white supremacy Archives - The Automatic Earth

Marine Le Pen is now the clear favourite to become the next President of France, with polls putting her first round support at around double that of any rival.

She sits on 35 to 36%, ahead of Jean Luc Mélenchon on 17 to 18% and Édouard Philippe on 13 to 16%. Polls show her…
— HJB News (@HJB_News__) September 30, 2026

They all hate Christians and Whites

The masks are all finally coming off https://t.co/OYtjxbY5N3
— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) September 30, 2026

We are constantly told that the war in Ukraine was "unprovoked"

But then I come across this interview with Victoria Nuland from April 2014…..
🤔 pic.twitter.com/TEhA7p2jki
— Richard (@ricwe123) September 30, 2026

It is not a good sign when the IRGC shifts from "Death to America" to "Vote Democratic." The IRGC is reportedly encouraging Americans to vote against the GOP in the midterms. https://t.co/QwTj1I7nf4 …
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) September 30, 2026

Trump doesn’t want that war. He may have no choice. Time is running out.

• Supertanker Ablaze After Iran Attack In Hormuz (ZH)

Iranians are apparently going back on the offensive, after it’s been widely reported that US-protected oil transit through the Strait of Hormuz has been fast gaining steam. Iran state media says a supertanker is burning off the coast of Oman after coming under Iranian attack: Local sources reported that a 2.5 million barrel capacity supertanker that was traveling through the Strait of Hormuz illegally was hit 8 kilometers off the coast of Oman and is burning, reports Fars.

Earlier we reported that starting in mid-August (on Aug. 16), Iran’s Supreme National Security Council set October 1 as a deadline. It warned at the time that if Washington failed to lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports within 45 days, Tehran could resume attacks against US forces, and by implication step up attacks on foreign shipping. Iran’s 45-day deadline for the United States has now expired. That deadline has now passed, potentially adding another layer of uncertainty to an already tense confrontation where Tehran may decide it must act ‘preemptively’ while facing more bombs by Trump (likely after the midterms).
* * *
Signs of potential major escalation, or the next round at least (which Trump has hinted will come after the midterm elections), just hit The Wall Street Journal, and sent oil prices soaring. A quick summary: The Pentagon is sending a third aircraft-carrier strike group and additional Marine Corps ships to the Middle East, adding 9,000 to 10,000 more troops to the region.
The ships, jet fighters, Marines and sailors will arrive in the region by the end of November, as President Trump considers renewing strikes on Iran after the midterm elections. The additional servicemembers will add to the more than 50,000 troops already in the region, with the deployments coming after Trump rejected Iran’s latest proposal for a seven-day ceasefire. The Trump administration is deploying a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East along with additional Marines, an American official also told Israeli media on Thursday. And later, in the afternoon, Trump posted a new Truth Social message as follows:

The USS Theodore Roosevelt is en route to US Central Command’s (CENTCOM) area of operations after having just left San Diego this week. It is expected to relieve the Japan-based USS George Washington, which entered regional waters in mid-August.

The Dems are very optimisticc. I don’t see it. They can get people to be anti-Trump. But in the ballot-box, you must pick a name, and anti-Trump is not a name..

• CNN’s Data Guru Just Dropped Brutal Numbers for the Democrats (Margolis)

Confidence that Democrats are going to sweep the House and Senate this November is as high as it’s ever been. Pundits treat it as a done deal, and the polls seem to back them up.But not everything may be as it seems.

As I previously reported, Frank Luntz, a pollster who is no fan of President Donald Trump, sees a messier picture. Voters are souring on both parties heading into the midterms, according to Luntz, but the Democrat Party is in worse shape. Its turnout advantage is only about two points. That’s thin, since the party out of power usually enjoys a big edge in a president’s first midterm election. Luntz told CNN on Monday that everything comes down to whether Trump’s voters show up. They turned out in force when Trump was on the ballot in 2016 and 2024. In 2018 and 2022, when he wasn’t, they stayed home.
That’s a striking admission from someone who has never been a Trump fan. But there’s another factor to consider: the historic underestimation of the GOP in the polls. It happened in Trump’s first term, and if it happens again the same way, Republicans will hold the Senate. But you don’t have to take my word for it. That’s CNN’s Harry Enten talking.
Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, explained on CNN News Central Wednesday that if the polls are wrong the way they have been historically in the Midwest, the GOP holds the Senate. “We’ve had really good Democratic polls coming out from Ohio, Michigan, Iowa,” Enten said. “And, you know, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me four times, I just have to ask the question, could it happen again?”
Could it? In major 2024 races, Republicans beat their September polling by nine points in Iowa, six in Ohio, and five in Michigan. Democrats’ leads in those states right now are smaller than those misses. “So, you look at this and you go, you know what, maybe we should just hold on a second here because we’ve seen this dance before and it was not a dance that Democrats like when the votes were actually cast and counted,” Enten explained.
Berman raised the obvious objection. Trump was on the ballot in 2024, so what happens in a year when he isn’t? Enten had the answer ready. In 2018, Trump’s first midterm, the GOP outperformed its September polls by six points in Iowa, six in Ohio, and eight in Michigan. Look across 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2024, and Republicans beat their September numbers by at least five points in all three states every single time.
Then Enten laid that history over this year’s Senate map. If Republicans outperform their Midwest polls the way they did in 2018 and 2024, Michigan, Ohio, and Iowa all go red. Even if Democrats could carry Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Alaska, we would still end up with a 50-50 Senate, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. And does anyone really believe Texas is electing James Talarico?
“So, if history holds in terms of the GOP outperforming their September polls, well, there’s a very, very strong chance that Republicans hold on the United States Senate, even if Democrats win in places they don’t historically win in, like Texas,” Enten said. “In these midwestern Senate races, yes, Democrats have gotten good polls,” Enten noted. “But I would just say, hold on just a brief second here because history says, you know what, it might not end for them as well as the polls currently suggest it will.”

Dems have had a lot of very good polls from Iowa, Mich & Ohio.

But are polls underestimating the GOP again? In all 3 states, GOP did better by 5+ pt in 2024 than polls had at this point.

Same thing in Trump's 1st midterm.

Same happens in 2026? GOP probably holds the Senate. pic.twitter.com/NZYxhGyRgd
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) September 30, 2026

Put Luntz’s warning next to Enten’s data, and the picture for November looks a lot brighter for the GOP than the headlines suggest.

The main Ukrainian blindspot of course is Chrysria Freeland. This doesn’t even mention her.

• Canada Has A Ukrainian Blindspot (Ted Snider)

On September 10, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky landed in Canada where he and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney signed a 100-year partnership “elevat[ing] the relationship between their countries into a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and confirming their aligned nature.”

Canada already has a special relationship with Ukraine. Before the war, Canada had the largest Ukrainian community in the Ukrainian diaspora with 1,209,805 Ukrainian-Canadians. Canada is the fifth largest financial contributor to Ukraine after only the United States, the European Union, Germany, and the United Kingdom with over $16 billion in military, financial and humanitarian aid.
Carney said that “Canada will always stand in solidarity with Ukraine” and that “there is no qualification to our commitment.” There is little wrong with that: Ukraine was invaded by Russia and taken advantage of by the West. But there are two problems with the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. The first is practical.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Canada has contributed $8.5 billion in military support to Ukraine. The Comprehensive Partnership includes a joint declaration on defense and security co-operation. During the official visit, Carney announced new investments to support Ukraine’s defense, including $350 million for interceptor missiles for air defence.
The practical problem is that Ukraine is black hole into which money intended for defense disappears. This is a problem well known to Ukraine’s partners who, nonetheless, keep pouring money in with a blind eye to the problem. Earlier this month, following close on the heels of a U.S. $100 billion European Union loan to Ukraine, Kiev surprised the European Union with a request for an additional $27 billion to address a shortfall that was difficult to explain. The request “unsettled” European officials, some of whom privately worried “whether money is being spent efficiently or whether needs are being overstated.”
A recent New York Times investigation found that seven of Ukraine’s ten top military contractors continued to be awarded contracts after Kiev knew they were facing investigations for fraud, corruption, or failure to deliver on deals they were paid for. Eighteen companies won contracts despite defaulting on previous ones. Millions were thrown away by inexplicably, and conveniently, awarding contracts to the highest bidder. Government audits show that in one year of the war alone, Ukraine lost $1.2 billion in U.S. foreign aid to “fraud, waste and mismanagement.” Sending hundreds of millions more to Ukraine sounds great. But to whom will it go?
There is a second problem with the 100-year Comprehensive Partnership that is deeper. Carney said the Strategic Partnership is based on the two countries “aligned nature.” But there are important aspects that do not align. Canada is a federalist country that officially recognizes more than one culture and language. The Carney administration recently walked away from negotiating a trade agreement with the United States partly in defense of its sovereign right to protect French culture, French language, and its official bilingualism.
Ukraine has been locked in a civil war since 2014 to protect the opposite: a monist vision of Ukrainian society that rejects federalism and recognizes only one culture as Ukrainian while suppressing the language, culture, and religion of ethnic Russian citizens of Ukraine in Crimea, the Donbas, and the southeast. It specifically denies the pluralist alternative that is a defining feature of Canadian identity. Rather than aligning in their natures, in this essential aspect, the two countries are the antithesis of each other.
Canada has confronted this blind spot before. In 2023, Yaroslav Hunka received two standing ovations in Canada’s Parliament as “a Ukrainian Canadian war veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians” and as “a Ukrainian hero and a Canadian hero,” despite having served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of Adolf Hitler’s SS.Carney insisted that “Canadians understand in our bones the importance of your struggle” and explained that the reason “there is no qualification to our commitment” to Ukraine is “because your cause—freedom, democracy, sovereignty—is our cause.”
It may be “our cause,” but the historical record is less clear that it is their cause. Zelensky has formally banned eleven opposition parties, including the Opposition Platform for Life party that was once the second largest party in the Ukrainian parliament, though they all condemned Russia’s invasion and contributed to Russia’s defence. He has restricted freedom of information, unifying all television sources into a single source of television news, and increased the censorship powers of the state over print and online media.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Ukraine’s largest denomination, has been banned by Zelensky though Ukraine’s constitution protects freedom of religion, the church ended all canonical ties with the Russian Orthodox Church in May 2022, and the Primate of the UOC expressed the church’s loyalty to Ukraine and condemnation of Russia’s invassion.
Cultural and linguistic rights for minorities have fared no better than political and religious rights and freedom of expression. Pursuing the monist interpretation of Ukraine, Zelensky has gone down a path of abolishing any hint of Russian culture. Legislation has erased the Russian language, making Ukrainian the sole language of government, schools, universities, culture, publishing and media.
It is fine for Canada to “stand in solidarity with Ukraine.” But we should not be blind to Ukraine’s struggles and challenges. If Ukraine is to avoid civil war after the war with Russia and if Ukraine is to have a chance of joining the European Union and orienting toward the west, they, too, are going to have to confront these challenges.

Russia will make it a hard winter.

• Ukraine Hit By Severe Power Cuts After Russia Pounds Grid (ZH)

Ongoing major Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure have resulted in significant forced power cuts across various regions of Russia ahead of what promises to be a frigid winter.National grid operator Ukrene rgo on Thursday urged consumers to limit usage following the recent attacks of the past 24 hours. The outages have chiefly impacted central Ukraine, as well as Kharkiv region in the east, along with Chernihiv and Sumy in the north.

