Sep 292026
 


JMW Turner Vignette Study of a Ship in a Storm c.1830


• Oil Tumbles on the Unexpected: Trump Signals Sanctions Relief (ZH)
• Supreme Court Hands Trump Major Victory in Fight vs Noncitizen Voting (Lucas)
• Starship Just Became a Money Making Machine (Stephen Green)
• Disney Legal Chief Warns Of “Much Smaller Organization” As AI Layoffs Loom (ZH)
• Media Aghast at Not Controlling White House Press Coverage (CTH)
• Mamdani Is Gradually Undermining Public Order In New York City (Stepman)
• A Preview of the Coming Cases for Another “Big Year” on the Court (Turley)
• First, Quit Pretending (James Howard Kunstler)
• The Next War Will Be Fought Here. America And Europe Will Be Enemies (Smertina)
• The New York Times Is Very Distressed (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Ted Cruz and the Subservience of the US Senate to Israel (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Victor Davis Hanson: The Counterrevolution, Explained (Pedro Rodriguez)
• Dems’ Virulent Antisemitism Could Be the Midterm Wild Card (Stephen Kruiser)
• Europe Asks China to Voluntarily Limit EV Exports (CTH)

 

 

https://twitter.com/DeepLeaksHQ/status/2104185918970380698?s=20 https://twitter.com/CHELLESHOCKEDTM/status/2104234117080678657?s=20

 

 


5 minutes later there’s no more sanctions relief.

• Oil Tumbles on the Unexpected: Trump Signals Sanctions Relief (ZH)

Al Jazeera is reporting that President Trump is signaling he’d be open to providing Iran with sanctions relief in return for nuclear concessions – though it remains that Tehran has throughout the war insisted that a ceasefire deal must be achieved first, before the nuclear file is dealt with.


US official says US President Trump is prepared to ease sanctions on Iran and release its frozen assets in exchange for progress on the nuclear issue, reports Al Jazeera And… CNN and Axios also run US offiicial comments (echoing Al Jazeera) that US President Trump is willing to grant Iran sanctions relief and release frozen funds in exchange for real progress on the nuclear issue. As stocks jump, crude big plummet…


Note via Newsquawk: Oil sees downside, with slight Dollar pressure, while Treasuries, stocks, and spot gold see upside amid reports that Trump is ready to ease sanctions on Iran and release its frozen assets in exchange for progress on the nuclear file. Meanwhile…

IRAN OFFICIALS PESSIMISTIC ABOUT DEAL WITH US BEFORE MIDTERMS. The Iranian response is what’s going to matter here. They will likely see in this another ploy to merely talk down oil prices, and have already repeatedly said they ‘don’t trust’ Trump. It was only on Friday night into Saturday that Trump outright rejected Iran’s 7-day ceasefire pitch – with not even so much as an effort to sit down and talk details. But apparently that could happen this week on an indirect basis, via the typical Gulf mediators.

After a weekend which saw President Trump reject an Iranian proposal for a 7-day ceasefire and roadmap to peace, and Tehran in turn targeting 19 ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the two sides once again have their fingers on the trigger.

Iran has said while it remains open to diplomacy, it is ‘fully prepared’ to resume the full-scale war with Washington, according to Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Sunday. On Monday, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei – who still hasn’t been seen since the war’s start and after his father’s assassination – has proclaimed his military has driven the ‘enemy’ from waters off southern Iran to the Arabian Sea.

“Having suffered painful blows from our valiant combatants and the guardians of the Strait of Hormuz, they [the enemy] dare not venture beyond the Arabian Sea,” Khamenei said in a new message. He warned that war could soon come to the Arabian Sea as well.


His words were issued on the annual remembrance of the Iran-Iraq War, as well as the anniversary of Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2024. “Whenever they have risked doing so they have only inflicted harm upon themselves, and the time is fast approaching when the Arabian Sea, too, will be cleared of their presence,” Khamenei’s message added. This marks an extension of threats from Iranian security officials last week which warned that war is coming to the Indian Ocean more broadly.

However, the reality also is that oil exports from the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman have been climbing over the past week. But renewed hostilities in the Strait of Hormuz, where Iranian forces are trying to hinder this uptick in transit, is looking more and more likely.

This as diplomacy is obviously stalled. Bloomberg observes, “Iran and the US appeared far apart on a new ceasefire deal or the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, with Tehran saying it’s sticking to a proposal US President Donald Trump has rejected.” And, “In futures, oil rose as Iran and the US appeared far apart on a new ceasefire deal or the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, with Tehran saying it’s sticking to a proposal that US President Donald Trump has rejected.”

Read more …

“.. allows states to use Social Security records and other information to check voters’ citizenship status.”

• Supreme Court Hands Trump Major Victory in Fight vs Noncitizen Voting (Lucas)

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett applaud at the conclusion of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address

The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Department of Homeland Security to continue its citizenship verification program.


In a 6-3 shadow docket ruling in the case of DHS v. League of Women Voters, the justices allowed the Trump administration to expand the program that allows states to use Social Security records and other information to check voters’ citizenship status. “By prohibiting interference with the disclosure of information regarding citizenship status to DHS—’notwithstanding any other provision of Federal, State, or local law’—Congress necessarily authorized DHS to request and receive that information,” the majority opinion says.

The three liberals, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. The majority held that a 1996 federal law banning noncitizen voting likely authorizes DHS to obtain citizenship information from other agencies, including state agencies. A shadow docket ruling is a Supreme Court order, often issued on an expedited basis without full oral arguments.

“In 1996, Congress, however, separately and expressly authorized DHS to request and receive information relating to citizenship and immigration status from other agencies, including SSA, in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA),” the majority opinion says.

Plaintiffs, led by the League of Women Voters, argued this could violate privacy rights. They also argued that the SAVE database, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, is unreliable and risks purging eligible voters.

In June, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of the District of Columbia ruled that a portion of President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order on election integrity was unlawful. Earlier this month, a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel denied the administration’s motion to stay the district court ruling pending appeal in a 2-1 ruling.

The case centered on a partnership between the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to expand the SAVE database. The expansion allowed agencies to search individuals using Social Security numbers, aggregate large amounts of data, and function as a citizenship verification tool to screen voter eligibility.

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First orbital flight os Starship was successful overnight!

“We are go for orbit..”

• Starship Just Became a Money Making Machine (Stephen Green)

“We are go for orbit,” and with that, the Starship mission that a moment before appeared to be a big disappointment turned into something entirely else. What the “else” is — and one big reason why the entire control room burst into cheers — I’ll get to in a moment. But first, the drama.


It felt like a long time getting to Flight 14 this morning, just a little over two months since Flight 13. FAA regulatory approval only came through on Sunday. For a company that prides itself on testing, iterating, and testing again with all due haste, it must have felt like years. There’s a lot riding on today’s flight. While the company did not attempt to catch the Starship’s booster stage in Mechazilla’s tender embrace, the mission profile was to simulate a catch by making a soft water landing in the Gulf of America.

The upper stage — usually called Ship — was not only supposed to make its first orbital flight, but was also, for the first time, supposed to deploy fully operational Starlink V3 orbital internet satellites before completing six orbits and itself making a controlled splashdown near Chile. Those satellites are also a big deal, and I’ll come back to them momentarily. But first we have to look at how everything almost went very wrong just a few minutes after Flight 14’s 8:46 a.m. Eastern liftoff.

The Super Heavy booster lost two of its 33 Raptor engines on ascent. Individually, those Raptors aren’t that powerful. But strap nearly three dozen of them together in a single booster, and you get a launch platform with 2.4 times the thrust of the Saturn V rocket of Apollo moon landing fame.


You’re allowed to say “Wow.” Assuming you haven’t lost the power of speech, of course. Those launches never fail to take my breath away. But part of reusability is that with 33 engines — arranged in sets for launch (all 33), boostback burn (13 then 5), and landing (3) — a Starship launch can afford to lose a couple of engines and still make the launch and the landing. And yes, it was two of the boostback engines that went out during ascent.

Nevertheless, the full stack got to where it needed to go for the Ship to “hot stage” away from the Super Heavy booster. After separation, the Ship’s six engines would keep it flying to its initial suborbital trajectory, while ground control kept its fingers crossed for a successful boostback burn and landing with two missing engines. They must’ve crossed those fingers really tight, because the booster made a perfectly controlled splashdown at 8:53 a.m.


Gorgeous, isn’t it? At 8:54 a.m., one of the Ship’s three vacuum engines failed, and a solemn decision had to be made: Continue on, using a longer burn with fewer engines to reach orbit — and deploy those Starlink satellites — or continue on the suborbital trajectory and make one more got-dam splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The initial call at about 9 a.m. was no-go for orbit. The Ship and its 26 next-gen Starlink satellites would go nowhere they hadn’t been before. I was watching the SpaceX live feed and could feel the entire company deflate. Hell, I deflated.

But as more data came in from the Ship, flight controllers determined that there was enough redundancy remaining in the functional engines to make a successful boostback burn and return the Ship safely. That was the big deal all along: Not whether SpaceX could get the Ship to orbit, but getting it back. At 9:10, flight control personnel were finally polled: Go or no-go?

“We are go for orbit.”


At 9:11 a.m., a SpaceX Starship upper stage made its first-ever orbital burn. And after that, everything seemed to move like clockwork.Once in orbit — above the coast of Namibia, if I was reading the live feed globe correctly — the Ship opened its Pez dispenser door and began deploying the first-ever operational Starlink V3 satellites. All 26 are now using their own motors to assume their orbits among the 11,000 or so V1 and V3 satellites currently in operation. Those first V3’s will enter service in a few weeks.

Given the launch issues, SpaceX decided to de-orbit the Ship earlier than planned, and that also went well.


This is where everything starts to come together, and I can get to those “momentarily” I teased you with. It’s almost impossible to believe what a huge upgrade Starship is to Falcon 9, and V3 Starlink is to V2. “Each one of these V3 Starlink satellites being deployed right now increases the bandwidth capacity of the ENTIRE Starlink constellation by roughly 0.11%,” Sawyer Merritt explained this morning. And one of the replies noted that “This one launch is over 2.8% of all bandwidth.”

One launch. To increase Starlink capacity that much with V2 and Falcon 9, you’d need no fewer than 10 launches. But today’s launch barely even tested Starship’s capabilities. A fully loaded Starship will put 60 V3 satellites into orbit — eventually, at a fraction of the cost-per-kilogram of Falcon 9. And Starlink is already price-competitive with terrestrial high-speed internet services.


Now, do you begin to understand the economics of Elon Musk’s “crazy” idea to put data centers in orbit? The point isn’t whether this engine or that one lost ignition. The point is that Starship today became a revenue-generating machine. First with Starlink, then with Starmind. The company’s fate is tied to Starship. A control room always erupts into cheers when the mission performs nominally, and today, Starship proved that it can generate revenue.

SpaceX shares are down nearly 1% on today’s news.People see, but they do not understand.

Gain understanding. Get cool stuff.

Read more …

I have no defence against the sad Mickey pics.

• Disney Legal Chief Warns Of “Much Smaller Organization” As AI Layoffs Loom (ZH)

The happiest place on Earth is about to become a lot more miserable for the rank-and-file at Disney’s corporate headquarters. Just weeks after we detailed the ongoing corporate bloodbath at the Mouse House following disastrous earnings and streaming losses, another brutal reality check has been delivered to Disney employees. This time, the guillotine is being rolled into the Legal and Global Affairs (LGA) department, and the executioner’s weapon of choice is artificial intelligence.


