trying to ban the calculator in a modern engineering department. Whether we choose to embrace it or not, generative software is now a permanent fixture of the global economy. In fact, it is currently the number one most marketable skill for people looking for new jobs out of college. Recent labor market data reveals that demand for artificial intelligence competency in entry-level roles has nearly tripled in less than a year, extending far beyond traditional technology companies into marketing, operations, human resources, and finance. To compete in a rapidly evolving market, the next generation cannot simply be passive consumers of technology. They must be fluent directors of it.

When leveraged properly, artificial intelligence becomes an exponential work and impact multiplier. It streamlines complex research, accelerates problem-solving, and synthesizes massive datasets in seconds. A properly equipped student learns to direct artificial intelligence as a powerful research assistant while maintaining total ownership over the final outcome. We must teach our young adults the difference between outsourcing their intellect and augmenting their capabilities.

Using artificial intelligence to skip the hard work of learning is a misuse of human potential. But using these platforms to elevate our thinking, automate routine labor, and tackle grand challenges is the exact formula for lifelong success and prosperity. This is not just about individual career placement. It is about national survival. Artificial intelligence is currently the fastest-growing economic sector in our country. It is catalyzing a trillion-dollar infrastructure buildout that is reaching all fifty states, revitalizing communities, and creating unprecedented opportunities across every sector.

If American industry is going to maintain its leadership on the global stage, our workforce requires graduates who understand how to harness these tools to innovate at breakneck speeds. If we are going to continue to lead on the global industrial stage, we need more students ready to embrace AI, not less.

Censoring students from trying to cheat does not protect academic integrity. It simply leaves our graduates woefully unprepared for the economic realities of tomorrow. Relying on software for baseline tasks means that the value of genuine critical thinking and strategic foresight is actually higher than ever. Employers are actively seeking out graduates who possess the discernment to evaluate machine-generated outputs, spot inaccuracies, and apply human judgment to elevate mediocre drafts into exceptional final products.

Our duty as educational leaders is to prepare students for a life of success, prosperity, and leadership in a highly competitive world. We completely fail in that core mission if we allow administrative fear to prevent us from teaching digital mastery. Instead of building higher digital walls, universities must build stronger practical foundations. We must teach students that true excellence lies in combining technological fluency with unshakeable personal integrity. We must show them exactly how to prompt, evaluate, refine, and deploy these tools ethically so that they enter their careers equipped to perform.

Artificial intelligence is driving the fastest economic transformation of our lifetime, and it is the key to America’s future competitive edge. The universities that thrive in this new era will not be the ones that tried to ban the future. They will be the ones that trained their students to lead it. As a new academic year begins, we owe it to the next generation to step forward with vision and confidence, equipping them to master this technology and secure the ongoing prosperity of American industry.

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Well, they “saw the future of Humanoid Production..”

• JPMorgan Saw Humanoid Production Inside Tesla’s Fremont Factory (ZH)

Retail flows across Asia remained heavily concentrated in newly listed, high-beta names, most notably Chinese robotics maker Unitree following its blockbuster Shanghai debut. The retail craze surrounding physical AI merely shows Beijing’s accelerating push to dominate the humanoid market. To close out the week, we pivot across the Pacific for a peek inside the US humanoid-robotics supply chain, where Tesla’s Fremont buildout provides a timely indicator of how quickly physical AI is advancing.

Rajat Gupta, a JPMorgan analyst who covers Tesla, recently toured Tesla’s Fremont factory and reported to clients this week that the facility, once the birthplace of the company’s electric vehicles, is now pivoting toward producing robotaxis and humanoid robots. Gupta and his colleagues toured the roughly 5-million-square-foot facility and found that the discontinued Model S and Model X production lines are being replaced by manufacturing equipment for Tesla’s Optimus humanoid.

“On Optimus, production lines are being installed at Fremont (the area was tarped off at the time of our visit), and TSLA remains largely on schedule for the targeted four-month transition following the end of S/X production in May, with initial humanoid deployments in 2H26 expected to focus on Optimus Academy for training and data collection, followed by internal factory use and external sales as early as 2H27,” the analyst said.

He said that Optimus robots are not currently working inside the Fremont plant. Initial deployments in the second half of 2026 will instead take place at the “Optimus Academy,” where the robots will collect real-world training data before being deployed in factories.