Where security conditions currently allow, emergency repair and restoration work is already under way,” a statement said. “Energy workers are doing everything possible to restore power to all disconnected consumers as quickly as possible,” it added.And BBC reports, “Kyiv has been preparing for a renewed onslaught before winter begins, by building fifteen small scale power plants in heavily fortified concrete bunkers.” Another European outlet warns of what this means for residents going into winter:
“Kyiv said it was Moscow’s opening salvo in an expected campaign to try to knock out heating and power as winter approaches.A recent increase in strikes has prompted fears about another winter with little or no power or heating, after similar attacks last year when temperatures plunged to -20C. The strikes which started Wednesday are being called one of the heaviest combined attacks on energy cited in months. Ukrainian officials reported seven people killed as a result.”
Ukraine’s prime minister Sergii Koretskyi confirmed on X, “Russia has escalated to massive strikes on energy infrastructure.” And President Zelensky indicated that critical infrastructure was hit across five regions. Freezing temperatures are expected to hit the capital region in the coming days, as emergency repair crews scramble – though there’s unlikely to be a let-up in the nightly attacks.
https://twitter.com/netblocks/status/2105352436911366384?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2105352436911366384%7Ctwgr%5E9be14063f224c54056aaa307b90e6046227374ea%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fgeopolitical%2Fukraine-hit-severe-power-cuts-after-russia-pounds-grid-ahead-freezing-temps
Zelensky has lately floated he’d be open to another energy ceasefire deal, and these calls are likely to be renewed; however, it will have to go both ways and the Ukrainians have also been unrelenting in their long-range drone attacks on Russian territory and oil refineries. Russian forces have also of late been systematically degrading and destroying data centers and mobile providers in Ukraine. Internet connectivity has become a problem throughout various sectors of the country.

“Carney and Burnham are Dumb and Dumber.”

• Canada And Britain Blame Trump, Putin, And ‘White Supremacy’ (J.B. Shurk)

Commie Canada and the dis-United Kingdom should be renamed the “Dumb and Dumber” of the British Commonwealth.

King Charles III’s North American prime minister, Mark Carney, ran to The New York Times last week to talk about his military combat preparations against the United States in the event that President Trump crosses Lake America and liberates Canada from its delusional leaders. What a showboating dunce. The U.S. singlehandedly sustains Canada’s economy and national security, yet the tiny central banker huffed and puffed in a hilariously Napoleonic display of fake strength.
In the same interview with the failing Times, Con-man Carney outlined his intent to integrate Canada’s economy with that of China and the European Union and to replace the U.S. Dollar with a China-linked global reserve currency. Rhetorically defending Canada’s sovereignty while insulting his U.S. benefactor, Little Mark Carney explained how he would subjugate his socialist nanny-state to Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping and unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Mark is the global mascot for “educated” idiots everywhere.
Not to be outdone by not-so-Great Britain’s Canadian cousin, U.K. Prime Minister Poindexter (er, I mean Andy Burnham) informed the United Nations General Assembly last week that his government was constructing yet another speech-police organization (this one given the august name, “National Centre for Information Defence,” which should not be confused with the “Research, Information, and Communications Unit,” the “Government Communication Service,” the “Counter Disinformation Unit,” the “Defending Democracy Taskforce,” the “Information Threats and Influence Directorate,” the “Rapid Response Unit,” the “National Cyber Force and Social Cohesion Taskforce,” the “Media Monitoring Unit,” or any of the other information-control agencies already mobilized across totalitarian Britain) to protect the British people from scary thoughts and words.
Burnham blamed the Russians for spreading “a narrative of decline, stoking division, and sowing despair” in the U.K. (and definitely not Westminster’s promotion of decline, division, and despair!) and promised to counteract this “information warfare” by censoring Britons’ public speech and feeding his collapsing country a steady diet of State-sanctioned propaganda. In order to beat back the Russians, Dilapidated Britain must have its very own digital Iron Curtain! Two cheers for democracy! Hip hip…who cares.
The British people are screwed. On average, their government grants settlement or citizenship to an illegal alien every single minute. These foreign nationals receive more welfare from British taxpayers than ever before. The third-world invaders (I mean, “newcomers”) use Britain’s streets as public toilets. Rather than securing the kingdom’s borders, the Home Office hands out a nine-page booklet informing mostly-Muslim men of military age that it is illegal to rape women and children while they conquer the islands.
In the last two years alone, the number of illegal immigrants (and future citizens!) arriving by boat has exceeded the size of the entire British Army! But if these outrageous facts disturb you enough to publicly express your feelings on social media, you will most likely join the roughly 65,000 Brits who have been arrested for “speech-related offenses” over the last five years. Foreign invasion? Good! Free speech? Very bad!
Apparently, the British police state also plans to imprison anyone who would rather not fight WWIII against the Russian Federation. During a recent episode of former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg’s “State of the Nation” on GB News, one leftist-globalist commentator in favor of mass conscription argued, “We would have to lock a few people up…some of the pro-Russian voices, people saying there isn’t a threat, don’t fight for your country, don’t go to war for Burnham, we’ll have to lock ‘em up.”
Rather than responding with horror at the suggestion that his fellow Britons should be imprisoned for opposing a catastrophic war, Rees-Mogg pedantically replied, “Well, we suspended habeas corpus during the Napoleonic Wars…indeed, yes.” In another interview, Rees-Mogg nonchalantly remarked that British citizens have a “duty” to “die” for Britain in a war against Russia.
In Burnham and Rees-Mogg’s Britain, the only way to “defend democracy” is to imprison anyone who disagrees with the British Establishment and to sacrifice everyone else to the killing fields! The British Isles might as well be renamed the “Gulag Archipelago.”
Interestingly, GB News — which leans conservative — discovered last week that Britain’s media regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), had covered up data showing that viewers trust GB News more than the BBC. GB News, in fact, is ranked above all other networks with regard to viewpoint diversity and impartiality. British authorities apparently did not want the public to know these inconvenient truths because the BBC is treated as an objective, trustworthy, and premier source of news (fact check: false!). In an effort to control the public’s perception of the BBC, Ofcom restricted what information the public was permitted to know. P.M. Burnham takes the “defense of information” very seriously!
How seriously? Burnham and the British government force citizens to pay for the BBC’s awful dreck whether they watch it or not! Every household in the U.K. must fork over a £180 license fee to the BBC each year. Because more households are refusing to pay the license, the government is considering the imposition of a mandatory £11-a-month Internet tax in order to keep the BBC’s fake news funded. The BBC says that the “fee is essential for maintaining the quality and diversity of public broadcasting in the UK.”

He doesn’t want war? He’s a traitor.

• A Lone Voice Of Sanity On NATO’s Eastern Flank Emerges (ZH)

There are a few sane voices left in the EU and NATO when it comes to urging an immediate de-escalation of rhetoric regarding Russia. Still, it’s a refreshing surprise when dovish sentiment comes from a country forming part of NATO’s eastern flank in particular. “We always need to think about the worst-case scenario,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev has told a European defense summit while warning that seeking to impose total defeat on Russia poses real risks of nuclear war.

Radev instead urged robust diplomacy to avert such a catastrophe. “The problem is that no one is raising the question about nuclear risk. Does it exist? Maybe not, I don’t know, but this is a risk,” he stated in remarks published Wednesday.”I don’t think the war in Ukraine will end in a nuclear war but we have to be prepared for the risk.”
“We always need to think about the worst-case scenario. Are we prepared for this? Does anybody speak about risk assessment? Does it exist at all? Because we have been trying to achieve a conventional victory over the biggest nuclear power.” He acknowledged that “there is a nuclear card” which Russia would be more likely to play if it perceived itself cornered. “We need to have this into account. We cannot close our eyes (to the fact) that there are nuclear weapons on our continent, there are nuclear weapons in the arsenal of Russia.”
The Bulgarian prime minister emphasized, “And this is part of the game calculation.” What has he gotten for his sensible calls for walking back tensions with Moscow? Western mainstream media has consistently labeled him “Kremlin-friendly”. Radev still made clear in this week’s comments that he rejected “this type of speaking” [nuclear rhetoric] from the Kremlin, referring to the recent example of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who warned earlier this month that a war between Russia and Europe would be “completely different” and “very short”.

The words were widely seen as a veiled threat of deploying strategic forces against Europe.Early this week NATO leadership called out what it slammed as ‘desperate’ rhetoric on the part of the Kremlin, also at a moment of growing accusations from European officials that Moscow is engaged in sabotage against EU interests and assets.
“Russia’s use of hybrid tactics is a sign of desperation. But we will not be dissuaded from our support to Ukraine,” NATO spokesperson Allison Hart said Tuesday, adding that “we [NATO] have what it takes to defend every inch of allied territory and remain strong, ready, and able to counter any threat.”
“NATO is a defensive alliance and none of our activities or exercises pose a risk to any part of Russia,” she reiterated. “We strongly denounce the threat of force, including any irresponsible nuclear rhetoric.” Hart added: “We call on Russia to end its unprovoked war in Ukraine.” Finally some serious questioning of the narrative: Where is the proof that the ‘Russians are coming’ – or are on the brink of some kind of invasion of European states?

Now that everyone’s admitting there was never an imminent Russian attack on Europe, the question is: who spread the rumors & what purposes did they serve. Because we keep getting these fake invasion panics, coupled with reminders about how many got Russia’s 2022 invasion wrong. https://t.co/uHAjy4bcM0
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) September 30, 2026

As for other tiny handful of EU countries which have been voices of sanity which call for dialogue with Russia, this has included:
Slovakia
Austria
Czech Republic
and Hungary (or at least, while it was previously under Viktor Orban)

Meanwhile, on Wednesday a new alarming headline has emerged connected with the Ukraine war: Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson says European weapons factories producing arms for Ukraine are legitimate military targets for Russia. Things look to grow a lot hotter before they cool off.

Paul Craig Roberts

• In the USA the Criminal Justice System Commits More Crimes than Criminals (PCR)

Reports I have read have me inclined to believe that there have been far more wrongful arrests from AI facial recognition and flock cameras than correct arrests.