According to a leaked internal memo obtained by Deadline, Disney’s Chief Legal and Global Affairs Officer, Horacio Gutierrez, delivered a blunt, unsentimental warning to his nearly 1,000-member global staff: prepare for the slaughter. In the missive, Gutierrez warned that Disney is undergoing a “transformation process,” stating explicitly that the LGA will soon be a “much smaller organization than it is today, and some of you will personally be affected by decisions we make in this process.”

In true corporate double-speak, Gutierrez avoided directly stating that machines are taking over white-collar jobs, but the writing is on the wall. He noted that the company will be taking a “dispassionate look” at every aspect of operations to find cost-effective efficiencies. The grim reality for employees was buried in the corporate jargon, with Gutierrez noting that the company must consider new models, including “automating certain workflows by leveraging the latest technologies, moving to self-service models where appropriate, engaging alternative legal providers and others, and new expanded share services, even outsourcing.”

Translation: You are being replaced by an algorithm, and whatever tasks the machines can’t handle will be shipped overseas or outsourced to the lowest bidder.

The timing of Gutierrez’s chilling memo is certainly no coincidence. It dropped on the exact same day Disney announced the hiring of Karandeep Anand – the former CEO of Character.AI – as the company’s first Chief Technology Officer. As we noted in our previous coverage of Disney’s desperate pivot to stem systemic financial bleeding, tapping a heavy-hitting AI executive to report directly to Disney boss Josh D’Amaro was a flashing red indicator that the company is looking to slash human capital costs drastically under the guise of technological innovation.


Gutierrez even invoked D’Amaro’s name in his corporate death warrant, stating that when teams work “smarter,” Disney can serve fans at “lower costs,” freeing up capital for content and infrastructure. He added that D’Amaro’s vision succeeds by “embracing technology to amplify what makes it great, not by clinging to the way things always have been done.” In other words, paying human lawyers and government relations staff a living wage is now considered an archaic anchor weighing down the balance sheet.

This latest internal panic follows the expiration of a “voluntary early retirement” offer pushed by Chief People Officer Sonia Coleman in August – a classic corporate maneuver designed to thin the herd before the involuntary pink slips are handed out. With executives openly admitting on their August 5 earnings call that more cuts were on the horizon following the April and July layoffs, the anxiety inside Disney is palpable. The magic kingdom is rapidly transforming into a sterile, automated, and outsourced corporate shell as Bob Iger’s regime scrambles to appease Wall Street algorithms with algorithms of their own.

Read more …

AG Todd Blanche -VS- ABC Martha Raddatz

• Media Aghast at Not Controlling White House Press Coverage (CTH)

For the past week the collective lamestream media have been going through fits of apoplexy following President Trump denying White House access to three propaganda outfits, CNN, MSNow and Politico. Whenever Washington DC media are criticized or dismissed, they react in outrage due to their delusions of grandeur, a genuine belief in their own importance.


Martha Raddatz from ABC takes aim at Attorney General Todd Blanche over the issue, then pivots to the second most important issue of the day for the stenographers – the AI doom narrative. Video and Transcript Below:


[Transcipt] – MARTHA RADDATZ – Good morning, and thank you so much for joining us this morning. Let’s get right to this. There was no TV pool coverage of the president’s trip to Tennessee this weekend. It was supposed to be CNN. They said they were banned from Air Force One. What is the justification for denying access?

TODD BLANCHE, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: Well, the president hasn’t denied access. That’s not the right way to describe it. This is — what the president has said is that he is sick and tired of certain media outlets just refusing to report accurate news, and so — look, it is a — it is a privilege — it is a privilege to be in the White House for anybody.

And that — and the president — the president knows that it’s the people’s house, and what you saw play out over the past week was really not just not — even after the judge — even after the White House let the reporters back in, they still refuse to use pool coverage. They still refuse to, on their own, make a decision to start covering the president again with the video.

But a lot of people saw the president. The president was not hidden from the American people at the — at the football game in Tennessee yesterday. And really, the unfortunate and sad thing here is that after years and years and years of one-sided media coverage of the president from certain outlets, the president finally said it’s not fair to the American people that this is happening and did something about it.

There’s still obviously litigation going on, but the important thing, Martha, is to know that that being in the White House is a privilege. It’s not a — it’s not a right.

RADDATZ: Understood and understood that on Air Force One, but CNN was denied access to Air Force One, and you are saying it is because of the way they report. Has nothing to do with national security.

BLANCHE: I’m not saying — no. I’m not — I wasn’t talking about Air Force One. It’s when you say denied access to Air Force One, the White House routinely decides who can go on Air Force One. This wasn’t a one-time denial of CNN. There’s all kinds of times when certain reporters are not flying or are flying —

RADDATZ: CNN was the pool that day. CNN was the pool that day. They were denied entry to Air Force One.

BLANCHE: I understand that, but the — it’s not unusual, and as a matter of fact, it’s common every time the president travels that he and his team decide which reporters get to travel with the president. And so, what you have now is you have — you have certain news outlets upset and frustrated at what happened last week, and so that they’re refusing to use pool coverage.

The president has every right to decide who gets to fly on his plane, and it is national security, especially on Air Force One, and especially at the White House. And so, it’s not just — it’s not just the fact that they refuse to report anything accurately.

By the way, that is what is a national security problem. When you have completely misinformation, complete misinformation coming out of the White House, that affects our relationship with our foreign partners, that affects our relationship with our foreign enemies. And so this is — this is just not about the fact that they’re refusing to report accurate news. It’s all about the information that the American people have a right to hear coming out of our – what should be respected media outlets.

[..]

I think most CTH readers understand my position on AI in general and the LLM (large language model) scouring of data specifically. I do not like AI in language, research or writing when it is used to replace the human brain because eventually people will stop learning. QUESTION: When AI moves from reading to writing the books, what exactly are you learning? I recently read a great comment on the X platform about the issue: “ChatGPT has now a big problem. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge exposed a massive threat to large language models.” They call it “model collapse.”

Internet ecosystem is rapidly changing, and generative AI will soon contribute much of the text found online. This forces us to consider what happens to future iterations like gpt-n when they are trained on data scraped from the web that was already generated by an llm.

According to the research, indiscriminately using model-generated content in training causes “irreversible defects” in the resulting ai. the model loses the “tails of the original content distribution.” in other words, it begins to forget the creative, fringe, and unique nuances of actual human writing, collapsing into a repetitive echo chamber.

This isn’t just a chatgpt issue.. the researchers built theoretical intuition showing this collapse is ubiquitous across learned generative models, occurring in large language models as well as in variational autoencoders and gaussian mixture models.

Tech companies rely on scraping the internet for large-scale data to build smarter models. However, the paper warns that if we want to sustain the benefits of training on web data, model collapse must be taken seriously. Ultimate takeaway? data collected from genuine human interactions is going to become increasingly valuable in a web filled with ai content.” {source}

This might be a problem that some AI research lab just recognized, studied and quantified. However, I can assure you I’ve been thinking about this specific issue for a long, long time. Even when I set up the parameters for this rebuilt website following our deplatforming in 2020, I was constantly thinking about how critical information becomes when these AI systems begin expanding their “trust and safety” mission, and start defining the truth. Everyone needs to be really careful with AI on the issues of gathering information.

I know I mess up my words a lot, spell things incorrectly, and struggle at times to make my thoughts presentable in written format. However, I can guarantee you these are always my words, my thoughts, my effort to explain stuff and provide raw information. I do not like the idea of AI used under the guise of ‘efficiency’ or ‘enhancement’ when it comes to information and writing about research. Even if we are the last ones out here in the “tails of the original content distribution” you can always guarantee it’s a human here at CTH with all the flaws of original content they don’t like to see shared.

Read more …

“.. this is just further demonstration that he’s determined to, over time, entirely undo the kind of policing that made New York dramatically safer under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.”

• Mamdani Is Gradually Undermining Public Order In New York City (Stepman)

New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has carefully plucked away another small but significant element of public order. According to the New York Post, the mayor’s office issued a directive that the New York Police Department would no longer be responding to calls relating to homeless encampments. Instead, officers will now have to first dispatch social services to deal with such matters before they are allowed to act.


The move is just the latest by the Mamdani administration to peel away public order in the Big Apple in the name of social justice. The administration had already put up roadblocks to prevent the NYPD from removing homeless encampments, but now it will be further handcuffed.The New York Post noted that this move represents a radical change and will likely mean that problems at homeless encampments may never be addressed at all.

“This year, the NYPD responded to more than 26,000 of the 36,000 complaints to 311 about encampments,” the Post reported. “Now, [the Department of Homeless Services] will handle triple the calls they previously responded to, with fewer than 2,000 staffers across the entire agency.” While Mamdani has been careful not to work too directly against the NYPD since he was elected, this is just further demonstration that he’s determined to, over time, entirely undo the kind of policing that made New York dramatically safer under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. That crime-fighting revolution paid dramatic dividends for decades.

Even though many crimes have dropped to rates below their post-George Floyd riots peak, urban chaos remains a problem and, in some cases, is getting worse. Subway and transit violence shot up dramatically after Mamdani was sworn into office. Many of those incidents were committed by unstable and mentally ill repeat offenders who had been living on the street. And unsanitary homeless encampments filled with drug addicts and people with mental illnesses who belong in an institution are sprouting up all over town.

In fact, according to a report from the mayor’s office, the number of homeless people in the city has reached a five-year high. And the growing numbers of homeless people are clustering in encampments that are transforming parts of the city, particularly the ones by the Intrepid Museum, Citi Field—where the New York Mets play—and under FDR Drive.“Local residents and workers are decrying a homeless takeover under the FDR Drive, where mountains of trash, foul smells, and fights are regular occurrences,” amNewYork reported.

“According to locals, the parking area under the highway from 17th Street to 23rd Street has become a massive homeless shelter.” Mamdani did do something about one shantytown. The city swept away an encampment on Wednesday that had built up near the New York University dorms. Oh, it’s in an area likely filled with a high concentration of Mamdani superfans. A coincidence, I’m sure.

Apparently, the former denizens just moved a few blocks away and set up camp again. And why not? Mamdani has made it clear that he intends to let these kinds of encampments fester and is effectively neutering public complaints about them. Don’t you worry about that filthy, mushrooming fentanyl den on your block, a social worker is on the case. As a New York Post editorial explained, deploying overstretched social workers to alleviate the problem isn’t going to fix it.

“The vagrants who erect and inhabit these camps are hard-core homeless who’ve already rejected the option of living in a shelter,” the Post editorial noted. “ … Compassionate encouragement won’t dislodge people sleeping on cardboard sidewalk pallets. That’s why the city has always tasked police with handling encampments.”

Unfortunately, these sorts of anti-policing tactics by the Mamdani administration may “work” in a certain sense. The encampment problem will surely grow. But as the situation slowly gets out of hand, the administration can better defuse the blame without immediately infuriating the public. They’ll say that the problem is “affordability,” that the budget is too small, and that systemic racism is causing an epidemic of homelessness.

All of that being nonsense, but by the time the issue is out of control the public may be more accustomed to thinking it’s endemic rather than a consequence of bad policy decisions. Slow-growing encampments don’t drive headlines the way dramatic increases in murder rates do. Mamdani probably knows that. He may have even learned that lesson following the disaster of the “defund the police” years.