“Overall, we came away from the factory tour with greater conviction in the robotaxi fleet ramp through late 2026 and early 2027, as well as an Optimus SoP that remains largely aligned with previously communicated timelines, both of which are central to the long-term thesis, while near-term commentary on demand drivers and FSD uptake remains constructive,” the analyst said.

Here are Gupta’s top takeaways from walking the Fremont factory floor:

Facility details. TSLA’s Fremont facility serves as the company’s primary test bed for innovation, supporting the launch of both new vehicles and humanoids across its expansive roughly 5-million-square-foot footprint. The plant manufactures premium Model Y variants and performance and premium Model 3 variants, while the recently decommissioned S/X lines, retired in early May, are being replaced by Optimus production lines.

The factory showcases the breadth of TSLA’s automation capabilities, featuring numerous custom-built robots and proprietary software designed to enhance manufacturing speed and precision. Production continues under several modernized tents, originally erected during the Model 3 “production hell” days, which remain integral to the facility’s operations. During our visit, we observed gigapress machines, stamping operations and general assembly lines and participated in FSD demonstrations involving the Model Y L variant and the Cybertruck.

Giga casting and stamping. TSLA’s innovative giga-casting process, first introduced with the Model Y, consolidates 70 underbody components that would otherwise require welding, significantly streamlining production. This approach reduces the number of robots needed on the welding line. The Model Y utilizes roughly 300 robots, compared with approximately 1,000 for the Model 3. TSLA also attributes this advancement to its materials-science expertise, including the development of a custom aluminum alloy, a capability enhanced through its collaboration with SpaceX. For stamping, TSLA employs Schuler presses with six progressive, interchangeable dies. TSLA stamps roughly 10 visible vehicle components in-house, while hundreds of remaining stamped parts are sourced from suppliers.

Unboxed manufacturing. TSLA emphasized that Cybercab production leverages an unboxed manufacturing process in which large subassemblies are built independently and in parallel, then joined together during the final stage. This approach allows open access from all angles, enabling simultaneous installation and streamlining the overall assembly process.

FSD demos. We participated in FSD demonstrations involving the Model Y L and Cybertruck, with the team walking us through the various modes, ranging from Sloth to Mad Max. The vehicles demonstrated notable driving accuracy, including navigating through a construction zone without manual intervention. The Autopark function worked seamlessly as well.

The Cybercab ramp-up is closely tied to the FSD v15 rollout. Management expressed optimism about the trajectory and pace of the Cybercab production ramp, highlighting that technology validation and production through unboxed manufacturing are advancing in parallel. The fleet deployment timeline will be largely dictated by the upcoming FSD v15 launch later this year. TSLA indicated that it is intentionally holding back on adding Model Y units to the robotaxi fleet, reflecting confidence in its ability to scale the Cybercab fleet in the near term. TSLA views FSD v15 as a step change in performance, comparable to the leap from v13 to v14, which produced a significant increase in parameter count, a larger context window and a roughly 20% reduction in latency.

The v15 upgrade encompasses seven core technologies, approximately 40% of which are currently being tested in the robotaxi fleet, where initial feedback has been encouraging. TSLA continues to focus on minimizing regression in core driving functions as it introduces new capabilities, and FSD v15 is viewed as the primary gateway to scaling unsupervised FSD. While the current AI/HW4 stack can run v15 and support unsupervised FSD, TSLA’s AI4.5 compute system is designed to accommodate rising compute and memory demands as robotaxi models scale and context windows expand. The system offers roughly 10% more FLOPS and twice the memory.

Robotaxi unit economics remain compelling with the Model 3 and Model Y, although Cybercab is designed to broaden the TAM beyond traditional ridesharing. TSLA highlighted that current robotaxi economics are attractive, with the Model Y and Model 3 carrying total ownership costs of roughly $0.60 to $0.70 per mile at average personal-vehicle utilization rates. Those costs fall to approximately $0.50 to $0.60 per mile at utilization rates four to five times higher, as is typical for robotaxis. That remains well below the roughly $2.50 to $3 per mile charged by incumbent rideshare operators.

However, TSLA’s vision for robotaxis extends beyond the traditional rideshare segment, which represents only a low-single-digit percentage of the overall mobility market, and calls for a purpose-built robotaxi platform capable of driving total ownership costs down to approximately $0.30 per mile. Management also reiterated that Cybercab is only the initial form factor, with additional vehicle types expected to follow as the platform evolves, citing the Robovan demonstration from the October 10 event as an example.

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