In a recent wrongful arrest US Marshalls from the Fugitive Task Force showed up in plainclothes outside a Tennessee grandmother’s home demanding that she come out with hands up. Her grandchildren and visiting neighbors saw a bunch of armed men and had no idea what was occurring. It was all the fault of a dumbshit cop in Fargo, North Dakota. The Fargo police officer issued an arrest warrant based on no evidence but his deduction from facial identity that the grandmother 1,200 miles away had committed in North Dakota eight bank fraud felonies.
The police officer made no investigation whether the Tennessee grandmother had committed bank fraud in North Dakota. He relied only on AI and on the American system of plea bargaining. The grandmother, Angela Lipps, spent about 6 months in prison until it became obvious that she had nothing to do with the crimes of which she was wrongly accused by a totally incompetent police officer who issued an arrest warrant without any investigatory evidence to back it.
Indeed, from the $10 million lawsuit Mrs. Lipps lawyers have filed, we learn that the lazy cop, Luca Heck, “misrepresented the facial recognition results and omitted material exculpatory information and his failure to corroborate Lipps’s connection to the crimes.”
I agree that AI is total excrement, and that the money spent on it is a total waste of investment funds. Only idiots of the most stupid kind would spend trillions of dollar in eliminating the need for human labor and making truth dependent on those who control the data base. But what we face here is an older problem. bPolice officer Heck reflects what happens to police when 97% of felonies are settled not by trials, but by negotiated plea bargains.
A plea bargain is self-incrimination, which is prohibited by the US Constitution. Nevertheless, plea bargains are the unconstitutional basis of 97%, according to the statistics of the US Department of Justice, of criminal convictions. The conviction is by self-incrimination, not by a jury verdict. Almost 100% of all felony inmates are imprisoned due to self-incrimination. This does not mean that none are guilty.
Self-incrimination occurs, because the cost of a jury trial exceeds the financial capability of 90% of the American population. Self-incrimination is chosen by defendants, whether innocent or guilty, also because a plea bargain conveniences prosecutor and judge by saving them time and energy, and thus results in a lighter sentence than the prosecutor and judge would impose with a guilty verdict from a jury. As it is permissible for prosecutors to withhold exculpatory evidence, hire witnesses to lie, and prohibit testimony that proves the defendant’s innocence, a fair trial is not possible in the United States. Occasionally someone gets a fair trial, but they are rare. Their rarity is why the conviction rate is so high.
Police officer Heck is a victim himself of the plea bargaining system. In 97% of American felonies the police evidence is NEVER TESTED IN TRIAL BEFORE A JURY because the plea bargain leaves the evidence against the defendant UNTESTED. Police have learned that sweating over evidence is pointless when the evidence never goes to trial. √Officer Heck assumed the case would never go to trial and would be settled with a plea bargain, so no investigation was necessary. Evidence is irrelevant in a plea bargain. For Heck and for the prosecutor, it was assumed to be an easy victory. Only in the case of Mrs. Lipps the case made no sense.
What we need to be documented is when in our history, what year, did the prospect of a fair trial become so remote that it paid to self-incriminate oneself. What happened to the US Constitution’s prohibition against self-incrimination? How has it happened that only 3% of criminal convictions in the United States of America are consistent with the Constitution’s promise of a trial by peers? Why do judges believe prosecutor and defendants when they stand before him and declare that no deal has been made?

“Musk is baaaack. In the past week alone he attended the Trump-Xi state dinner and was slated for a White House AI lunch, and now has his first formal advisory role since DOGE. Some feuds age like milk, others like fine wine; this one appears to have aged like a Pentagon contract.”

• Hegseth Unveils “Project Meridian” (ZH)

What do you get when you put the world’s first trillionaire, the man who builds killer drones in Ohio, and a former House Speaker in a room and ask them to design the next century of warfare? According to Pete Hegseth, you get “Project Meridian.”

In a sprawling “State of the Force” address to junior officers and enlisted troops at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Wednesday, the Secretary of War announced that Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich (all three were in the audience) will lead an initiative “focused on discovering, developing and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes.”
“Its purpose is to creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer and capabilities we must master,” Hegseth said, adding that “the best forecasters of future conflict” do “not solely reside inside the Pentagon.”
The project will be overseen by Emil Michael, the former Uber executive who is now the Pentagon’s top technology official. Bloomberg said Hegseth offered no further details, although Axios reports that the trio is expected to deliver its findings within 120 days, in both a public and a classified version.
The Customer Asks The Suppliers What It Should Buy
One does not need to be a cynic (although it helps) to notice that two of the three people now advising the Pentagon on which “capabilities we must master” also happen to run two of the companies most likely to sell those capabilities.
Musk’s SpaceX handles national security launches and has been a public company since its blockbuster June 12 IPO, which made Musk the planet’s first trillionaire. Luckey’s Anduril, meanwhile, has gone from defense upstart to prime-in-waiting in record time: it landed a $20 billion Pentagon contract in March, followed in May by a $5 billion raise at a $61 billion valuation, and it also builds the software for Golden Dome together with Palantir. As for Gingrich… Bloomberg notes he “has written a book on technology and entrepreneurism,” which is presumably what counts as a defense credential in 2026.
Then there is the Musk comeback. More than a year after the ultimately unpopular DOGE effort and the very public falling out with Trump, which at one point had the administration weighing shutting SpaceX out of Golden Dome, Musk is baaaack. In the past week alone he attended the Trump-Xi state dinner and was slated for a White House AI lunch, and now has his first formal advisory role since DOGE. Some feuds age like milk, others like fine wine; this one appears to have aged like a Pentagon contract.

What Goldman Says About The “Affordable Mass” Pitch
To be fair, there is a real case for letting outsiders shake up how the Pentagon buys things, and few have laid it out better than Goldman’s A&D analyst Noah Poponak, who sat down with Anduril’s management in June. Goldman’s diagnosis was that the legacy defense industry produces “low numbers of expensive, bespoke assets” that are hard to scale, while Anduril designs for “affordable mass” through selective vertical integration, common components across product lines, designs simple enough to automate, and flexible factories that can switch products quickly.
The economics also explain why everyone wants in. Per Goldman, Anduril targets a near 25% total company operating margin over time and gets roughly 70-80% of its revenue from fixed-price work, well above what the traditional primes earn. Poponak also saw “early signs of progress” in Pentagon acquisition reform, including multi-year frameworks and open-testing programs such as Drone Dominance. One of the architects of the “affordable mass” model will now help write the Pentagon’s wish list, which is either the most efficient procurement reform in history or the most efficient sales pitch. Possibly both.
Goldman is also constructive on the listed drone names. In his AeroVironment notes this month, Poponak noted that funded backlog rose 37% y/y and 23% sequentially and that AVAV “has exposure to faster growing portions of the defense budget.” He pointed to demand for its LOCUST directed-energy counter-drone system (first international order: more than $50mn) and the low-cost Freedom Eagle interceptor, which offers “a significantly lower-cost alternative to traditional missile defense systems.”
Enter AutoWarCom Meridian was not the only new acronym. Hegseth also unveiled a new four-star Autonomous Warfare Command (yes, “AutoWarCom”) with “service-like authorities” over drones, AI and command-and-control. It is set to be operational by October 1, 2027. Until then, an interim effort called Project Agincourt will draw on the Defense Innovation Unit and the Drone Dominance program, pairing “operators with entrepreneurs in rapid adaptation cycles.” Existing programs such as the Collaborative Combat Aircraft and the Navy’s MQ-25 unmanned tanker are being folded in. Hegseth called it “the fastest peacetime shift in modern military history.”
The money was already lined up. As we reported in April, the Pentagon’s FY27 request seeks $54.6 billion for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, up from $225 million in FY26, a 243x increase that would make even a Silicon Valley VC blush. Add the $1.1 billion Drone Dominance initiative to stockpile 300,000 sub-$5,000 attack drones by the end of 2027 (which sent drone stocks soaring in May), plus the Army’s $500 million FPV award to Neros in July, and the direction of travel is pretty clear.
…So Why Are Defense Stocks Puking?
You would think a four-star command dedicated to drones, a 243x budget request and the world’s richest man drafting the shopping list would be manna for defense stocks. Instead, the SPDR S&P Aerospace & Defense ETF (XAR) is down 22% from its August 14 peak and in a bear market, and as of Wednesday it is on track for a seventh straight weekly decline, the longest losing streak since the fund launched in 2011. XAR is now down 4.1% YTD while the S&P is up almost 12%.

“The government inflated Bidenomics, and then it became afraid of the rising prices.”

• ADP Jobs Report Confirms 90,000 New Jobs (Eskeldson)

On September 30, the ADP (Automatic Data Processing) research firm posted a jobs report confirming the creation of 90,000 new jobs in the private sector. Before that, according to Quartz, Dow Jones expected 68,000 jobs. ADP’s National Employment Report announced that “hiring accelerated for the first time since May,” with education, healthcare, and hospitality in the lead. The Trump administration added manufacturing to that group of jobs, due to a new steel plant, the largest in the state, being built in Iowa. PR NewsWire said that 54,000 new employees joined medium business teams,

The Trump administration, new jobs, and inflation
23,000 were hired onto small businesses, and 14,000 were welcomed by large ones. Most of the new jobs from the original ADP report were found in the Northeast U.S. Many people have complained about job shortages and inflation. The higher prices rise, the fewer jobs and more inflation available, the angrier we get. Political cartoons and worthless government interventions have abounded, and the inflation-plus-job-unavailability bee in the consumer’s bonnet stings him again and again. It causes work-related woes and necessity prices to rise, and candidates to make speeches about it during election time.
In a change of events, the White House website has several articles about President Donald Trump adding more jobs, making up for losses caused by Bidenomics, a well-known implementation of the former president where jobs produced great risk and little reward. More than one million private-sector jobs have been created in President Trump’s second term, while federal employment remains at its lowest share of the workforce on record.
The government inflated Bidenomics, and then it became afraid of the rising prices. Overlooking that so many businesses could have gone broke and people would have become unemployed, as employers would have been unable to pay workers, the government simply kept the inflation. Stores raised prices because the money stopped having as much value, making food, clothing, and daily life necessities very hard to obtain, if not unaffordable; Bidenomics was remembered for the infamous egg shortage taking place in the early 2020s.
However, during the new Trump administration, Open Source Zone wrote on X that the September U.S. core inflation rate dropped to 3.0%, but it was originally supposed to be 3.3%. This reduced inflation may be why the ADP report included data showing that the latest private sector employees have been paid more: a 3.2% increase in their starting salary and a 4.7% increase in “gross pay.”
The takeaway
In the new report, an ADP chief economist, Dr. Nela Richardson, said, “job creation rebounded and pay growth remained solid.” Trump possibly helped to create these new hospitality, health care, and education jobs by restructuring a system rife with monetary woes. Further, Trump played a role in reducing inflation by removing Biden administration policies that were probably using inflated monies to stay afloat, and that we taxpayers were forced to pay for.

Seriously, this is the US Senate:

“Smith pleaded ignorance again, so Kennedy tried a different line of questioning. “You don’t know anything about that. Do you believe in the Tooth Fairy?” Kennedy asked. “I do not,” Smith answered. “How about the Easter Bunny?” Kennedy continued. “I no longer believe in the Easter Bunny,” Smith said. Kennedy then asked whether Smith thought Jimmy Hoffa died of natural causes. Smith said he didn’t.”

• Sen. Kennedy Dogwalked Jack Smith at Senate Hearing (Matt Margolis)

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) gave former Special Counsel Jack Smith an epic grilling at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday morning. Kennedy accused Smith of partisan bias, of keeping a federal judge in the dark about his pursuit of congressional phone records, and of angling for the special counsel job in the first place. Smith spent the afternoon insisting he was a paragon of nonpartisan virtue, and Kennedy wasn’t buying a word of it.