When leftist social goals were rapidly unlocked, the immediate consequences ignited an immediate backlash. He’s clearly trying to avoid that. Methodically stripping away the enforcement of public order, eroding trust in the police, and making authorities unresponsive to those who want the situation fixed is a cynical but effective way to hide a malignant social revolution.

In that sense, Mamdani is succeeding where other leftist regimes failed, even if the eventual result will be the same miserable failure.

Read more …

“The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “It’s hard not to have a big year at the Supreme Court.”

• A Preview of the Coming Cases for Another “Big Year” on the Court (Turley)

October is when hype meets reality. In baseball, the final teams are sorted out for the playoffs, and your football teams are well into the winnowing-out process for the Super Bowl. For court nerds, the start of the October term at the Supreme Court can have a similar dynamic, as long-watched cases finally come up for oral argument. Although the court continues to accept cases on a rolling basis, this term is looking like another blockbuster, with cases that range from climate change to gun rights to parental rights.

The odds of making the oral argument docket make the NFL season look like a walk in the park. After thousands of petitions, the Supreme Court accepts on average between 70-80 cases for the coveted “writ of certiorari.” If you are a lower-court judge with an appealed case, this is one Super Bowl you would probably prefer to skip. The court generally reverses the cases it accepts for review. Last term, it had a 71 percent rejection rate, slightly up from the prior year.

This year already has a number of major cases that are likely to have transformative impacts on the law and society. Here are a few.

Climate Change

In Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, Boulder sued energy companies under “theories of public and private nuisance, trespass, unjust enrichment, and civil conspiracy, claiming that they knowingly contributed to climate change while misleading the public about its impacts.” The Colorado Supreme Court ruled for the city and the county in finding that such lawsuits are not barred by federal preemption. If the case is allowed to go forward, it would expose companies to potentially thousands of climate change lawsuits.

Gun Rights

October is already shaping up as a major Second Amendment term. Democratic cities and states have been banning the AR-15, the most popular rifle in the U.S., and the 9mm semi-automatic handgun, the most popular handgun in the U.S. These cases out of the Seventh Circuit in Chicago (Viramontes v. Cook County) and the Second Circuit in New York (Grant v. Higgins) will likely give long-awaited clarity on these bans. They could potentially close off a major circumvention of prior rulings to achieve sweeping gun control policies.

In addition to these cases, the court is considering the possible review of Calce v. New York. In that case, the Second Circuit upheld a stun gun ban. The court previously sent back a similar case out of Massachusetts after the First Circuit ignored prior rulings. The court stressed that the fact that a weapon did not exist at the time of the ratification of the Second Amendment (such as “electric arms”) does not mean that they fall outside of the constitutional protections. The addition of Calce would make this one of the most momentous Second Amendment terms in history.

Parochial Schools and Religious Discrimination

The court will return to another parochial school controversy this term. In prior cases, the court has repeatedly stepped in to prevent states from discriminating against religious schools in voucher or subsidy programs. In St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, the Tenth Circuit upheld a Colorado provision that requires all preschools to agree not to discriminate on the basis of “race, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, income, or disability.” The Catholic challengers are arguing that the policy requires them to violate their religious values as a condition for participating in the preschool program and funding.

Parental Rights

In International Partners for Ethical Care, Inc. v. Ferguson, Washington amended its laws to delay shelters in notifying parents of a runaway child who has “gender-affirming treatment” — the standard used for children in abusive homes. Instead, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families is first notified. The Ninth Circuit rejected parental claims raised in the case due to a lack of standing.

The Right to a 12-Member Jury

In Kian v. Florida, chiropractor Hamed Kian was convicted of five counts related to practicing with a suspended license. Pursuant to Florida law, he was tried by a six-person jury. Kian argues that the law violated his Sixth Amendment right to a jury of 12 members.

Some of us are watching a few other cases. Not surprisingly, my two favorites deal with the freedom of speech. The court has yet to decide whether to accept D.A. v. Tri-County Area Schools in which the Sixth Circuit upheld a school ban on high school students wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts. In the view of many of us in the free-speech community, the case is a major potential First Amendment ruling in the making.

Some of us also hope that the court will take up Tiny Zaps v. Traxler, which deals with a ban on tattoos on the face, neck, or head as well as a ban on tattoo parlors within 1,000 feet of churches, school, or playgrounds. The South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the ban, and it could allow the court to reinforce free-speech protections for “body art.”

The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “It’s hard not to have a big year at the Supreme Court.” That is certainly true, but this term is already pretty big, and the court still has plenty of slots to fill before January.

Read more …

“The Republican party has plenty of things wrong with it, but the other side is so crazy they’re celebrating our assassinations and sharia law.” —DC_Draino on X (Rogan O’Handley)

• First, Quit Pretending (James Howard Kunstler)


Drug Addicts on Kensington Avenue, Philadelphia

The leaves turn and the season quickens and, in a few weeks, comes an election more dreaded than all the slavering blood beasts of Halloween. Do you suppose, as I do, that America is tired of being insane? The pathetic part of this national nervous breakdown is how unnecessary it actually is. Our national problems are not that difficult to understand and correct. Here’s an inventory of them:


Making a living 1. So many blunders, starting with off-shoring our factories. So few well-paying working-class jobs. Some of the former working-class are now working three part-time gigs and still not making a living. Quite a few are just at home, on “disability,” smoking drugs, flirting with suicide on fentanyl, eating too much crap snack food, getting tattoos. We’ve quit pretending that’s all right.

Mr. Trump proposes to change that and is re-shoring industry. It takes time to build it, get it running. Meanwhile nobody can find a plumber, an electrician, because of the bad political decision to send everyone to college, including kids not really able to finish high school. Result: “elite overproduction” Translation: too many college graduates, with the situation made worse by bogus fields-of-study that were concocted to keep students busy without preparing them for the real world. Hence, they are “elite” only by certification, not superior knowledge or skills. Young people need to learn real skills. Mr. Trump issued EO 145278 (April 2025) “Preparing Americans for High-Paying Skilled Trade Jobs of the Future.” Pell grants for short-term vocational training. Grants for apprenticeship positions.

Making a living 2. Rewrite the immigration law. We don’t need 1-million-plus newcomers each year. How about none for a while? Give American citizens priority for any and all jobs. Keep the border closed and deport all illegal immigrants. They have no “right” to be here. We don’t need “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” (Emma Lazarus, 1883). It’s not 1883 anymore. Quit pretending we have to be “the beacon of the world.” Let them make themselves free in their own lands.

Making a living 3. America needs household servants and poor people need work. The current work-around for the well-off is to hire illegal aliens for this kind of work. It allows them to believe that putting poor Americans on the dole (out of “empathy”) and allowing them to be useless is “progressive.” (That’s insane.) There’s plenty to do, even for people of limited ability. Make menial labor okay again. These days, many people of means live in chaotic households where nothing is taken care of. It reflects their chaotic lives. (No wonder wealthy liberals are crazy.) Get poor people off welfare and off making babies they can’t take care of. Give them a place to live in your 5,000 square-foot McMansion and a paycheck.

Nothing Works. Because we automated too many transactions. Spent $XX-Billions and fifty years computerizing the US Telephone system to improve communication. Result: it’s impossible to get a real human being on the phone. How is that an improvement? How is it better for Americans to get fucked around on “phone trees” for hours every week? Too many “help desks” located in foreign lands that employ people who barely speak English. Quit pretending that’s okay. Start by requiring doctors’ offices and hospitals to provide humans to the answer their phones.

The Horror That Is Medicine. Get this: the situation is too dire to fix at-scale. The complexity and opportunities for racketeering are now too vast. Since failure is already well underway, and trust in doctors is broken, allow medicine to reorganize at the local clinic scale on a pay-for-service basis. Streamline medical education and the entry positions to practice. Government should not take over medicine, but can subsidize medical education. It would comprise a tiny percentage of the annual budget.

Accept that there’s a lot doctors will have to learn on-the-job. Forbid insurance companies from owning hospitals, clinics, and doctor practices. To restore trust, quit pretending that Covid-19 was anything but a nefarious exercise and prosecute the large number of pharma executives, hospital admins, doctors, bureaucrats, who enabled it to happen. Make personal responsibility for your body great again. Let RFKjr do his job.

Scam Education. It’s failing at-scale as medicine is. Kids are allowed to “graduate” from high school not knowing how to read or do basic arithmetic. How did that become okay? Answer: the teachers’ unions are corrupt and degenerate, dedicated to Marxist social disruption and maximizing their pensions. Manipulating kids into fake sexual crises is a criminal enterprise. Centralizing K-12 schools into gigantic buildings was as much a mistake as off-shoring industry. School’s primary mission should be to produce basically literate citizens in the language of the USA, which is English. If you can’t speak and read English, you’re unlikely to learn anything else and unlikely to thrive in this society.

Black / White race conflict. Failing to teach black ghetto kids to speak English correctly stigmatizes them for life. Quit pretending you can compensate for that with grievance politics. It’s only made race relations worse and driven whites and blacks into separate cultures that can barely communicate with each other. That is opposite of the direction America was going in two generations ago. How did it reverse? I will tell you: By the 1980s, liberal shame over the Civil Rights movement’s failure to produce perfect social “equity” inspired the “solution” of “multiculturalism,” which said, let’s just have different standards of language, manners, and behavior for different ethnic groups (and everybody will get along). It was a shuck and jive. To be a coherent nation requires a common culture, the same standards for all citizens. That was America’s strength when we were strong, not our “diversity.”

The Law. The Woke judiciary is punking America thanks largely to appointments made by Barack Obama and “Joe Biden.” It’s extremely difficult to get rid of political “activist” judges with lifetime appointments. Or to wait for the SCOTUS to reverse their multitudinous noxious rulings. But it’s less difficult to put out-of-business the small cadre of lawfare ninjas who bring all the lawsuits that their chosen activist judges rule on — namely, Norm Eisen, Marc Elias and their many associates. They have engaged in manifold seditions from RussiaGate to the Mar-a-Lago raid and are liable for prosecution for the roles they played.

Eisen and Elias run numerous NGOs that assist their shenanigans. The funding streams to them can be turned off, especially if any of the money comes from foreign entities, such as Arabella Advisors (and its pass-through orgs) or from foreign nationals like Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss and Shanghai-based Neville Roy Singham (currently under investigation by a New York federal grand jury). George Soros’s many Open Society affiliated NGOs have been busy for years pumping money into state attorney general and many county district attorney elections.

In a 5–4 ruling on the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment bars the government from limiting independent spending on political speech by corporations, unions, and other associations. A later D.C. Circuit decision, SpeechNow.org v. FEC, led to the creation of “Super PACs” (political action committees) that can spend unlimited sums on activism as long as they do not give money directly to candidates or coordinate with them. Years later, there is a growing consensus that these decisions led to tremendous mischief in politics and the administration of law. They can be revisited.

Fraud and Grift. Artificial Intelligence (or “Super Intelligence,” if you like) is already pretty good. Good enough to trace money flows from the US Treasury through states such as Minnesota, New York, Illinois, and California, and further down the line into local orgs like the now-infamous Minneapolis “Learing” Center and the Feeding Our Future scam. AI can go over their books super-efficiently, too. Veep JD Vance is probably already using AI on his Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent estimated aggregate fraud in annual government spending at around half a trillion dollars a year.

Free and Fair Elections. It’s astounding that there’s any disagreement over the provisions in the SAVE ACT: only citizens can vote. . . ID required. . . One-day only election with results next day at the latest. . . Mail-in voting only for military, voters too ill to go to the polls, and persons out-of-the-country for a good reason. It’s a sign of epic dysfunction that we go into the midterms having failed to move this bill through a Republican-controlled Senate.

This is just a casual survey of a few things in our national life that need repair. You have to ask: who is behind all the pretending. What stands in the way of getting any of this done? I think you know.

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Here=Arctic.

By Ksenia Smertina, senior lecturer at the HSE Institute for Media, expert at the Russian International Affairs Council on Eastern and Central Europe

• The Next War Will Be Fought Here. America And Europe Will Be Enemies (Smertina)

This September, the Arctic quietly widened the rift between presumed transatlantic allies. Brussels’ attempts to mitigate growing US influence in the region have so far been unsystematic but intense. The Arctic Summit held in Finnish Lapland and the subsequent EU-Canada talks, where European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed granting Ottawa associate member status, should be viewed in the context of the new agreement between the US and Greenland.


The EU is using its usual competitive methods in the polar race, plunging into a de facto confrontation with the US. An alternative to this could have been attempts to find its own legitimate place among the major players; however, the window of opportunity for such initiatives has closed, which leaves the space no alternatives other than the prospects of a hybrid war in which Brussels and Washington are rivals.

The EU’s familiar patterns beyond the Arctic Circle
Twelve EU countries and the bloc’s leadership attended the Arctic Summit in Lapland this month, where they agreed upon a radical securitization of polar policy, officially recognizing the region as a “geopolitical hotspot.”

To understand the specifics of the bloc’s Arctic ambitions, it’s important to note that the union’s members lack any significant infrastructure of their own on the polar map. In the wake of Brexit, the EU no longer has its own sovereign Arctic borders directly connected to the Arctic Ocean. Norway and Iceland remain outside the union, Greenland remains an autonomous Danish overseas territory, and Finland and Sweden are geographically cut off from the ocean. Moreover, the EU as a single bloc completely lacks its own Arctic icebreaker fleet – the few national vessels of the Scandinavian countries are incapable of ensuring true strategic dominance.

Lacking either geographical rights or military hardware, Brussels has reduced its Arctic strategy solely to environmental concerns, climate monitoring, and the protection of indigenous peoples. In 2008, the EU formally designated the Arctic as a zone of its strategic interests, and in 2016 and 2021, key EU Arctic strategies were adopted.

This approach began to change in 2022–2025, when, against the backdrop of a rapidly shifting geopolitical situation in the world, US claims to Greenland triggered the performative landing of European troops on the island. The Arctic Summit in Rovaniemi this month, which was informal in nature, confirmed the shift in the focus of the EU’s interests.

The final agreement formalized the shift from an environmental agenda to a “hard power” strategy: the parties pledged to sharply increase investment in military mobility, satellite surveillance, and cross-border infrastructure in the north, as well as coordinate the blocking of Russia’s “shadow fleet” under the pretext of environmental protection. These decisions, reinforced by the leaders’ demonstrative visit to the Finnish Lapland Air Wing military airbase, formed the basis of the new EU Arctic Strategy, which Foreign Minister Kaja Kallas promised to present in October 2026.

After the summit, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen went on to invite Canada to become an associate member of the EU in the context of trade and tariff disagreements between Ottawa and Washington. The mere suggestion of such an alliance has maximized the politicization of the Arctic agenda, making the outcome highly unpredictable.

It’s worth noting that Brussels’ aspirations for leadership are always specific. It’s enough to recall Francois Duchene’s concepts of “civic” power and Jan Manners’ idea of “normative” power, which explain that Brussels projects its influence on the international stage through its economic model, diplomacy, and the export of legal and ethical standards. This approach has been further developed by Mark Leonard, who called the EU an expanding “invisible empire” and argued that the EU’s influence is based on the mechanism of attracting and integrating its neighbors, and Ana Bradford, who described the phenomenon of the “Brussels effect” – a mechanism by which the EU’s vast internal market allows it to unilaterally dictate regulatory rules to transnational corporations and governments around the world.

It is precisely in this vein that we should understand what is happening. Brussels is employing its standard, decades-old methods of supranational control. Unable to compete in the realm of real icebreaker technology and innovative logistics, the EU is attempting to redirect the race to its familiar channel of bureaucratic regulations, climate quotas, and virtual budget allocations, all while cloaking it in the most anti-Russian, defensive rhetoric possible.

Its urgent proposal to pursue a “unique” alliance with Canada is a classic attempt at normatively co-opting another country’s sovereignty. Brussels seeks to act as an “environmental and technological sponsor” and thus gain access to Canadian resources, thereby legitimizing its presence in the high north through the use of foreign geography.

It is for this reason that seemingly unrelated countries, including some of Moscow’s most committed foes, were invited to the summit in Lapland: a crowd had to be assembled to give the story a larger scope. It included Mediterranean Greece and Black Sea Romania, as well as the Baltic states, which were simply counting on participating in the new EU “polar” grants.

Why doesn’t this work?
Until recently, European activity has served as a mere backdrop for US policy in the Arctic. Washington has spent decades building an Arctic empire of steel, radar arrays, and military bases, relying on a strategy of strict deterrence. In Alaska, the US has deployed a powerful air force hub of fifth-generation F-35 and F-22 fighter jets, and American nuclear submarines have learned to maneuver under the ice. In September 2026, the White House and Ottawa began the practical phase of deploying Arctic Over-the-Horizon Radars (A-OTHR) as part of the modernization of NORAD, which will allow US command to monitor airspace all the way to the Arctic Circle in real time.

At the same time, Washington is accelerating the elimination of its main vulnerability – its backlog of icebreakers: the Bollinger shipyards are assembling the first heavy polar ship in half a century, the USCGC Polar Sentinel. Washington’s plans by 2030 include the launch of two more heavy icebreakers and the construction of the deep-water military port of Nome near the Bering Strait. Furthermore, active lobbying is underway to promote the concept of “freedom of navigation” to allow unimpeded passage through the Northwest Passage, significantly shortening the sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

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“Very Distressed that Illegal immigrant-invaders into the US are being deported..”

• The New York Times Is Very Distressed (Paul Craig Roberts)

Notice that the New York Times uses immigrant-invaders to report on deportations. Listen to the NY Times’ hysteria:


“Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement this summer soared to record highs since the start of this Trump administration — with 43,000 in June, more than 49,000 in July and nearly 51,000 in August — as officials cut or narrowed the pathways to legal residency in the United States and expanded the pool of people eligible for deportation.

“Federal agents appeared in nearly every corner of daily life, carrying out operations at hospitals and airports, outside suburban schools and along rural construction sites and truck stops. They fanned out from coastal cities in Maine to desert towns in Arizona, across the open plains of Wyoming and down through the southern borderlands.”

Notice that the South is now a “borderland” and that the illegals are so upset by their arrests that they have to take therapy, little doubt at taxpayers’ expense. Clearly, the NY Times does not differentiate between a citizens and an illegal. If there are no borders why spend $1.5 trillion annually on national defense? There is no nation to defend. Only a multicultural tower of babel. The next Democrat president can cancel national defense and allocate the $1.5 trillion to the care of immigrant-invaders.

The minuscule deportations are a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of illegals the Democrats encouraged to walk across the border. As white liberals don’t value American citizenship, why not keep the illegals and deport the white liberals? America would gain from the trade.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/us/ice-surge-immigration-arrests.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20260925&instance_id=182566&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=304508195&segment_id=227087&user_id=e2862097b5a5d4f22d0b82b929ce528a

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/us/ice-surge-immigration-arrests.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20260927&instance_id=182628&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=319886775&segment_id=227148&user_id=16e8eb830e4bd362dd416f1daa9d25b1

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“Netanyahu has stolen America’s sovereignty and self-government and turned the “superpower” into a Puppet State.”

• Ted Cruz and the Subservience of the US Senate to Israel (Paul Craig Roberts)

It is powerful evidence of American collapse that the red state of Texas, John Wayne country, has a US Senator who believes that protest of genocide is anti-semitism. When a Texan disrespects the national anthem in order to demonstrate his subservience to Greater Israel, we know the Zionists have stolen our country. It shows that the “conservative patriots” who support Ted Cruz also disrespect America and support Israel over America.


On the other hand it might merely show that Ted Cruz is a political whore dependent on the Israel Lobby’s campaign contribution for his reelection campaign. As he is dependent on Israel’s money, or rather on the money that the US taxpayers are forced by “their” government to give to Israel with which to purchase our elections, he has to serve Israel, not America. And no, it is not the same thing.

Americans, a people very slow on the uptake, have not caught on after decades that the billions of dollars they are forced to transfer each year to Israel is a money-laundering operation that comes back to members of the House and Senate as political campaign contributions. Americans are such a naive and witless people that I do not see how they can survive. The US Government is the only government in history whose president and congress are dependent on their support for Israel.

From the way Trump speaks–especially at the UN–it does seem that our president is Israel’s puppet who is going to unleash nuclear war on Iran in behalf of Israel’s hegemony over the Middle East. The dumbshit Arabs in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Turks stand there knowing that they will be next. The former Israeli prime minister Bennett has already warned Turkey–“the next Iran”–when he addressed the Israel Lobby in the US last February. The Saudis have let thmselves be manipulated for so long by Washing and the Israelis that no one respects them or cares what happens to them.

Israel at least has purpose and determination, which the Muslims, with the exception of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, lack. It is quite amazing that a portion of the Muslim Middle East is allied with Israel in support of its own destruction, as is the Republican Party.

The Republican Party represents Israel. The Democrat Party represents immigrant-invaders, criminals, and sexual perverts. A vote for either party is a vote against America. https://www.unz.com/jfreud/semitismor-jewish-supremacism-not-antisemitism-is-the-great-plague-of-our-times/

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“The United States is moving in a direction that nobody would’ve recognized, especially by our founders,” Hanson said.

• Victor Davis Hanson: The Counterrevolution, Explained (Pedro Rodriguez)

Decorated historian, Hillsdale college professor and Daily Signal senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson explained the reasoning behind his New York Times bestseller “The Counter-Revolution” during Heritage Action’s Sentinel Summit in Orlando on Saturday.


As Hanson stated in both his video appearance at the summit and in his book, the Left’s challenge is to create a government and a society that fit its desires, which has prompted President Donald Trump to fuel a movement to maintain America’s traditional way of life and to act against longtime liberal institutions such as universities and legacy media.

“The United States is moving in a direction that nobody would’ve recognized, especially by our founders,” Hanson said. “Donald Trump is trying to undo this progressive project that had captured the institutions and was kind of oblivious to whether the Democratic Party actually won or not. They were able to retain power and influence without it.” As a result, the senior fellow added, the liberal hijacking of America’s institutions and society created bias in the media, corporate boardrooms, entertainment, K-12 education, and universities.

At that point, Hanson added, those institutions created the “idea that you had to have a bachelor’s degree, or you had to go to a university, to work at the DMV, or to work at HHS, or to work at the planning commission.” “In other words, you could be a lifelong master electrician, and when you were retiring, you couldn’t get a job, let’s say, as a building inspector, unless you were certified by a university,” he continued. “So, we created this vast 3 million-member federal workforce, and probably 10 to 20 million state and local workers.”