Kennedy opened by asking about Smith’s reaction to President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton. “When President Trump defeated Secretary Clinton, you were bitterly disappointed, weren’t you?” Kennedy asked. “I don’t recall that,” Smith replied. Imagine not recalling your own reaction to a presidential election. What a joke.
Kennedy then noted that Smith’s wife is an ardent supporter of Barack and Michelle Obama who made a “glowing, saccharine-sweet documentary” about the former first lady and sold it to Netflix. Smith refused to discuss his family and kept reminding everyone that he’d taken two jobs in the first Trump administration.
Then Kennedy switched gears. “You asked General Garland to appoint you special counsel, didn’t you?” He pressed. Smith looked down and scribbled on his notepad. “I don’t think that’s accurate,” he said. “He made the decision to appoint me.” When Kennedy asked whether Smith had people call then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to lobby for him, Smith scribbled some more and said he didn’t recall anything like that. Then Kennedy asked if he really wanted the job, and Smith launched into a speech about his own impartiality.
“I accepted the position as special counsel because I had spent 30 years as a nonpartisan prosecutor,” Smith claimed. “I had investigated every sort of criminal case you could possibly imagine, and I thought I was qualified to do the job. I knew that I would do it independently, and I would conduct it the same way whether it were Republican or a Democrat.” Kennedy watched him deliver that absurd claim with the patience of a man who knew exactly where this was going.

Senator John Kennedy just took a full minute to EXPOSE former special counsel Jack Smith’s alleged Democrat connections.

Smith was squirming throughout the entire exchange and REFUSED to answer a single question.

Kennedy had him dead to rights, and he knew it.

KENNEDY: “When… pic.twitter.com/2jEFRTdJor
— Overton (@overton_news) September 29, 2026

Next, Kennedy zeroed in on Smith’s pursuit of phone records belonging to members of Congress, which Smith’s team obtained through Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg. “When you went to Judge Boasberg, you didn’t even tell him you were seeking the phone records of members of Congress, did you?” Kennedy asked. “Because you knew he wouldn’t agree. He would say, ‘Hey, counselor, anybody who knows a law book from a J.Crew catalog knows that this violates the Constitution.’ But you didn’t tell him, did you?”
Smith tried twice to explain the non-disclosure orders his team sought, and Kennedy cut him off both times. Then the disgusted senator delivered the line of the day. “You didn’t tell him. But you’re unbiased. You have no personal feelings,” Kennedy said. “You make me want to throw up in my mouth.”
Another satisfying moment came when Kennedy got Smith to admit he told Garland twice that he planned to prosecute Trump. Smith said he had “absolutely no idea” whether Garland then checked with President Joe Biden. So Kennedy walked him through it, getting Smith to concede that Garland was experienced and intelligent.
“Is he a dummy?” Kennedy asked. “That was not my experience,” Smith said. “Yeah, mine neither,” Kennedy said. “So you’re telling me that you’re about to prosecute a former president of the United States — first time in history. Not only that, you’re about to prosecute a former president of the United States who’s also the current opponent of Judge Garland’s boss. And you told Judge Garland, ‘Here’s what I’m about to do.’ And you don’t think he checked with President Biden to see if it was okay?”
Smith pleaded ignorance again, so Kennedy tried a different line of questioning. “You don’t know anything about that. Do you believe in the Tooth Fairy?” Kennedy asked. “I do not,” Smith answered. “How about the Easter Bunny?” Kennedy continued. “I no longer believe in the Easter Bunny,” Smith said. Kennedy then asked whether Smith thought Jimmy Hoffa died of natural causes. Smith said he didn’t.
You have to love Kennedy. Smith has given up on the Easter Bunny, yet he still expects Americans to believe that Garland greenlit the first federal prosecution of a former president, who was also Biden’s chief political rival, without so much as a heads-up to the White House. Smith brought two federal indictments against Trump and dropped both after voters sent Trump back to the White House in November 2024.

“Was anybody really looking forward to black lesbian Casablanca — as an eight-part limited series — if Netflix had won the bidding war?”

• Paramount Deal Approved Hours Before $7 Million-a-Day Fines Kick In (Green)

Just hours before contractual $7 million-a-day late fees kicked in on Thursday, a federal judge blessed Paramount’s $110 billion Warner Bros. buyout. Well, it’s about time. “After a fierce year-long battle,” as Variety put it Wednesday afternoon, Paramount chief David Ellison will finally complete his buyout of troubled Warner Bros. “in the most expensive takeover in Hollywood history.”

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín oversaw the California-led, multi-state antitrust suit seeking to block the buyout or impose conditions on it. Yesterday, she put her stamp of approval on Paramount’s settlement with the 12 Democrat state attorneys general who brought the case. The merger had already been approved by the Department of Justice and even by the EU’s busy-body nanny-staters, but California Attorney General Rob Bonta saw an angle and went for it.
The suit was such a nuisance — and put so many California jobs at risk — that California Democrat gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra practically begged the Blue State AGs to call it off, or at least settle quickly. Nevertheless, the AGs seem to have gotten most of what they wanted.
I’ve written in recent months about the legal ins and outs and political maneuvers leading to this moment, and the California-led antitrust suit that, in my mind, amounted to nothing more than legal blackmail over the combined companies’ future operations. And sure enough, among the deal’s various terms, Paramount-Warner (or whatever the merged company’s name turns out to be) will be required to establish an editorial-independence board for CBS News and CNN, plus an independent compliance monitor.
Professional Hollywood scold Mark Ruffalo, who at one time was a not entirely untalented actor, blasted the court’s approval as “incredibly disappointing.” “This grassroots movement isn’t going to fade away, and neither is our resolve,” Ruffalo said to — I’m not sure, actually. “This was never about just one merger: This was about fighting back against corrupt oligarch billionaires trampling the interests of everyday people to line their own pockets.”
Ruffalo’s net worth is believed to be about $35 million, yet his most famous role was mostly CGI. So if you were on the fence about whether the deal should go through, hopefully Ruffalo pushed you over to the Yes side, if not with me out in the fields of Oh HELL Yes, about a hundred yards further down from the fence. But I digress yet once more.
As a business proposition, I remain agnostic about the merits of the buyout. This is an industry in flux, being chased out of its home city by bad governance, and the merged studios will have a lot of debt to service. How much? $80 billion. I don’t know what kind of deal Paramount might have gotten for its bonds, but an average 7% interest rate would mean $5.6 billion a year in interest alone. That’s a lot of movie tickets and streaming fees.
Still, I wish them luck. Partly because these are two storied studios that have played a big part in American culture, and if a merger prevents one or both of them from getting parted out — which was one of Warner’s possible fates — that would be wonderful. But mostly because I didn’t want to see Warner’s massive IP library become just another part of Netflix’s content-slop firehose. Was anybody really looking forward to black lesbian Casablanca — as an eight-part limited series — if Netflix had won the bidding war?

“Freedom + Courage = Saving Western Civilization.”

• My Last Conversation with Charlie Kirk (John Solomon)

Many months later, it still looks and feels surreal when I see the video clip. Sitting in my podcast studio with headphones on, fighting back tears and uttering words I never thought would enter my mouth as a journalist.

“Charlie Kirk passed away a short while ago. He wasn’t able to survive the blood loss from the wound to his neck,” I told Eric Bolling in a special breaking news broadcast on Real America’s Voice, the upstart network that we three shared together. “There will be some announcements soon is what I’m told. And then we will have to sort through what happened today, who is responsible and try to understand.”
Just a few minutes before, I had confirmed from multiple sources that my friend — half my age but twice as visionary– had died. I triggered a bulletin on the Just the News Web site providing the first confirmation of Charlie’s death and then went on air with my stunned RAV colleagues to share the news. A short while later, President Donald Trump confirmed our report and a nation began mourning, and then debating, how a young man with charisma and passion, a beautiful loving wife and two kids could be robbed from us by the bullet of another young man driven to become an assassin solely from the apparent hatred for the beliefs Charlie spread across America’s campuses.
I’ve thought back often in the year that has ensued and asked myself, and my heavenly father above: what would Charlie say about that moment? The truth is we will never know for certain. But my final interactions with Charlie a few weeks earlier at his annual donor event in Colorado have brought me to this conclusion. Tyler Robinson is exactly the type of young American that Charlie was dying to reach with his political evangelism.
Both young men grew up in a disillusioning era of America where division was seeded and nurtured by intolerance spread at lightning speed across social media. It has been an era where hope and opportunity is being hijacked by the false prophets of democratic socialism, fake news and globalism. It’s also an era where the Western civilization value system that embraced truth, goodness and freedom and decried evil and repression is being supplanted by a new gospel of hedonism and moral relativism and Big Government idol worship spread by influencers that resemble the snake oil salesmen of the gypsy era.
Charlie chose a path toward freedom and faith and family. He saw America as eminently good, even with its flaws. He believed in fighting for it by leveraging the liberty of free speech to spur a great debate, just like Lincoln in the dark days before the Civil War.
Tyler apparently chose to embrace a different path that took him into a dark world of furryism and video game fantasy, where resentment rises in the absence of hope and faith and eventually escalates into a final act of lethal intolerance.
That dynamic has played out over and over again on the streets of America from Columbine to Coventry. Rob young people of hope and God and purpose, confuse them about everything from the righteous history of their country to the undeniable reality of their gender and they will eventually drift from family and friends and freedom and truth and eventually succumb to a moment of irreversible hatred
In the end, Charlie made his mark with a bullhorn of hope. Tyler made his with a bullet inscribed with hate. But they will be inextricably linked forever just like Booth to Lincoln during the Civil War, or Oswald to Kennedy during the Cold War. Ironically, every major struggle for freedom in American has been marred by an assassination. It’s a sobering reminder that freedom is not free and that the forces of evil that seek to extinguish liberty’s flame will resort to whatever measures necessary to succeed…
… In the pages that ensue in this book you will get to learn just how Charlie came to embrace such fearless patriotism. His intellect was large, his capacity for debate endless and his passion to ensure his generation not be erased by an evil golden calf of socialism was infectious.
Some say he can’t be replaced and that a single assassin’s bullet has ended his counteroffensive. Perhaps some of the past year feels like a drought. But as farmers know, a single good rainfall is all that’s needed to revive crops to a plentiful harvest. I hope and pray this book is that rainfall, that reading about the evolution of Charlie’s thinking and the wisdom of his words will inspire you to pick up the bullhorn of liberty and fill that void.
Every generation’s geniuses boil their thesis into a simple equation. Newton and Einstein had theirs. Charlie had his too. On the two-hop flight back from Aspen to Washington DC last August I jotted into a note my takeaway from being on stage with Charlie. For me it is the Kirk equation we must follow.’
Freedom + Courage = Saving America
Later I scribbled out America and paid homage to Charlie’s wisdom. My final inscription now reads like this: Freedom + Courage = Saving Western Civilization.

NATO’s Sales & Marketing rep Mark Rutte is beside himself here, fidgeting, realizing that an actual Baltic elected official is killing his dreams of war… https://t.co/cxlVqB3sl6
— Patrick Henningsen (@21WIRE) October 1, 2026

Elon Musk says SpaceX and Tesla are aiming to produce 200 gigawatts of solar per year and take it to space, where "it's essentially always sunny."

He says the U.S. has to scale power dramatically to compete with China, which he says has about three times America's electricity… pic.twitter.com/M8bejZZPRE
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) September 30, 2026

Elon Musk in new interview on yesterday's Starship launch:

"We deployed V3 Starlink satellites, which are enormous. These are satellites with a wingspan of a 737. Next year, we expect Starship to reach a weekly or twice weekly launch cadence." pic.twitter.com/wDt3EN6y5C
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) September 29, 2026

Data centers on the ground are limited by permits and power.

SpaceX's answer is Starmind, orbital AI data centers with about 72 Nvidia chips and up to 175 kW per satellite.

That's about 5,700 satellites per gigawatt. Terafab builds the chips, and Starship launches them.… pic.twitter.com/tv0IlHZNAF
— Herbert Ong (@herbertong) September 30, 2026

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Debt Rattle June 15 2026

Jun 152026

June 15, 2026 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:15 am Finance Tagged with: birth tourism, Carney, Elon Musk, Hormuz, Middle Powers, MoU, peace deal, politics of envy, Pompeo, Putin, Schopenhauer, Scott Jennings, SpaceX, white supremacy 36 Responses »

Robert Campin A man 1435

• Trump Announces Peace Deal with Iran Is Complete (Margolis)

• Trump: Hormuz To Reopen Friday After Signing Of “Great Peace Deal” (ZH)

• Iran Reveals Draft Of Trump-Touted MoU To Be Signed Sunday (ZH)

• Scott Jennings Hammers CNN Panel Over Elon Musk Trillionaire Status (Amy Curtis)

• Bakari Sellers Calls Elon Musk a White Supremacist (Margolis)

• Elon Musk and the Politics of Envy (Tim O’Brien)

• Carney: “Middle Powers” Can Collectively Counterbalance U.S. Global Power (CTH)

• Pompeo Unmasked (CTH)

• Buttigieg Joins the Calls to Take Over the Supreme Court (Turley)

• ‘Birth Tourism’ Networks Around the World Exploiting the U.S. (Salgado)

• Puffy Putin Peril: The West’s Latest Attempt To Scare Itself (Amar)

• Thinking for Oneself: Schopenhauer on Reflection vs. Regurgitation (Eskeldson)

Updated valuations of Elon Musk's companies based on publicly available info:

• SpaceX: $2.1 trillion
• Tesla: $1.5 trillion
• Neuralink: $9 billion
• The Boring Company: $7 billion

$3.62 trillion combined. Elon has now created $2.5 trillion in wealth for others. pic.twitter.com/ZUF99E9JsV
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) June 13, 2026

https://twitter.com/Samdani4232/status/2065834962687873189?s=20 https://twitter.com/BarronTNews_/status/2065789421379572045?s=20 https://twitter.com/Real_RobN/status/2065854007722311794?s=20 https://twitter.com/FarmGirlCarrie/status/2065912335248826563?s=20

"Money doesn't have power in & of itself. People get confused sometimes they think an economy is money. Money is a database for exchange of goods & services. The actual economy is goods & services"

一 Elon Musk pic.twitter.com/niNWlN72tI
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) June 14, 2026

Scott Bessent traded with Soros and Druckenmiller against governments for 20 years – now he's Trump's United States Treasury Secretary

he generated $10 billion in total profits for Soros:

– $1B collapsing the British economy in one day

– then told Soros about Japan: "a… https://t.co/4h6DZSv1Sc pic.twitter.com/cg2YBXW8Zi
— bodila (@51bodila) June 13, 2026

What a way to spend your 80th birthday! He did it! Hats off. So many people wanted him to fail even if it was against their own interests, just to spite him.

• Trump Announces Peace Deal with Iran Is Complete (Margolis)

On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that a peace deal with Iran had been finalized, immediately lifting the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports and reopening the Strait of Hormuz to global shipping. The region that has defined American foreign policy anxiety for decades just changed dramatically — and it happened on Trump’s watch. “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, offering “congratulations to all!” He followed that up by authorizing what he called the “toll-free opening of the Strait of Hormuz” alongside the simultaneous removal of the naval blockade. Then, in classic Trump fashion, he added, “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif confirmed the deal in a statement of his own. He announced that “the Peace Deal between the United States of America and Islamic Republic of Iran has been REACHED” after what he described as “intensive talks.” He continued, “We would like to thank the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran for their commitment to finding a diplomatic solution to the conflict. We would also like to extend our sincere appreciation to our brothers in this mediation effort, the great leadership of State of Qatar, for their support in reaching this agreement. I would also especially thank the visionary leadership of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Republic of Türkiye for their immense contributions in this regard.”
A formal signing ceremony is scheduled for June 19 in Switzerland, with mediators facilitating preliminary technical meetings this week to lay the groundwork.Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi confirmed the deal from Tehran’s side, saying an immediate and permanent halt to war and military operations — including in Lebanon — would begin Sunday. He also made clear that Iran would respond if the other side violates its commitments and that the next phase of negotiations hinges on Iranian assets being unfrozen. Make no mistake about it, Tehran is going to test the limits of this thing. That’s what Iran does. But the framework is there, and the verification mechanisms matter.
Vice President JD Vance laid out the significance on Sunday on Fox News. “Three things that I think are important for the American people just to appreciate about what this deal does for all of us as Americans,” Vance said. “Number one, this is the immediate opening of the Straits of Hormuz and, of course, the lifting of the naval blockade that we’ve had on Iran along with it. The number two thing that it means is that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, and not just pursue a nuclear weapon, but procure or try to buy a nuclear weapon as well that’s built into this agreement.”
The third element, Vance explained, depends on Iranian compliance. Still, the upside is enormous. “If the Iranians comply with this deal, it is going to fundamentally transform the Middle East for the next 50 years,” he said. “It’s going to end the war. It’s going to make the Middle East more investable. It’s going to mean a lot of prosperity, lower energy prices for the American people. This region of the world has been a basket case for my entire life and longer than that.”
Obviously, there’s still work ahead. And there’s reason to be skeptical of Iran because this is a regime with a long history of buying time while running out the clock. But, we aren’t sending them plane-loads of cash in the dark of night, or giving them a path to nuclear weapons, as Barack Obama did. And that’s the key here. Trump built in verification. Vance was explicit that the benefits flow only if Iran delivers. The approach is trust nothing, verify everything, and tie every concession to compliance. That’s exactly the kind of deal the Obama-era Iran agreement was never structured to be.
JUST IN: VP JD Vance reacts to the completion of the U.S.-Iran peace deal, calling it a "big win." pic.twitter.com/sQAFUKIIqK
— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 14, 2026

“Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, also confirmed: “that the Peace Deal between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran has been REACHED.”

• Trump: Hormuz To Reopen Friday After Signing Of “Great Peace Deal” (ZH)

“This Great Deal will bring Peace and Security to the whole Region. Many presidents have tried to make Peace with Iran, and all have failed before me. The Leaders of the Region have, for the first time, found a President who can help them achieve real Peace. With the opening of the Strait upon the signing of the Deal on Friday, for purposes of mine removal, oil will flow on both ends again for the Region, and the World!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The timing of the peace deal is critical. The world was approaching a dangerous energy cliff, with strategic petroleum reserves being quickly drained to offset lost Gulf production and stabilize physical markets. Still, even with a deal in place, energy flows through the strategic maritime chokepoint will not normalize overnight. It will likely take several months, if not quarters, to clear the backlog, restore shipping confidence, de-risk insurance markets, and bring regional production and export flows back to pre-crisis levels. As for damaged energy assets such as those in Qatar, it’ll take years to get production back to pre-war levels.
Deal Confirmed By Trump, Pakistan PM, Just Ahead Of NY Futures Opening. Just 30 minutes before futures open in New York, President Trump announced on Truth Social that a “Deal” with Iran is now complete. “Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll-free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” Trump said.

Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, also confirmed: “that the Peace Deal between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran has been REACHED.”
Sharif said, “The official signing ceremony will be on Friday, 19 June in Switzerland.”

Following intensive talks, we are pleased to announce that the Peace Deal between the United States of America and Islamic Republic of Iran has been REACHED. Both sides have declared the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in…
— Shehbaz Sharif (@CMShehbaz) June 14, 2026

Israeli journalist and Iran affairs correspondent/analyst for Israel’s Channel 14 reports that hardliners in Iran, including IRGC forces, will not derail the peace deal.

BREAKING | IRGC Commander Ahmad Vahidi Will Not Block the Deal

• According to my sources, IRGC Commander Ahmad Vahidi has agreed not to stand in the way of a deal, despite not supporting it

• The IRGC sees strategic value in a ceasefire: sanctions relief, increased oil and… pic.twitter.com/kqM7jj0CMd
— דרור בלאזאדה | Dror Balazada (@DBalazada) June 14, 2026

From the lead-up to the accord.

• Iran Reveals Draft Of Trump-Touted MoU To Be Signed Sunday (ZH)

Bloomberg and Reuters are reporting Sunday some fresh details on Iran’s version of what the MoU to be signed – which President Trump says will happen today (albeit remotely) will inlcude. “A draft of the US-Iran memorandum of understanding included diluting highly enriched uranium within Iran and the release of $25b of Iran’s frozen assets, Reuters reports citing a senior Iran official it didn’t identify,” writes Bloomberg in the latest. This includes:

• Final deal to be discussed in the 60 days following agreement by the two sides
• Also includes Iran immediately reopening Hormuz Strait to all commercial vessels and US lifting its naval blockade
• Tehran in draft agrees that will neither produce nor acquire nuclear weapons
• To maintain the nuclear status quo until final deal is reached, including by not enriching uranium and not expanding nuclear facilities

One potential major complication to the two sides actually signing is what’s happening in the Beirut suburbs, which the Israeli Air Force has just struck for the first time in about a week:

Israel has struck a building in Beirut’s southern suburbs in response to Hezbollah attacks on northern Israel, marking the first such strike since last Sunday. pic.twitter.com/VYv3mGFrF9
— Faytuks Network (@FaytuksNetwork) June 14, 2026

Provocative Israeli military actions previously effectively torpedoed prior Washington-Tehran attempts to get back to the negotiating table. Will the same hold-up happen again? Pro-Israel supporters and lobbyists in the US have been raging against what they see as a ‘failure’ of a deal, and ‘capitulation’ to Iran on kicking the can on the nuclear issue… not least among them is on display in the following:

Has to be about releasing the $20-24 billion in frozen assets to Iran, the most immediately damaging concession for Trump.
I took a plunge into Mark Levin's show–the squealing about Trump selling out Israel for Iran is rather enjoyable ngl.https://t.co/hf27AJiGuL
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) June 13, 2026