That liberal takeover, Hanson said, created a society that has embraced multiple genders, biological men in women’s sports, mass border crossings, and lesser criminal penalties for those who stole $950 in merchandise and not $951. That society, Hanson said, is what led people like Trump to feel like they had to tackle the issues created by this liberal takeover.

“All of these things that have constituted a revolution,” he continued. “This kind of revolution that Trump is waging is saying, it doesn’t do any good to complain about the media if you don’t defund PBS and NPR and USAID and all of these things.” “It doesn’t do any good to complain about the border unless you build a wall, you deport people, you stop catching release, and you eliminate the refugee status you get after you get here,” he continued.

Read more …

You can’t talk about Israel without talking about Muslims at the same time. Both in the US and the EU.

• Dems’ Virulent Antisemitism Could Be the Midterm Wild Card (Stephen Kruiser)

Let’s just get something clear up front: I am not here to figure out why Jewish Americans vote for Democrats. I’m a lifelong practicing Roman Catholic, and I can’t fathom why anyone from my faith tradition votes for Dems. What the heck, let’s leave religion out of it — it’s a mystery to me why anyone would ever vote for a Democrat.


The Democrats have been on the more antisemitic side of things since the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. The three-year anniversary of that horror comes less than a month before the midterm elections this year, and it’s worth wondering if Jewish Americans might break with historical trends and be a deciding variable. Any exercises in moral equivalency between Hamas and the Israeli response to October 7 are patently antisemitic, and the Democrats have been involved in a lot of them. The Brownshirt revival on college campuses post-Oct. 7, 2023 has received explicit and implicit support from the Democrats.

Here’s a snapshot of the thinking of a leftist activist who Robert wrote about over the weekend: “Flores, like many contemporary leftist activists, hates Jews, and thinks they’re behind everything that a “progressive” thinks is wrong with the world. Their nefarious hegemony extends even to the local politics of Sonoma County, Calif. Says Flores: “But we’re literally run by the gay Jewish mafia — the Zionists in Sonoma County. The Jews still run the world. That’s where we’re at. All our money gets sent to Israel, but nobody wants to talk about that.”

A lot of Democrats will insist that disapproving of the United States/Israel alliance isn’t antisemitic, but any deep dive usually proves that it is. American leftists hate Israel because they hate Jews. And they hate Jews because they’ve spent a kajillion years telling themselves that the Islamic jihadi psychopaths who want to wipe Israel — and eventually the United States — off the map are good people.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members who are ascendant in the Democratic Party are, for the most part, unhinged antisemites. I added the qualifier “for the most part” there just in case some leftist troll managed to find one who isn’t. I don’t think that will happen, though. Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, Rashida Tlaib, and DSA Psycho Queen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all prefer that Israel be destroyed and Islamic terrorists hold complete sway in the Middle East. That’s what “Free Palestine” is all about.

El-Sayed is a big moral equivalence antisemite. This is from Catherine: “The Nazis slaughtered six million Jews, the Holocaust from which the global Jewish population has never recovered. The Jews were entirely innocent victims of irrational and violent hatred. El-Sayed wanted to pretend the Arab Muslim loss in the 1948 Israeli independence war is an experience of similar trauma ” Sane people never say, “Ya know, what we went through was just like the Holocaust.” Because it wasn’t.

The question now is how many Jewish American voters will realize that the power base in the Democratic Party is rapidly shifting towards people who truly and deeply hate them. The Dems may be slipping up a lot lately, but they’re still pretty crafty with false narratives and obfuscation. There’s also a strongly inherent level of gullibility that has to be factored into anyone who’s ever voted for Democrats. Hoping for a sea change in that voting bloc might be a bit much. Or, we might get lucky, and legacy Dem voters will finally realize that “free health care for all” isn’t a thing.

Read more …

Define craziness:

“..If the European automakers cannot purchase Chinese EV carbon credit certificates, the fines levied by Brussels against gasoline powered autos will destroy the EU auto business. “

• Europe Asks China to Voluntarily Limit EV Exports (CTH)

I was quite confused by this distinctly European approach until I had dinner with a Chinese actuary working in the auto warranty insurance industry. Europe asks China to voluntarily limit exports (mostly autos) to the European Union. Europe doesn’t want to get China angry with them about this issue. However, China is sending massive numbers of EVs into Europe. Europe is losing its auto business. I couldn’t figure out why the EU didn’t take an aggressive/confrontational position.


Then I was reminded. Europe cannot force Beijing through a trade action (tariffs, ban, EU limit etc.) because Beijing might stop selling them EV carbon credits. If the European automakers cannot purchase Chinese EV carbon credit certificates, the fines levied by Brussels against gasoline powered autos will destroy the EU auto business. Think about this for a while, then read the EU media report:

EuroNews – Brussels is pressing Beijing to accept quotas on Chinese exports as negotiations enter their final stretch, with the EU threatening trade measures unless tangible progress is made by next month. Brussels and Beijing are fighting over quotas that would limit Chinese imports to the EU market, as the Europeans seek to rebalance their trade relationship with China, Euronews has learned.

Both started intense negotiations last June over EU and Chinese access to each other’s markets, with an October deadline set by the European Commission to reach “tanglible” results. However, China is pushing hard against the EU’s attempts to protect its market.

According to one person familiar with the matter, the Commission, which is negotiating on behalf of the 27 EU countries on trade issues, wants China to accept quotas on specific products. However, it is unclear how China would accept and respect such quotas. According to media reports, so-called “voluntary export restrictions” have been pushed by the Commission for electric vehicles. But Beijing’s trade minister rejected them in a statement earlier this month.

If China accepted such a system of restrictions, it would mean that it voluntarily limits its exports to the EU on the basis of a deal negotiated with the Commission, sparing the EU from adopting defensive trade measures that might be seen as an aggressive move by China. Technical negotiations are in their final stretch as the October deadline is approaching. ”

It’s a remarkable mess, no?

Europe wants Beijing to voluntarily limit the number of EVs that come into Europe from China, in order to save their auto sector from complete collapse. However, Europe cannot force Beijing to limit the number of EVs that come into Europe from China, or Beijing might stop selling them carbon credit certificates that will result in fines to the EU automakers that will collapse the EU auto sector.

You would think that Europe would just get rid of the net-zero carbon regulations until they can stabilize their market and get back to a reasonable energy policy. Alas, that would mean reversing decades of climate change legislation. The preferred route is to ask Beijing to limit hurting them.

Again, think about this.

Madness.

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https://twitter.com/Crazyunfill94/status/2104178507643568389?s=20 https://twitter.com/RayBurtonSAS/status/2104347850314248484?s=20

 

 

 

 

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May 282026
 


Andy Warhol Mick Jagger 1975


• SpaceX-Tesla Merger Speculation Grows (ZH)
• No, Iran and China Are Not ‘Winning’ (Ben Shapiro)
• Trump Red Line: No Sanctions Relief Unless Iran Gives Up Uranium (ZH)
• President Trump: Iran is Negotiating on Fumes (CTH)
• Democrat Voter Fraud in America is Legion – Dr. Jerome Corsi (USAW)
• The Islamic Terrorist Conquest of West Africa (Lawrence A. Franklin)
• Pope Leo Needs Trump to Tame AI (Daniel McCarthy)
• Russian Court Orders Euroclear To Pay €200 Billion (RT)
• Ukraine War Enters ‘A New Phase’ (Stephen Green)
• Small Business Administration: $200 Billion In Fradulent Pandemic Loans (JTN)
• Two Countries in the World Retaliated Against Us, China and Canada (CTH)
• Home of 20-Year CIA Senior Manager Raided: $40 Million in Gold Bars (CTH)
• President Trump Praises DNI Tulsi Gabbard for Her Incredible Work (CTH)

 


 

https://twitter.com/Sassafrass_84/status/2059039734114955467?s=20

 


 


It’s harder to keep them apart than to merge them.

Expect at least a $4 trillion evaluation.

But what happens if something happens to Elon Musk?

• SpaceX-Tesla Merger Speculation Grows (ZH)

Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives has pointed out for months the potential for a SpaceX-Tesla merger, discussing the possibility with Bloomberg in February and, more recently, on a podcast where he said the probability is 80% by 2027. Polymarket odds of a merger by the end of the year stand at 32%. Now, CNBC has joined the growing speculation that Musk may eventually merge Tesla and SpaceX into one mega-company. The report said: “The two companies already have a laundry list of shared resources, and Musk has discussed with colleagues the possibility of folding the companies together, according to people familiar with the talks who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the topic.”


A current Tesla employee told CNBC that many workers at the electric vehicle company have long expected such a transaction to eventually take place and that the topic is openly discussed internally. Another person close to the company said that shared challenges tied to power and compute constraints have led to regular collaborations. Both companies already overlap across AI, compute, power, batteries, materials, engineering, suppliers, board members, and personnel. SpaceX now includes Starlink and xAI, while Tesla is increasingly becoming an AI and robotics company, in addition to remaining one of the leading EV makers.

https://twitter.com/TheSonOfWalkley/status/2059348595019550769?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2059348595019550769%7Ctwgr%5E625e36eedb1d9d3dbbc2ddd4320d05cb54e8efc4%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Ftechnology%2Fspacex-tesla-merger-speculation-grows-decade-cross-company-deals-reveal-deeper

Financial ties between the two companies are already well known: Tesla invested $2 billion in xAI, which became part of SpaceX after the merger. SpaceX bought $697 million worth of Tesla Megapack systems for xAI data centers and $131 million worth of Cybertrucks. Past transactions also included Tesla selling solar equipment and parts to SpaceX, Tesla using SpaceX jets, and SpaceX helping with Cybertruck materials.Tejpaul Bhatia, a longtime SpaceX investor and CEO of Nebex, told CNBC that “Parallel entrepreneurship seems to work for him [Elon Musk].”

Tesla’s market cap currently sits at around $1.6 trillion, while SpaceX is expected to start trading on Nasdaq in about two weeks, after achieving a private market valuation of $1.25 trillion earlier this year. Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives recently told Anthony Pompliano that he has a high-conviction view (80-85% chance) that SpaceX will merge with Tesla in 2027, post-IPO.

Musk sits on both company boards and holds 85% voting power at SpaceX, which would mean limited resistance when the time comes for a merger. EV blog Electrek laid out Musk’s creative engineering of billion-dollar self-dealings over the years:

1. SolarCity — $2.6 billion (2016): Tesla acquired SolarCity, a money-losing solar installer where Musk served as chairman and was the largest shareholder, for $2.6 billion in an all-stock deal. Shareholders sued, alleging it was a bailout of a company that was running out of cash. Musk sat on both boards. A Delaware court ultimately ruled the deal was “fair,” but other Tesla directors settled for $60 million without admitting fault. Musk argued that SolarCity’s solar business had become an integral part of Tesla’s own business, but shortly after winning the lawsuit, Tesla shut down parts of its solar operations and stopped reporting quarterly solar deployment.

2. Twitter/X — $44 billion (2022): Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion, a price he himself tried to back out of after realizing he overpaid. Within a year, Fidelity had revalued its stake as down 65%. By October 2024, the platform was valued at roughly $9-10 billion. Then, in March 2025, Musk had xAI acquire X for $33 billion ($45 billion including $12 billion in debt) — effectively bailing out his private investors by magically restoring a platform worth $9 billion to a $33 billion valuation on the back of xAI.

3. xAI — Tesla’s $2 billion investment, then SpaceX absorption (2025-2026): Tesla disclosed a $2 billion investment in Musk’s xAI in January 2026, despite shareholders having previously rejected a proposal. Days later, Musk was rumored to be floating a three-way merger. Within weeks, SpaceX acquired xAI in a deal worth roughly $250 billion. Weeks after that, Musk admitted xAI was “not built right” and needed to be rebuilt — after Tesla shareholders’ money was already in and SpaceX shareholders had swallowed the dilution.

4. Tesla-SpaceX merger (2026-2027?): Now Musk wants to combine the whole thing. If this happens, Tesla shareholders will be merging their $1.6 trillion company with an entity that Musk controls with 85% voting power — an entity that now includes the wreckage of Twitter, a money-losing AI company he admitted was built wrong, and a rocket business with an insane valuation that rests on ever-delayed Mars dreams and “data centers in space.”

Polymarket odds of a SpaceX-Tesla merger by the end of the year stand at 32%.

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But the media like that picture.

• No, Iran and China Are Not ‘Winning’ (Ben Shapiro)

For years, much of the American media has operated under a peculiar assumption: that the best way to confront adversaries such as China and Iran is to accommodate them. If the United States applies pressure, the narrative quickly becomes that America is overextended, losing leverage, or somehow empowering its enemies. That narrative has resurfaced during President Donald Trump’s confrontation with Tehran and Beijing. According to outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, both Iran and China are supposedly emerging stronger from the current conflict. It is a difficult claim to square with reality.


Iran’s senior military leadership has been decimated. Its regional proxy network has been weakened. Its economy remains in severe distress, and its military capabilities have been heavily degraded. Yet much of the media coverage treats Iran’s mere survival as evidence that it is somehow winning. The New York Times recently argued that Iran had “succeeded in confounding U.S. and Israeli expectations for a speedy victory,” suggesting that Tehran had created a kind of stalemate. But modern wars rarely end with formal surrender ceremonies or total collapse. By the standards of contemporary warfare, weakening an enemy’s military leadership, degrading its economy, and limiting its regional influence would traditionally be viewed as significant strategic gains.

Instead, media coverage often defines victory so narrowly that any continued resistance by Iran becomes proof of American failure. The Times also suggested that Iran had “maintained control” over the Strait of Hormuz. But if Iran truly controlled the strait in any meaningful sense, it would be freely exporting its own oil and profiting from commercial traffic through the region. It is doing neither. Iran’s threats against shipping lanes reflect desperation and leverage-seeking behavior, not dominance.

In fact, instability in the Strait creates problems not only for the United States and its allies but also for China, which depends heavily on imported oil flowing through the Gulf. That reality complicates the simplistic narrative that Beijing somehow benefits automatically from chaos in the Middle East. To be sure, the Trump administration has exercised restraint in certain areas, particularly regarding direct attacks on Iranian energy infrastructure. But that restraint reflects strategic calculation, not weakness. Completely destroying Iran’s energy sector could devastate the Iranian population and eliminate the economic foundation for any future moderate government.

The same pattern appears in coverage of China. The Post recently highlighted a reported intelligence assessment claiming that Beijing is exploiting the Iran conflict to maximize its advantage over the United States. The report pointed to Chinese weapons sales, diplomatic messaging and China’s ability to study American military operations. None of that is surprising. Great powers routinely study conflicts and attempt to exploit geopolitical openings. That does not mean they are winning. China still faces the same structural problems it faced before the conflict began: slowing economic growth, demographic decline, mounting debt and heavy dependence on imported energy. Prolonged instability in the Middle East threatens Beijing’s economy as much as Washington’s.

The Post also emphasized concerns that the conflict is depleting American munitions stockpiles that could be needed in a future Taiwan contingency. That concern is legitimate. But it reflects years of inadequate defense production and military downsizing under previous administrations, not some strategic triumph by Beijing. Critics of American foreign policy often argue that China can portray the United States as an aggressive power in decline. But China’s own behavior makes that argument difficult to sustain. Beijing continues threatening Taiwan, tightening control over Hong Kong, expanding military influence across the Pacific, and pressuring neighboring countries throughout Asia.

The idea that China is positioned to win a global moral argument against the United States requires overlooking much of Beijing’s conduct. Ultimately, the broader media narrative reflects a longstanding tendency in parts of the American press to interpret nearly every assertion of U.S. power as evidence of American weakness. Military action becomes proof of overreach. Economic pressure becomes recklessness. Adversaries surviving become adversaries winning.

But survival is not victory, and disruption is not dominance. Whatever criticisms one may have of Trump’s foreign policy, the central premise of his approach remains straightforward: American strength deters adversaries more effectively than accommodation does… History suggests that argument deserves more serious consideration than much of the current media coverage is willing to give it.

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“No, no, not at all. Not sanctions relief, no..”

• Trump Red Line: No Sanctions Relief Unless Iran Gives Up Uranium (ZH)

Trump Red Line
President Trump has reasserted his ‘red line’ for negotiations, centered on enriched uranium and the nuclear issue: President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that Iran would not get sanctions relief in exchange for giving up their highly enriched uranium. His comments come as the United States and Iran try to strike a deal to end the conflict that has engulfed the Middle East for the last three months.


“No, no, not at all. Not sanctions relief, no,” Trump told PBS News during a short phone call when asked if the current deal would mean that Iran would give up their highly enriched uranium in exchange for sanctions relief. Trump also in a televised Wednesday afternoon cabinet meeting said Iran is “intent on a deal” but that “Iran is negotiating on fumes.”

White House Rejects ‘Complete Fabrication’ Of Iran TV MOU Contents. The Trump administration has denied the morning Iranian state media reports on the contents of a current ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ (MOU) – which curiously had left out any reference whatsoever to the fate of Iran’s enriched uranium…

WHITE HOUSE: NOBODY SHOULD BELIEVE IRAN STATE MEDIA REPORTING

WHITE HOUSE CALLS REPORTED IRAN MOU A ‘COMPLETE FABRICATION’

An official underscored that it is a “complete fabrication” – and so it seems we are yet again back at square one, as Tehran has also said it is only engaged in ‘indirect’ contact with Washington at this point. There are further reports in US media that the Pentagon has drawn up a new target list, and has acknowledged that the Iranians have been able to better hide their missile launch sites. Also emerging are ambiguous reports of some kind of potential explosion incident at a petrochemical complex at Asaluyeh, in Iran’s Bushehr province. US side denounces Iranian state media reporting on current MOU draft and status:

Oil Dumps on MOU Headlines
As for the status of talks, the below headlines present the latest (and noticeably absent is the enriched uranium question, or release of Iranian funds). Bloomberg summarizes: “An unofficial draft of a US-Iran interim peace deal says maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz can return to normal within a month of the agreement being finalized, according to Iranian state television. It’s unclear how recent the draft, reported by IRIB News, is or whether the US has agreed to the terms.”

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“Iran thought they were going to outwait me, you know: “We’ll out wait him, he’s got the midterms.”

• President Trump: Iran is Negotiating on Fumes (CTH)

Earlier today, President Trump and Vice President JD Vance held a cabinet meeting in the White House. The assembled press pool was invited to attend. Again, President Trump being the most transparent administration in history.


President Trump walked through many of the policy agendas within the various cabinet offices, and each cabinet head responded by discussing what their department was doing to combat waste and fraud and align for the strongest economic outcome. At 26:39 of the video, Secretary of State Marco Rubio walks through the current status of engagement with Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. At 45:00 of the video, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth discusses the ongoing military operation in the Middle East, against Iran. At 54:11 Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent provides an update.

At 58:00 the media question session begins. WATCH:

“Iran thought they were going to outwait me, you know: “We’ll out wait him, he’s got the midterms.” I don’t care about the midterms, look what happened last night, that was the prelude to the midterms. They want very much to make a deal. So far, they haven’t gotten there. We’re not satisfied with it, but we will be — either that or we’ll have to just finish the job. The strait’s going to be open to everybody. It’s international waters. Nobody’s going to control it. We’re going to watch over it.”

“Iran is negotiating on fumes, but we’ll see what happens. We can make a good deal right now, but maybe not a great deal, and if it’s not a great deal, we’re not making it. Iran will receive no concessions or sanctions relief in exchange for handing over its highly enriched uranium. Iran cannot be allowed to possess a nuclear weapon because it will use it immediately and without hesitation.”

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“I believe Trump is going to have to call in the National Guard in certain states in order to get a fair election.”

• Democrat Voter Fraud in America is Legion – Dr. Jerome Corsi (USAW)

Dr. Jerome Corsi has a Harvard PhD in political science. He has written more than 50 books, and many of them became best-sellers. Dr. Corsi says the Democrat election and voter fraud days are caving in on them. The last time Dr. Corsi was on USAW, he said “Democrat Voter Fraud in America is Legion.” Former CIA Director John Brennan must have heard Dr. Corsi because two weeks later, the headline reads, “John Brennan: “Legion Of Professionals” In DOJ, FBI, CIA Are Still Resisting Trump’s Influence.” Was this a coincidence Brennan used the term “Legion”? Dr. Corsi says, “No, I think he is responding to the fact the resistance to Trump is overwhelming. He is balancing out the legitimate charge that the cheating is ‘Legion.’ He’s saying a ‘Legion’ of people are opposing Trump. That’s the real ‘Legion,’ and it’s Trump that is awful, and he’s the one blocking democracy. It’s ridiculous.”


So, former CIA Director Brennan is basically saying voter fraud is real? Dr. Corsi says, “Yes, he’s admitting it, and then he’s countering it saying the real ‘Legion’ are people opposing Trump. So, he’s trying to change the subject by using the same words. It doesn’t work. John Brennann is arguing that it is legitimate to oppose the President of the United States and the bureaucracy. . .. Therefore, he is legitimating insurrection.”

Dr. Corsi says the Democrat Party has changed into a communist party, and there is really nothing democratic about it. Dr. Corsi explains, “The design of the (Democrat) party is to destroy America. That was the original communist plan. Now, the Democrat Party is open to supporting Marxists for office and Islamists, radical Islamists like Mamdani (NYC Mayor). You have this fusion of radical Islam and Leftism because they both hate the United States. They are going on the theory of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Dr. Corsi goes on to say, “The Democrat Party has gone insane. They have no agenda, and all they want is power. It does not matter how they get it. They are increasingly becoming violent in the attempt to grasp power. That is becoming apparent to the American people. When the American people see that, the Democrat Party will have no reason for existing. It is rapidly proceeding to that point. . .. The Democrat Party has become rogue, anti-God, anti-family and an anti-life destruction engine. It’s become dangerous.”

Dr. Jerome Corsi points out the losses at the Supreme Court are making voter fraud more difficult with rulings that make it illegal to give extra days to count votes and forbidding redistricting on race alone. These are just a few of the ways Democrats are losing their voter fraud grip. There are also 130 lawsuits across 32 states to stop Dem voter fraud, and there are DOJ lawsuits to clean up voter rolls with 29 states that are blocking access. Dems are desperately trying to hold onto their voter fraud. Dr. Corsi says with the Senate refusing to pass the “Save Act,” President Trump will be forced to declare a national emergency, probably sooner than later. November midterms are a little more than five months away.

In closing, Dr. Corsi predicts, “President Trump is not going to allow the Democrats to steal the midterm elections and have two years more of impeachment after impeachment, which is what the Democrats have vowed to do. . .. I believe Trump is going to have to call in the National Guard in certain states in order to get a fair election.”