The usual caveats which proved all prior ‘deal imminent’ headlines to be premature and wishful thinking still apply. Some latest from Iranian state media according to Al Jazeera: “Iran’s Fars news agency, citing a source close to the negotiating team, is reporting that Iranian officials were discussing the ceasefire points with the Qatari mediators in Tehran. The report added that the deal is yet to be finalised and “no agreement will definitely be signed at the time Trump announced”. The comments were made to the agency prior to Israel’s deadly attacks on Lebanon’s southern suburbs today.
Sunday Iran Deal (or rather: MoU Remote Signing) Expected Sunday, per Trump. President Trump said Saturday that an interim U.S.-Iran deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and wind down the four-month conflict could be signed as soon as Sunday. However, Tehran has pushed back on that timeline, signaling that no final decision has been made while Iranian officials continue to review the terms of a potential memorandum of understanding. “The Deal is scheduled to get signed tomorrow, and immediately after it is signed, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN TO ALL,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Saturday, while claiming that Iran “no longer wants a Nuclear weapon.”
The president continued, “At the appropriate time, when all is calm, we will go in and get the Nuclear Dust, buried deep under the powerful sunken granite mountains, thanks to our beautiful B-2 Bombers and their brilliant pilots, and downblend and destroy it, whether in Iran, or the United States.” Pakistan and Qatar are mediating, with technical talks expected to follow any signing and last up to 60 days. The MOU is structured as a step-by-step framework, meaning the Hormuz maritime chokepoint will reopen first, followed by economic rewards for Iran as conditions are met.
Pakistan, which has served as one of the mediators, is preparing to sign the peace deal electronically, followed by technical-level talks next week, according to Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. He said those talks would last two months and focus on Iran’s nuclear program. Meanwhile, the Iranian media outlet Fars News Agency reported earlier that Iran has not made a final call on a potential MOU with the U.S. Iranian authorities are still reviewing the political, legal, and technical details, with no final decision announced as of Sunday morning.
The urgency behind securing an MOU to reopen the Hormuz chokepoint is clear: the world is drifting dangerously close toward an energy cliff. Strategic petroleum reserves are being drawn down rapidly around the world to offset the loss of Gulf production, while China’s weakening fuel demand is helping to offset some of the broader supply shock. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi made clear Friday that Iran understands that terms related to its nuclear program will be finalized within 60 days of the initial agreement being signed. So in essence, this means Iran could get its wish of pushing nuclear negotiations back, only after the hot conflict has clearly ended. Iran has long sought to separate the issues of a final end to the war from consideration of its nuclear program.
Energy markets priced in de-escalation last week, with Brent crude futures sliding as much as 5.1% Friday and European gas dropped as much as 8.4% after Trump canceled planned new strikes on Iran. IG’s weekend markets are pricing in a 50 bps decline in Brent crude when futures open on Sunday evening. But throughput traffic through the Hormuz chokepoint remains far below pre-war levels, and a vessel was struck off Oman on Saturday. Normalization could take weeks, if not many months. Bloomberg noted, “Roughly 140 ships passed through the narrow chokepoint each day before the conflict erupted.”

“If Elon Musk had never gotten involved in politics, and never supported Trump, he’d be getting ticker tape parades right now for building this amazing company and sending rockets into space..”

• Scott Jennings Hammers CNN Panel Over Elon Musk Trillionaire Status (Amy Curtis)

While Leftists melt down over Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire, they’ve demonstrated that they don’t understand how value works, or stocks, or how the economy works. Scott Jennings pointed out a very obvious truth: if Elon Musk were a Leftist, this wouldn’t be an issue.

.@ScottJenningsKY takes down CNN panel over Elon Musk hysteria:

"If Elon Musk had never gotten involved in politics, had never supported Trump, he'd be getting a ticker tape parade right now."

Hinojosa: “Do you agree that one person should have control of American policy??"… pic.twitter.com/8gsMB5eOXC
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) June 14, 2026

“Are you saying because Elon Musk exists and is a wild success that that is somehow to the detriment of all the people you’re mentioning?” Jennings asked. “Elon is creating an environment where entrepreneurship, where success, where building is celebrated.” Then came the truth bomb. “The only reason anybody’s mad about this, let’s just be honest, is because he supported Donald Trump for President,” Jennings said.
“If Elon Musk had never gotten involved in politics, and never supported Trump, he’d be getting ticker tape parades right now for building this amazing company and sending rockets into space. It’s all political, and the people who should love Elon Musk hate him for that reason.” “But do you agree that one person should have control of American policy?” asked Gina Hinojosa. “That’s what money does.”
“It’s all about access to the United States,” she continued, “It’s not just about Donald Trump. There are races all across the country where he has access on policy.” “Call me when you’re made about Soros,” Jennings said.Do people with money have more influence in politics? Does CNN have a chyron for this? That’s how it’s always been. If money influenced policy, we’d have President Ross Perot. Hillary Clinton raised $770 million in 2016 and Kamala Harris raised $1.6 billion for her campaign.
https://twitter.com/wxmel/status/2066178897012490748?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2066178897012490748%7Ctwgr%5E8aab5d0d89583224ad4976df81987866feaa71be%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftownhall.com%2Ftipsheet%2Famy-curtis%2F2026%2F06%2F14%2Fscott-jennings-hammers-cnn-panel-over-elon-musk-trillionaire-status-n2677733
Clean vehicles, clean energy sources, space exploration, and Internet access via Starlink. Those are just some of his achievements and contributions. Bingo. If he funded Leftist causes and politicians, this wouldn’t be an issue.
https://twitter.com/Sinnersaint39/status/2066185825411273006?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2066185825411273006%7Ctwgr%5E8aab5d0d89583224ad4976df81987866feaa71be%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftownhall.com%2Ftipsheet%2Famy-curtis%2F2026%2F06%2F14%2Fscott-jennings-hammers-cnn-panel-over-elon-musk-trillionaire-status-n2677733
It doesn’t matter what the narrative is today, as long as the Democrats can scream and whine about the “oligarchy” and against Donald Trump, Republicans, and anyone who isn’t their political ally.

Jennings is right: Musk only became a ‘threat’ when he stopped voting the way media elites preferred. That’s classic selective outrage. https://t.co/F20eLDnk1K
— Matthew Newgarden (@a_newgarden) June 14, 2026

Sure.

• Bakari Sellers Calls Elon Musk a White Supremacist (Margolis)

A CNN panel meant to discuss extraordinary wealth lurched far off the rails Friday night when one commentator went into full-on slander mode on Elon Musk, who became the world’s first trillionaire this week. He’s been getting attacked from the left for his success because that’s what the left does. Well, that and fantasize about spending other people’s money, which is exactly what CNN contributor Cari Champion started with. “If you spent a million dollars every single day, it would take you more than 2700 years to spend a trillion dollars,” Champion said.

“What you could effectively do with a trillion dollars is get rid of global poverty. You could end world hunger, you could cure major diseases like malaria, and you could completely transition the global energy sector to renewables. The fact that he has this type of money only tells me that his power will be more prevalent and that I could not — I cannot guarantee someone like this man would use his power for good.” Then Bakari Sellers took things further. After blaming Elon Musk’s influence for USAID cuts that he claimed killed thousands of women and children, Sellers leveled a charge that sent the panel into a frenzy: “Elon Musk is a white supremacist who believes in things like the —”
Criminal defense attorney Arthur Aidala jumped in. “Oh, boy,” Aidala said. “I wasn’t even finished a sentence,” Sellers shot back. Scott Jennings had a warning ready for Sellers. “You may need a lawyer when this is over,” he quipped. Sellers pressed on. Musk “believes in things like the Great Replacement Theory,” he said. But Aidala pushed back hard. “Considering we have about 12 defamation cases in my office right now,” he said, “before you start throwing things around like someone’s a white supremacist — I would win that case.”
He’s right. Democrats and the media often label mainstream conservative arguments about immigration and electoral incentives as “great replacement theory” and imply racism, but it’s not like Democrats haven’t made the very argument that, because of declining birth rates, the United States needed immigration to sustain population growth and the workforce. “We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a good future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in 2022. But I digress.
In fact, Jennings cut through the whole exercise with a few pointed questions. “I’ve been listening to liberals count and spend Elon’s money for him,” Jennings said. “This envy, jealousy, hatred of success. Why is it immoral? Why is it wrong for somebody in our system — our capitalist system, in the greatest nation on earth, to go out and build a company — build companies, build technologies, go into space, aim to go put a colony on Mars, give internet to half the world. All the things he’s doing. Why is any of this wrong or bad? Why would we want to discourage entrepreneurship? Why would we want to discourage anybody building anything? That is the nature of it.”

“Since the signs were pre-printed and funded by the usual funders of anything good for America …”

• Elon Musk and the Politics of Envy (Tim O’Brien)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know by now that with SpaceX’s Initial Public Offering (IPO), Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire. The implications of this for all of us and our grandchildren are many and far-reaching. Of course, the left has found a way to narrow it all down to one simple idea: “His money is our money, or it should be.” That’s not the way they say it. What leftists actually are saying is he doesn’t pay enough in taxes. Why? For the sole reason that he’s rich. If you’re a leftist, rich people are never paying “their fair share.”

This is the politics of envy, and if you study the vast majority of leftist messaging at any time on any topic, envy is a critical component. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if the Democrats, and the left at large, decided to quit being jealous of the right, the left would die as a movement in less than 24 hours. Envy is the lifeblood of leftist politics, and Musk is merely their latest, biggest, and most convenient target. But it’s worth being reminded that to the left, you are no different than Elon Musk. Let me explain. The left is miserable when you’re happy. It feels entitled to be the only source of your happiness, but it has no desire to make you happy. Rather, it simply wants to control how happy it will allow you to be.
You saw this during the COVD-19 pandemic when the left rationed aspects of your previous life to you in small portions. The desire to control you in this way came from a fear that you might find a way to be happy in spite of conditions, in this case a pandemic. The thoroughness with which arbitrary measures were taken to deny you the simplest of pleasures was rooted in envy. Around the same time and in the same environment, Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the whole entitlement movement accused you, if you were white, of having “white privilege” and and said that you don’t deserve to be happy. Instead, you should feel guilty because some on the left are unhappy.
The “white privilege” guilt trip was not only one of the purest forms of the politics of envy, but it worked to get leftist and otherwise weak white people to voluntarily surrender their happiness. At some point, almost all leftist politics comes back to envy. And so, when Musk took SpaceX public and the company’s value skyrocketed (sorry, I couldn’t help myself), the left fell back on its most core strategy – the politics of envy. Leftist billionaires and their pawns were well prepared to opportunistically try to capitalize on Musk’s good fortune with protest signs, messaging, and rent-a-mobs ready to go.

PSC-CUNY Union leader speaks out against Elon Musk and the Space X public offering set to take place this month at a protest near Nasdaq in Times Square. pic.twitter.com/4dwDL8S24b
— LUKE2FREEDOM (@L2FTV) June 5, 2026

A union representing leftist college professors showed up alongside all the other envious union members, paid protestors, and disgruntled leftists, complete with their pre-printed signs. They were there to air their grievance that someone was having a good day and just might be happy. Their signs alone showed an extremely high level of financial illiteracy and ignorance regarding just about everything related to the SpaceX IPO. They read: “Billionaires are a scam”; “Elon is stealing your pension”; “Overthrow the oligarchs”; “This billionaire is stealing from you”; “Elon is stealing your 401K”; and, of course, “Stop Elon. No Trillionaires.”
Since the signs were pre-printed and funded by the usual funders of anything good for America, we can only assume that the evil strategists on the left conceived of these messages because they knew the phrases would appeal to their illiterate base. First off, how could Elon making money from willing investors represent him stealing your pension? There is no relationship at all, and there can’t be. The money Musk and everyone else made from the IPO came from the market, not from unwilling American citizens or taxpayers. It came from institutional investors through mutual and index funds, universities, large pension funds, and millions of willing individual investors. People invested because they hoped to make profits at some later point. The protestors either don’t understand that, or they pretend not to.
Another sign that actually sidesteps all rational thought is the one that says Elon is stealing your 401(k). The truth is, the SpaceX IPO very likely already helped your 401(k), and if it didn’t, it soon will. Many, if not most of the big mutual funds are riding on the fortunes of a handful of companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, maybe Tesla, and Alphabet. SpaceX just joined the club. That means if you have a 401(k), it’s in your best interest to want SpaceX to do well. That can only grow your retirement savings. And then there’s that argument the left makes when it has no argument: “Stop Elon. No Trillionaires.” Why? I mean, really, why? What’s the point? If someone else becomes rich and it has no effect on you, why should you even care? I mean, other than pure jealousy.