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From west to east.

• The Islamic Terrorist Conquest of West Africa (Lawrence A. Franklin)

The widened scope and quickened pace of the Islamic State’s military operations in the Sahel region — just below North Africa, roughly from Senegal to Sudan — threatens to alter the strategic orientation of the African continent. Efforts at countering terrorist operations in the Sahel, such as they were, have evidently failed. As all roads to Mali’s capital of Bamoko are now blocked, that country might be the first state to “go under.” On April 25, during a coordinated attack on several Malian cities, Muslim terrorists killed the country’s Minister of Defense. The terrorists then drove the Malian Army and its allied Russian mercenaries out of the country’s north.


The military juntas ruling Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have proven themselves as ineffective at combatting Islamic terrorist operations as the democracies that they overthrew. The increasing terrorist assaults across the Sahel and the jihadists’s determined efforts to take over Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have eroded the sovereignty of these states. The combat successes of the jihadists in the Sahel in March 2022 precipitated their elevation to the status of “Islamic State Sahel Province” within the hierarchy of the IS, and several other factors have facilitated the growth of the jihadist advance in the Sahel.

The cooling of the once global counterterrorist crusade — following an apparent shift in focus by the world’s great power rivalries, as well as fewer resources directed against the terrorist problem — left a vacuum that was adroitly filled by jihadist groups, which has reduced the pressure on Islamic State and Al Qaeda regional affiliates. Another situation that might have impacted negatively upon the Sahel’s overall security is the monumental migratory flow of Africans from sub-Saharan countries who pass through the Sahel to the Mediterranean, and the consequent stress this puts on the Sahel economies.

A third force eroding state sovereignty of Sahel countries is warfare waged by Al Qaeda terrorist affiliates that are rivals of the Islamic State, such as the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM). JNIM also coordinates attacks with the Malian anti-government militia known as the Azawad Liberation Front. Jihadist violence has become ubiquitous in the Sahel, and recently expanded to include fighting between Islamic State and Al Qaeda. On April 2, a notable clash between these two rival terrorist networks occurred in western Niger. The Sahel now appears to be the epicenter of global terrorist violence. Sahel’s terrorist groups might also be acquiring confidence that they can achieve permanent and more ambitious goals in the near future.

slamic State units have also been exploiting the deteriorating security situation in the Sahel and in Nigeria’s northeastern states, which are already governed under Islamic sharia law. Islamic State probably feels buoyed by its easy success in recent battles with the Nigerian Army. On April 25, Al Qaeda terrorists conducted simultaneous attacks against several Malian urban areas. Their success might well tempt jihadist fighters to move into major urban areas in northern Nigeria and elsewhere in the Sahel. An additional worrisome trend indicates that terrorist violence is moving westward to Africa’s Atlantic coast.

State control increasingly is being eroded in the Sahel region, despite multilateral efforts to sustain the sovereignty of several states in the Sahel, such as the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF) consisting of Chad, Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, and, until last year, Niger. The MNJTF had made significant strides in halting the advance of the Al Qaeda-affiliated Boko Haram terrorist group, particularly in Chad, but recently the overall scorecard is less conclusive. The MNJTF is sustained mostly by the continent-wide Organization of the African Union (OAU). While the MNJTF originally planned to field a 10,000-member OAU army, insufficient air cover, poor communications, and logistical problems have reduced the organization’s effectiveness.

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All this talk about democracy and transparency. Nothing is less transparent then the Vatican.

• Pope Leo Needs Trump to Tame AI (Daniel McCarthy)

Pope Leo is right about the need to make artificial intelligence answer to the human good. AI has to be subject to human moral responsibility. But whose? The pope warns against power accumulating in private hands: A few companies, led by a handful of executives and board members, control AI development. The hard question Leo’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” tries to answer is how to make AI accountable to public authority and the common good, not just the interests of its creators. This is where Leo runs into trouble — his view of politics is one-sided and decades out of touch.The encyclical is written in the language of 20th-century liberalism, with the United Nations and international bodies playing an outsize role.


“International organizations, particularly the United Nations, are essential instruments for promoting a civilization of love,” he writes, in the context of “negotiating shared regulations on the use of digital technologies, in order to protect civilians and the most vulnerable from ‘invisible’ yet real forms of violence.” Leo compares AI to the Tower of Babel, yet that image applies at least as well to the U.N. Citing the teachings of Saint John Paul II and Pius XII, Leo affirms, “the Church values democracy insofar as it guarantees the effective participation of citizens, enables them to elect and peacefully replace their leaders and prevents power from being monopolized by small elite groups motivated by particular or ideological interests.”

By that measure, how democratic are most international organizations? “In a world where data, computational resources and regulatory influence remain in the hands of a few, to speak of the common good means exposing this new form of epistemic, economic and political asymmetry and naming the new monopolies of AI,” writes Leo. Hear hear! The pope is absolutely correct about the need for transparency — if we want ethical AI, we have to know whose ethics are being written into the system. Ordinary people have to know who in the major tech companies is responsible for teaching these machines, instilling rules in them, and what those rules are.

And the public has to exercise due skepticism about the supposedly objective results that AI inquiries generate — the results conform to someone’s chosen criteria and expectations. The machines may generate their own answers; they don’t do their own moral thinking: “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean,” the pope writes. “Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.”

These things must all be supplied by human beings, and as the pope says, we shouldn’t trust tech companies to come up with the right guardrails on their own. The technology is so powerful, its uses have to be debated by a well-informed public, and Big Tech must be answerable to higher authority. Yet Leo often downplays the role of elected national governments in this, favoring nebulous “new collaborative efforts” among “political leaders, labor organizations, the business world and the scientific community.” That’s consistent with his confidence in the cacophonous United Nations, as well as his thinking about “how legislative and regulatory decisions impact the dignity of work, shared prosperity, inequality reduction and environmental protection” in the context of AI.

It’s one smorgasbord after another — a welter of competing interests and agendas that can’t be brought into focus in time while AI races ahead. Leo appreciates the speed at which the technology is moving, but not the need for commensurate “dispatch” on the part of the political response. A policymaker has to be able to act quickly to keep up with AI and has to have one will and voice — in short, what’s needed is a strong executive backed by the popular authority of a national election. The age of AI has serious implications for the institutions of government, and it makes the presidency more important than ever. It’s not the United Nations or an amorphous assortment of interest groups Leo needs to appeal to; it’s President Trump.

“Magnifica Humanitas” doesn’t do that. The pope would not, and should not, trim Catholic Social Teaching down to suit Trump; on economics, war and much else, there are sharp differences. Yet Leo’s encyclical goes beyond the necessary points of disagreement to embrace a broadly liberal and internationalist agenda — even including global warming on his ideological checklist. If commonsense AI regulation is going to succeed, not only does it need Trump’s support, it has to have his voters’ backing, too. Leo needs to learn to speak their language, if he wants to stop AI running away with our lives.

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Will we risk the entire global financial system?

• Russian Court Orders Euroclear To Pay €200 Billion (RT)

A Moscow arbitration court has granted the Bank of Russia’s request for the immediate enforcement of a ruling ordering Euroclear to pay around €200 billion ($233 billion), RBK reported on Tuesday, citing lawyers for the Belgian clearing house. Ukraine’s Western backers froze about $300 billion in Russian sovereign assets after the escalation of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev in 2022, most of it held at the Brussels-based depository. While the EU has so far stopped short of seizing the assets outright, Brussels has transferred some €6.6 billion in profits generated from frozen Russian central bank assets to a fund for Ukraine since 2024.


Moscow has said any use of its frozen assets would amount to theft, also warning it could retaliate by seizing about €200 billion in Western assets held in Russia, though it has so far stopped short of doing so. Commenting on the latest ruling, lawyers for Euroclear, Sergey Savelyev and Maksim Kulkov, claimed to RBK that its right to a fair trial had been violated but declined further comment due to the closed nature of the proceedings. The Bank of Russia described the ruling as fair, noting that it takes into account not only the ongoing nature of the violation, but also the risk that any delay in enforcement would prolong the restoration of the violated rights.

The initial ruling ordering Euroclear to pay €200 billion was issued by the arbitration court last week. Commenting at the time, Euroclear called it unfounded, adding that such claims are not recognized under EU law. It also pledged to appeal the verdict. Shortly after filing a lawsuit against Euroclear in December, the Bank of Russia said it could expand its legal action over frozen assets beyond the Belgian-based depository to include other European banks that also hold its funds.

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Putin will have to flatten Kiev after all.

• Ukraine War Enters ‘A New Phase’ (Stephen Green)

“Russia is considering limiting exports of diesel and jet fuel,” Bloomberg and other sources reported Tuesday, “as refinery run rates fall to multi-year lows amid Ukraine’s escalating attacks.” An Interfax source claimed that the decision to ban exports is at “an advanced stage,” but no date has been set. If it comes to pass, that would be bad for diesel prices and inflation right here at home, but worse for Moscow’s finances. Just the fact that the Kremlin is considering an export ban is more evidence that Kyiv’s drone campaign is increasingly effective — against Russia’s energy production at home, and closer to the frontlines in Ukraine.


The brutal math is that most months this year, Ukraine managed to kill or wound more Russian soldiers than Moscow was able to recruit. After nearly four-and-a-half years of remorseless attritional warfare, that’s not a good place to be. And it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. ISW’s George Barros said on Monday, “The war in Ukraine has entered a new phase.” Well, maybe take a statement like that one with several grains of salt. While ISW’s reporting is rock solid — everything they post in their daily Russo-Ukraine War updates is open-source and verifiable — the organization’s analysis can be somewhat (ahem) less reliable.

Estimates vary, but ISW believes that Russian forces suffered a net loss of territory in April, while others claim it happened in April and in February. There are still a few days of fighting to go in May, but Russia is believed to maybe have lost a little ground again this month.nThrough the end of April, Russian advances in 2026 average about 2.9 km2, per day, down sharply from 9.76 km2 per day in early 2025. Russian casualties are much higher, too.

Two things seem to have changed. One is that Ukraine finally has enough mid-range drones to do to Russian forces what Russian forces spent 2025 doing to Ukraine: interdicting soldiers and logistics well behind the front lines “by fielding new technologies such as the US-made Hornet strike UAV, among other systems,” as Barros put it. The other is that Ukraine is now systematically going after Russian fuel trucks, further complicating Moscow’s logistical problems.

Trent wonders if the losses are “enough to cause fuel shortages, fuel rationing & the shutdown of civilian motor traffic between Crimea and Russia?” Regardless, Kyiv spent 2025 giving up ground, yes, but also destroying Russian air defenses faster than Russian industry can replace them. The bloody results speak for themselves on the ground, and in Moscow’s concerns over fuel exports. With no end in sight to this stupid war, there’s no doubt in my mind that Barros is correct when he says that “Ukraine’s advantage in intermediate range strikes is notably not permanent,” and that “Russia will very likely eventually develop countermeasures to mitigate Ukraine’s advantages.”

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“..200 billion in fraudulent PPP loans that the Biden administration tried to hide, and forgive, and sweep under the rug,”

• Small Business Administration: $200 Billion In Fradulent Pandemic Loans (JTN)

Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler said that the agency found $200 billion in fraudulent Paycheck Protection Program loans, which were intended to allow businesses to pay staff during the pandemic. “At the SBA, we found $200 billion in fraudulent PPP loans that the Biden administration tried to hide, and forgive, and sweep under the rug,” Loeffler said during President Donald Trump’s Cabinet meeting at Camp David on Wednesday.