It’s beyond sickening that Elon Musk – the world’s first trillionaire – pays a lower effective tax rate than truck drivers, firefighters, or nurses.

It’s not complicated – we need to actually TAX THE RICH.https://t.co/GGEOxCernI
— Congresswoman Sara Jacobs (@RepSaraJacobs) June 12, 2026

That post from Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) is rich, literally. She’s playing upon jealousy and envy to encourage more taxation, but only of the rich, so we’re told (for now). They play this “lower effective tax rate” game to try to pretend Elon doesn’t pay a ton of taxes, which he does. Also, like the financially illiterate protestors in New York, Jacobs is drawing no distinction between income, which is taxed, and assets like stock, which only convert into taxable money if you sell shares. What makes Jacobs’ post curious is that she is one of the richest people in Congress. She’s got an estimated net worth of $76 million, and she didn’t earn any of it. She was born into it.
If ever there is such a thing as privilege, she’s got it. Her father is billionaire Irwin Jacobs, who founded semiconductor company Qualcomm. So, when she demonizes Elon for being a billionaire, or now a trillionaire, she’s pretty much demonizing her own daddy, and she’s not doing herself any favors. She just wants you to think she’s one of the good kind of millionaires. What’s obvious is she wants you to feel like a “have not,” and she wants you to hate Elon simply because he’s a “have.” Something Jacobs did not do and would not do is acknowledge all those who have immediately benefited from the SpaceX IPO. A lot of leftists are making money here. The University of North Carolina, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Virginia bought in early and have huge stakes in the company.
According to Fortune, “In total, more than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees are expected to become millionaires in the IPO.” My colleague, David Manney, reported on how some of Musk’s loyal employees at different levels of the company will be rewarded. SpaceX counts 22,000 employees at the moment, and all of them pay taxes. The average salary of SpaceX employees is $155,000-$176,000, according to the company. All of these people pay local, state and federal taxes. Many, if not most, pay property taxes. Those who just made millions each on the IPO will ultimately pay a collective billions more in federal taxes. That means more money headed into the local, state, and federal piggy banks.
Over time, millions of individual investors will make profits on their SpaceX stock at some point, and they will pay taxes on the profit. The point is, the government will see its share of cash from the IPO, and it didn’t have to do a thing except sit back and wait for the profits to roll in. Yet, Democrats like Jacobs and the rest of the left somehow want you to feel like only Musk is the beneficiary of the IPO. That’s not stopping the left from engaging in envy porn. Check out this post from millionaire Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), decrying the rich as she rides in the back of her limo. Or this common refrain that attempts to blame Musk for people putting themselves on government entitlement programs that you, the taxpayer, pay for anyway.

Elon Musk just became the world's first trillionaire. This needs to be a wake up call. pic.twitter.com/H3w4OxA91U
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) June 12, 2026

In other words, people getting free stuff are big mad that Musk is winning. Since he’s making more money, naturally, they want more free stuff…just because. That poster blamed Musk for just about every economic challenge anyone in America could face, but one thing he posted that deserves to be addressed is this notion that Musk is getting federal handouts to make his money at SpaceX. As though he’s running a non-profit that doesn’t reward the federal government. His rockets are the delivery system for satellites that protect our national security, among many other things. Oh, and remember the time NASA couldn’t rescue those astronauts, so Musk had to bail out the government?.

I feel like I’m in the Shire (but of anti-heroes).

The Little People flock together

“Carney Affirms that “Middle Powers” with Same Ideological Construct Can Collectively Counterbalance U.S. Global Power..”

• Carney: “Middle Powers” Can Collectively Counterbalance U.S. Global Power (CTH)

Making his ninth trip to Europe since become prime minister 15 months ago, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney once again outlined his governing model to combat a U.S. administration that he claims has fractured the globalist norms. During his press conference with Micheal Martin, Ireland’s taoiseach (Prime Minister), Carney once again built upon the idea of “middle powers” uniting together in common ideology against U.S. dominance until such a time as the U.S. government can once again return to a leftist ideology.

The specific objectives become clear about halfway through the presser today as Carney notes the importance of grouping nations together who agree on climate change, energy controls and the green agenda. Canada’s alignment with Europe is seemingly centered on the net-zero carbon model. This perspective makes sense from Carney as it is the same priority he’s carried since his time as governor for the Bank of England. WATCH:

As the former Governor of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada, Carney used his platform to position climate change as a systemic financial risk. He then championed the view that private capital must be the primary tool to force an economic energy transition. [Post-COVID this was known as “Build Back Better.“] President Trump’s perspective and the majority American view on climate change and energy development is against the core professional effort of Carney and the banking interests he has always represented. This becomes very important to understand as the U.S-Canada conflict is about to hit an inflection point.
HISTORY: Through the “Net Zero” Banking Alliance (NZBA) Mark Carney pushed banks to agree with policies and protocols that forced them to set lower lending targets to high-carbon industries and clients. The goal was to force companies to ‘decarbonize’ or find themselves starved of capital. While working at the Bank of England and Canada Carney famously warned multinational interests and insurance companies, most of which were centered in London, that fossil fuel assets that did not fit the net-zero industrial model would become “stranded assets” worth nothing because they could not be capitalized or insured. This threat signaled to multinationals that any investment in a project that was against the “Paris Climate Treaty” was a bad financial risk.
This approach endeared Mark Carney to King Charles III, who is himself a major climate alarmist. Unfortunately, U.S. politicians -particularly during the Trump first term- accused the Carney banking/finance and insurance alliance of operating an illegal banking cartel to choke the larger American energy sector. Facing legal threats over antitrust violations, in combination with obvious violations of fiduciary duty, NZBA has to strip out its strict, mandatory lending restrictions. Slowly banks began retreating from the net-zero alliance.
Regional and national banks began citing the economic necessity of supporting traditional energy companies, and energy security became more important than adherence to voluntary restrictions on carbon emissions. This angered Carney as his life construct was under pressure. Carney then entered Canadian federal politics and sought to downplay his ideological climate agenda. However, all of his energy policies essentially come from the same mindset of opposition to fossil fuels.
The disparity in energy production is the core issue inside the details of the USMCA. The United States and Mexico are both aligned with low-cost fossil fuel use, which is particularly important for large scale industrial manufacturing (steel etc.). Whereas Canada doesn’t want the dirty jobs and wants only to focus on electricity production.
You can make electricity from windmills, solar farms and nuclear power. However, you cannot make iron, steel or aluminum without fossil fuels. In scientific fact, part of the largest global irony is because it’s impossible to make windmill components, solar panels or nuclear power equipment without using fossil fuels.
In the video below, while he was a banker you can see Mark Carney admitting on tape: When voters blocked his ESG plans, “We” (Central Bankers) shifted into the position of “Regulators” to work around the voters through the back door of finance and insurance. They manipulated fossil fuel production and prices by withholding lending and insurance.
https://twitter.com/vesperdigital/status/2064518878005174439?s=20

“One month later we were in beginning of SARS-CoV-2, which we now accept in hindsight was a U.S. military and intelligence operation..”

• Pompeo Unmasked (CTH)

Many of you will likely remember December 29, 2019, when Secretary Pompeo, Joint Chief’s Mark Milley and Secretary Mark Esper flew to Mar-a-Lago to inform President Trump about military strikes they had just conducted in Northern Syria and Iraq. At the time of the strike, President Trump was negotiating the exit of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and even having direct talks with the Taliban which was proclaimed as controversial by the traditional war machine elements in DC. The action by Pompeo, Milley and Esper did not align with the moment based on Trump’s ongoing effort.

President Trump made no comments about the strike they carried out, nor did President Trump post anything about the events. In fact, President Trump made Pompeo, Milley and Esper stand at the podium and inform the media and public. CTH said at the time nothing about this made sense. Our suspicion was that Pompeo, Milley and Esper had acted unilaterally without approval. Events later on indicated our suspicion was accurate. One month later we were in beginning of SARS-CoV-2, which we now accept in hindsight was a U.S. military and intelligence operation utilizing a virus created in a Wuhan, China biological lab. The global response to the virus was a combined military and intelligence operation.
The most excessive ‘western’ reactions to the virus were carried out by New Zealand, Australia, the U.K and Canada, all five-eyes countries. The November 2020 election result was specifically an outcome of the virus and fraudulent mail-in ballots. It’s also worth remembering that in 2016 the Trump-Russia collusion material originated from the U.K via former intelligence operative Christopher Steele and the Fusion GPS network in the U.S. That’s the context for last week Mike Pompeo paying tribute to his old friend in British intelligence who worked with him as CIA Director following the 2016 election of President Trump.
Mike Pompeo – Within hours of being announced as the nominee to be the U.S. Director of the CIA, I received a hand-delivered message on MI6 stationery congratulating me on my nomination. It was signed simply “C” in green ink. Legendary. I shared it with my son and even he thought I was now cool! More than that, this note, from Sir Alex Younger, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service of the United Kingdom, confirmed what I already believed: the work that the CIA and MI6 did together mattered, that the partnership was critical, and that two leaders focused on the mission could save lives and provide tools for our nations to deter our adversaries.
Alex’s passing this week brought back so many memories of our time in service together. He flew to Langley to see me the day I was confirmed. We brought our two senior teams together in the UK to plan and coordinate and build in the first several weeks of my time on duty: making clear to them all that this relationship was more than special – it was critical for the security of our two countries.”

“Drinking the Court-Packing Kool-Aid..”

“This Nike School of Constitutional Law is catching on with a wide array of pundits and professors. Just do it.”

• Buttigieg Joins the Calls to Take Over the Supreme Court (Turley)

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg apparently got the message this week that he cannot hope to win the Democratic nomination without promising radical measures, including the packing of the Supreme Court. After denouncing the current Court as “rogue” for not ruling as the left has demanded, Buttigieg endorsed the plan of Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren to pack the Court to reverse adverse constitutional interpretations.