She said that $22 billion in those fraudulent loans have been turned over to the U.S. Treasury and Department of Justice for collections and prosecution, and people who have been convicted of fraud are serving prison sentences. Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler said that the agency found $200 billion in fraudulent Paycheck Protection Program loans, which were intended to allow businesses to pay staff during the pandemic.

“At the SBA, we found $200 billion in fraudulent PPP loans that the Biden administration tried to hide, and forgive, and sweep under the rug,” Loeffler said during President Donald Trump’s Cabinet meeting at Camp David on Wednesday. She said that $22 billion in those fraudulent loans have been turned over to the U.S. Treasury and Department of Justice for collections and prosecution, and people who have been convicted of fraud are serving prison sentences.

Loeffler said that, because small businesses are some of the biggest taxpayers in the U.S., they bear a lot of the impact from fraud. “They show up every day. They work hard to provide for their employees, to build their businesses. They’re doing it the honest way. And they see fraudsters taking from the American people. It’s taxpayer money,” she said. The PPP provided government-backed loans to help small businesses keep their workforces employed during the pandemic. The program stopped accepting new applications on May 31, 2021.

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Quo Vadis, Ottawa?

• Two Countries in the World Retaliated Against Us, China and Canada (CTH)

I never quite understood just how controlled the information flow is inside Canada until about two years ago when we began closely monitoring Canadian positioning for the upcoming USMCA (CUSMA) renegotiation/cancellation. It quickly became obvious the majority of Canadians have no idea why it is almost a certainty the U.S. would exit the trilateral arrangement and position for a bilateral free trade agreement.


In the two years that have passed, now we see a few Canadians starting to realize the core issues of trade conflict that make any FTA between the U.S. and Canada almost impossible. The largest issue centers around Canada’s net-zero carbon legislation that now completely disconnects them from aligned North American energy policy between the U.S. and Mexico.

A trilateral agreement requires core alignment on industrial manufacturing, and that requires similar abilities & similar energy policy. You cannot make steel, iron and aluminum without coal and gas. You need joules for heavy industrial manufacturing that cannot be achieved without exploiting coal, gas or oil (carbon materials). Canada’s energy policy no longer aligns with industrial manufacturing. This core issue cannot be resolved at the current level of energy policy in Canada.

There are other issues like Canadian trade deals with China, non-tariff barriers, legislated rules over intellectual property and other points of significant friction that make alignment within North America challenging. However, the energy component makes compatible trade impossible.

In the interview below, U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra appears on a podcast with David Leis, for a blunt conversation about trade, pipelines, critical minerals, China, and why the U.S. is growing frustrated with Canada’s direction. At the end Hoekstra even explains why he is doing Canadian podcasts; because information within Canada is restricted by the government control of media – and that explains why most Canadians are clueless about the issues.

I’ve prompted the interview to the point that gets into the details. If you are interested to be fully understanding of what is coming, this is a solid reference point. Also, if you have financial investments associated with Canada or any system that is connected to the economic relationship between the U.S. and Canada, you need to watch this interview to proactively defend your financial interests. VIDEO PROMPTED:

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Watch it or listen to this roughly 30 minutes (prompted) as you cook, drive or go about your day. But listen to it and see the disconnect between Canada and the USA as outlined. Things are going to get much worse in this relationship as the finality of it all suddenly starts to sink in north of the border with the average Canadian.

Additionally, there’s another short segment on U.S-Canadian trade as discussed by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer recently at a Council on Foreign Relations event.

QUESTION: “How serious is the fissures? Are the fissures with Canada, the rupture with Canada? And can you envisage USMCA being transformed into separate agreement with Mexico, separate agreement with Canada, or no agreement with Canada?”

USTR GREER: “Well, I would say that, you know, the team right now is in Mexico. My team, and they’re negotiating with Mexico on a bilateral basis. I speak with some regularity to my Canadian counterparts.

Our sense is that we have with Canada, you know, some some trade challenges, which, you know, to some people, you know, some people may think, oh, those are just irritants to us. They’re, they’re significant, and the reality is, we’ve spent the past year and a half going to countries, telling them we have to have some level of tariff on the globe to deal with this giant death that we’re dealing with, to try to reshore, etc.

And, and most countries have, you know, I know grudgingly, but they said we understand your policy, we understand so we’re going to negotiate with you, we’re going to remove some of these tariffs and non tariff barriers, etc. Canada’s approach has been different.

They like China retaliated against the United States. Two countries in the world retaliated against us, People’s Republic of China and Canada, so they’re just, they’re just in a different spot, and it’s, it’s hard to see necessarily where that ends.”

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“$40 Million in Gold Bars, $2 Million Cash and 35 Rolexes”

• Home of 20-Year CIA Senior Manager Raided: $40 Million in Gold Bars (CTH)

An interesting arrest that might warrant some background material prior to today’s events. Keep in mind there are several indicted individuals from Venezuela and Mexico now said to be cooperating with the DOJ and federal law enforcement. In addition to former Venezuela dictator Nicolas Maduro in the Southern District of New York, we should also note three Mexican officials connected to the Sinaloa cartel previously turned themselves in to U.S. federal officials and are said to be cooperating.


Earlier this month, Gerardo Mérida, a retired Mexican army general who served as public-security secretary in northwestern Sinaloa state surrendered in Tucson, Arizona. Enrique Inzunza Cazárez, who is also facing drug trafficking and weapon charges, was taken into custody in San Diego by the DEA. Sinaloa businessman Enrique Diaz Vega – another name from the SDNY indictment – also turned himself into U.S. authorities in Arizona.

As you read this story, also keep in mind the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, falls under the authority of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and that agency oversees a background check program, known as “continuous vetting.” According to NBC News a 20-year veteran manger within the CIA named David Rush has been arrested on suspicion of embezzlement and theft. The CIA operative was reported to have been referred to the FBI by CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

(VIA NBC) WASHINGTON — A former CIA senior officer with top secret-level clearance has been accused of secretly stashing millions of dollars in gold bars in his home that he said he needed for “work-related expenses,” according to court documents and two people familiar with his employment history.

David Rush, who held a management position, was charged with criminal theft of public money in a complaint filed last week in the Eastern District of Virginia. His lawyer didn’t respond to a request for comment. He was also accused of lying to his employers about his background for nearly two decades. Asked about Rush’s case, a CIA spokesperson said in a statement joint statement with the FBI that the FBI had arrested a person after a referral from the agency.

“After a CIA internal investigation identified potential violations of the law, CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred the information to the FBI for a law enforcement investigation,” the written statement said. “The FBI is working closely with our partners at the CIA and the Department of Justice as we continue to investigate this matter fully. We are committed to following the facts, ensuring accountability, and pursuing justice in accordance with the law.”

[…] It wasn’t clear how the investigation into Rush began, and it also wasn’t clear when he left the CIA. His home was raided just last week.

From November through March, Rush made several requests for funds, including for foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars, according to an affidavit filed in federal court by an FBI agent investigating the case. In a storage space near his office, investigators found only a portion of the funds. On May 18, federal agents searched Rush’s home and seized roughly 300 gold bars worth more than $40 million, court documents said. Agents also seized about $2 million in U.S. currency and 35 luxury watches, mostly Rolexes, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit alleges Rush knowingly took part of the money he requested for work-related expenses to his home for personal gain. The court filing didn’t specify which agency employed Rush, but the two people familiar with his employment history said he was with the CIA. (link) Separate allegations in the complaint accuse Rush of falsifying his background over nearly two decades in dealings with government employers.

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She’s not gone yet.

• President Trump Praises DNI Tulsi Gabbard for Her Incredible Work (CTH)

During a cabinet meeting today at the White House, President Trump took the opportunity to thank Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, for her exceptional work and focus within the intelligence system to organize strong reforms that will be around for a long time. DNI Tulsi Gabbard has indeed been a transformative member of the cabinet, working through her office and agency while partnered with CIA Director John Ratcliffe and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio. Mrs. Gabbard is leaving on June 30 to stand beside her husband Abraham as he battles a bone cancer diagnosis. WATCH:


It is expected that DNI Gabbard will deliver more information to the American public through a series of declassifications prior to the end of her tenure. There is no immediate discussion of her replacement and Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Aaron Lukas, will serve as Acting Director of National Intelligence following her departure.

REMINDER: There will likely be a great deal of rumor and speculation about a different permanent replacement. One name sure to surface within the discussion is Devin Nunes, but I strongly doubt the former Chairman of the HPSCI would desire or accept the position.If, and that is a very big ‘if’, Devin Nunes was to accept the role, that would indicate a remarkable change in his opinion about the overall intelligence apparatus. Therefore, I doubt this is an option. Devin Nunes believes in the historic fidelity of the intelligence institutions. As a result, the DNI position has seemed smaller and less significant.

The only way Nunes would take the job is if two things changed. First, he now believed the construct of the United States intelligence apparatus is teetering on the edge of irreversible corruption (he did not previously hold this position); and second, if he sees that Tulsi has now proven the power of the DNI in the intelligence apparatus. As readers here will fully understand, until DNI Gabbard that power was never fully extended. Former House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) member Elise Stefanik will likely be another name. She would have the full support of the Susie Wiles grouping. The same network who advocated for Mike Waltz to be National Security Advisor.

However, Stefanik would greatly please Laura Loomer, Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro; while conversely providing fuel for Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly antagonisms. Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn would likely be another name. Unfortunately, Flynn’s judgement is not stellar, and while he has been supportive of Mrs. Gabbard it’s not likely President Trump wants that kind of Flynn drama or the issues he brings with him for a nomination. That said, if the political calculation is to fuel the core base, Flynn might stand a chance at nomination. But don’t overthink it, Flynn would be of no value in the DNI position for anything of substance. Again, weak judgement (led to his former demise) and grifting tendencies.

Two other names of note: Scott Perry from Pennsylvania who was a target of the FBI/IC for his support of President Trump, and Rick Crawford the current Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, a gang of eight member. The IC has nothing to fear from either of these names. They are essentially Mike Waltz clones, though to be fair I might be a little harsh on Perry.

Rick Crawford, as HPSCI Chairman, allowed Tulsi Gabbard to review the Atkinson transcript. Still, he didn’t act until Gabbard asked to see it and later pushed to declassify it. While he had the authority to handle it himself, like many congressional IC members in both the House and Senate, he seemed wary of challenging the very system they’re tasked with overseeing. [TIP: If whoever’s name it is currently falls under the IC oversight mechanism, they probably fear the “seven ways from Sunday” group, unlike Tulsi Gabbard. Accept this reality and adjust your perspective accordingly.]

GOPe types and “CONservative” influencers might also bring up Trey Gowdy or former HPSCI Chairman Mike Rogers. If either of these names show up, there’s a problem. And anyone advancing these names…. well, they’re the problem. One name that would seem to fit the role and responsibilities would be former Congressman Dan Bishop, currently serving as a U.S. Attorney in North Carolina. Bishop was a member of the House Subcommittee on Govt Weaponization that frustratingly went nowhere as it was designed to fail by House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan. Bishop himself was frustrated by the lack of assertiveness within the sub-committee structure. There’s no immediate need for any speculative guesswork. ADNI Aaron Lukas will likely do a solid job.

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https://twitter.com/NiohBerg/status/2059207985797169529?s=20

 

 

 

 

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