For years, the Supreme Court had a liberal majority that overturned dozens of long-standing cases. That was not viewed as the work of a rogue court. Yet, even as President Donald Trump attacks this Court for ruling repeatedly against him, liberals are now demanding court packing. As the party becomes more radicalized, any candidate expressing doubts over radical demands like court packing is unlikely to make it out of the primaries. Accordingly, “Mayor Pete” is reaching for Court-Packing Kool-Aid. In making his pitch to the Rainbow PUSH Coalition convention, Buttigieg knew that he had to offer some radical bona fides. He decided to offer up the Supreme Court:
“We have to do [something] with the Supreme Court, that is now a rogue Supreme Court. To see them eviscerate the Voting Rights Act is to see them reverse some of the most important progress this country ever made, wiping out Black political representation, but also wiping out part of what actually is great within the complex American story.” That description is part of a campaign of disinformation about the Court’s recent decision to end racial gerrymandering. The Court reaffirmed that the Voting Rights Act would be used to prevent any intentional racial discrimination. It banned states (almost entirely Democratic states) from engaging in racial discrimination to guarantee election results based on the race of the candidates.
He then thrilled the crowd by promising to pack the Court to guarantee the results that he and they are demanding. Declaring that it is “time to think big,” Buttigieg explained: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that there have to be nine Supreme Court justices. That one doesn’t even take a constitutional amendment. It just takes a readiness to set up a court that fits this country. We could have 13 seats matching the district structure of the federal judiciary, but also a process that makes it less partisan.” Buttigieg appears to be referring to the circuit system, not the district court system. What is most striking is that he promises to reverse decisions on issues like racial gerrymandering by packing the Court, but then says it will make the Court “less partisan.”
The whole point of adding four new justices selected by the Democrats is to create an instant majority to their liking and to reverse past rulings. Years ago, I wrote an academic piece on the possible expansion of the Supreme Court, but there is a world of difference between that and a court-packing plan. Under my proposal, the court’s expansion would take almost two decades to ensure that no president could pack the court. Various Democrats have been pledging to not only impeach Trump (and a long list of other figures), but to pack the Supreme Court as soon as they regain power.
James Carville declared, “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F— it. Eat our dust. Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.” This Nike School of Constitutional Law is catching on with a wide array of pundits and professors. Just do it.
Years ago, Harvard professor Michael Klarman laid out a radical agenda to change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.” However, he warned that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described.” Therefore, the court must be packed in advance to allow these changes to occur.Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder has put packing the Supreme Court front and center, explaining, “[We’re] talking about the acquisition and the use of power if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.”
At base is a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the Court. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) not only renewed her previous call to pack the court but said the court was illegitimate for rendering decisions against “widely held public opinion.” Former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said the court “defies the will of the people.” Reporter John Haltiwanger insisted that “the court is clearly not representative of the U.S. public. It’s supposed to be the people’s court.”
In reality, the court was never meant to be that. It was meant to be the Constitution’s court, designed to stand against everyone and everything except the Constitution. In a system designed to protect the minority, the court (like the Constitution) is counter-majoritarian in much of what it does. With the Supreme Court removed as a barrier to the left’s radical agenda, Democrats could indeed fulfill the objectives laid out by figures like Klarman to ensure they never lose power again.
That will make the 2028 election the most consequential election for our constitutional history in decades. The outcome will most immediately decide the fate of an institution that has been a stabilizing force for centuries. Even though this Court has ruled against the Trump Administration on a variety of key issues, the left is still demanding that it either yield to all of their demands or face a hostile takeover. On our 250th anniversary, these reckless and radical voices remind us that (as Benjamin Franklin warned us) this is our Republic if we can keep it.

” Incidentally, Western and Northern Africa are two areas where Islam dominates the countries.”

“And if the Supreme Court does not make the right decision on birthright citizenship, we might as well kiss our country goodbye.”

• ‘Birth Tourism’ Networks Around the World Exploiting the U.S. (Salgado)

The U.S. State Department has uncovered sophisticated and dangerous “birth tourism” networks from West Africa, Europe, and North Africa exploiting our current unconstitutional “birthright citizenship” system. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is one of the biggest abusers of our idiotic “birthright citizenship” system, but plenty of other bad actors around the world cash in as well. Contrary to the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment, America now says any child born on our soil is automatically a citizen, even if his parents just flew into or walked into the country. Unsurprisingly, this has for years encouraged abuses.

Besides the practice of “anchor babies,” where illegal aliens give birth in America and use their new citizen kids to keep the family here, there’s also “birth tourism.” From The Daily Wire: In West Africa, a U.S. embassy uncovered a “sophisticated birth tourism network” wherein more than 100 foreign nationals were using fraudulent documents to obtain visas and secure U.S. citizenship for their children. The State Department shut down this birth tourism network and revoked the foreign nationals’ visas. State is also coordinating with local authorities to “systematically identify and cut off any similar operations.” Incidentally, Western and Northern Africa are two areas where Islam dominates the countries.
“Under President Trump, the State Department is defending the integrity of U.S. citizenship by ending illegal birth tourism schemes,” The Daily Wire quoted the State Department. “No foreigner is permitted to obtain a visitor visa for the primary purpose of acquiring U.S. citizenship for a child by giving birth in the U.S.” This is why the upcoming Supreme Court decision on birthright citizenship is so important. The Daily Wire went on: A U.S. embassy in Europe found that more than 400 suspected birth tourism cases had occurred since 2024.
In this case, investigators traced the birth tourism to at least six companies that were coaching applicants on what to say in their visa interviews, arranging housing, and setting up delivery plans. State again shut down the process, revoked the visas, and permanently banned “several fraudsters from traveling to the United States ever again.” An embassy in North Africa revoked more than 100 visas for “birth tourist” parents who came to the United States specifically to give birth to children who would get U.S. citizenship. State Department consular officers worked with law enforcement and used data analytics to identify the networks abusing the visa system in this case.
“A U.S. visa is a privilege, not a right,” the federal department said. “The State Department is taking action around the world to stop this abuse, dismantle birth tourism networks, and hold accountable those who try to scam our system.” But even all these networks are small beans compared to the vast CCP apparatus for helping loyal party members come to the United States to give birth to kids who become automatic citizens of our country, even though many of them are then raised back in China. You can read more here. Up to a million Communist Chinese could be voting in United States elections by 2030, thanks to this huge “birth tourism” industry.
And if the Supreme Court does not make the right decision on birthright citizenship, we might as well kiss our country goodbye.

“Headlines about the Russian president’s looks and ‘erratic’ behavior are a symptom of terminal Russophrenia..“

• Puffy Putin Peril: The West’s Latest Attempt To Scare Itself (Amar)

You can’t argue with a man observing the obvious: We are living in unusually perilous times. In the Middle East, for instance, the Israeli-American infernal duo have been on a rampage of war, state terror, all-purpose devastation, and genocide that, as a bonus, has also brought the world economy to the verge of cardiac arrest by clogging one of its vital fossil fuel arteries. Indeed, that particular risk is so obvious that even Germany’s less than brilliant Friedrich Merz has long spotted it.

In the Far East, Taiwan is currently ruled by a government so hell-bent on antagonizing their fellow Chinese on the mainland that Taipei’s political reflexes seem almost as perverse as those of Berlin. In the West, you have the German elite which can’t find enough billions to fork over to Ukraine when Kiev and friends blow up Germany’s vital pipelines and lethally cripple its already ailing economy. In the East, there is Taipei, getting really, really angry when the Philippines and Japan start negotiating away Taiwan’s maritime Exclusive Economic Zone. Angry, that is, at Beijing.
And in the EU, that “garden” of “values” that really is a swampy jungle of eternal confusion and corruption, the catastrophe that in its foreign policy is now obvious enough for several European bigwigs to gang up on the abysmally, ragingly incompetent Kaja Kallas. Her tenure as de facto EU foreign minister has been so breathtakingly blundering that her employers aren’t merely itching to kick her out but thinking about, in essence, abolishing her job.
Being so horrible at something that you won’t just get fired yourself but take it down with you – perhaps only the Baltic Girl Boss Wonder could pull that one off. But then, maybe it’s really all just another power grab by EU’s German queen (of the absolute kind) and US viceroy (of the submissive kind) Ursula von der Leyen. Either way, frightful insanity abides. We could add more scary and grotesque evidence, but things are clear enough: It’s a grim picture all around. So, fair enough if you feel like being a big sad downer and doom monger. Where it gets weird is when you get your scare priorities all upside down.
Granted, from a hapless NATO-EU European perspective, Russia may look a little unsettling: after all, once you have waged years of proxy war, sanctions, and propaganda war against it, who knows what the mood is really like in Moscow? As a good NATO-EU apparatchik, you certainly would not, because you have displayed the foresight of a gnat by proudly not talking – or listening – to the Russians. So, when you feel a little insecure, that might really be your bad conscience calling (in a merely professional, not moral sense, which you are likely to lack).
But, generally speaking, the worse the stupidities and mistakes you have produced but keep repressing, the higher the price. Old Sigmund Freud called it “affective debility.” In essence, it means that lying to yourself makes you dim. And once you are BS’ing yourself for years as if there’s no tomorrow, you’ll turn positively imbecilic.
That’s the only way to explain a fresh wave of transparently hysterical scare mongering about Russia in the West, in particular, this time, in Britain. Thus, on the occasion of the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), centrist mainstream flagship The Independent came out with a fascinating piece of fiction masquerading as analysis. Under the clickbait title “‘Puffy-looking’ Putin is acting weirder than ever – and that should chill us to the bone,” readers were treated to a highly imaginative horror tale about, in essence, a terrible loose cannon in the Kremlin pondering staged incidents and nuclear terrorism and ready to blow up the world or at least Europe or perhaps just Britain because Russia is losing the war. Also, he looks “puffy”!
All of this backed up (not really) by yet another statement from a high British military officer that things are dire as never before in (his) living memory. He and his comrades in arms – plus a few tweedy spy gents and dames – produce these Cassandra screams at least twice a month; it seems to be a standing order.
Indeed, there is such an inflationary over-production of men and women in khaki and with stiff upper lips crying big bad Russian wolf that even Politico has already produced at least one ‘best of’ collection, gathering “The 5 doomiest Russia warnings from Britain’s military chiefs.” Perish the thought any of this may have anything to do with fattening defense budgets and driving up the obscene profits of His Majesty’s military industrial complex!
Generally speaking, The West has a rich tradition of declaring Russia vanquished, its president Vladimir Putin at death’s door or on the verge of being regime-changed away, and, of course, Ukraine (and, really, the West) on the cusp of winning the war. And, at the same time, of predicting that Russia will attack all of Europe, likely tomorrow. Notwithstanding occasional and intriguing anomalies, when a NATO commander (from Trump’s US, of course) lets slip a fragment of truth, such as that actually Moscow is not looking for conflict.
In short, we are speaking about the severe and very sad but also funny mental condition already well known as Russophrenia: the afflicted live with an imaginary Schrödinger’s Russia occupying their suffering minds, a Russia that is always simultaneously half-dead and yet so alive and kicking, it’s about to roll into their living room on a tank.

Don’t learn from books, learn from life!

• Thinking for Oneself: Schopenhauer on Reflection vs. Regurgitation (Eskeldson)

Arthur Schopenhauer’s argument is that thinking for oneself is better than regurgitating information from books and that the two produce very different effects in a learner. In the beginning of his essay, he compares the difference between regurgitation and reflection (or critical thinking) to two different libraries. Regurgitation is represented by a disorganized library with books all over the floor, furniture, shelves, or wherever else they have been mislaid. Similarly, someone who exclusively regurgitates information may have jumbled facts in his mind and will not have a clear picture of anything specific, despite learning (allegedly) so much about that thing. In the public domain essay “On Thinking for Oneself,” Schopenhauer shows us some men who appear to know so much about specific countries from travel books, but they cannot form their ideas into a gestalt to describe those countries as a whole. They cannot see the bigger picture because they were habitually exposed to only small bits of information.

Billie Pritchett writes, “Wouldn’t it be better for someone to discipline his mind by being instructed in the fundamentals of a subject, and then begin thinking within that framework?” as he recognizes an objection that Schopenhauer’s readers likely had in his day. The framework of other people’s observations on a given subject appears to be useful and airtight, but Schopenhauer believes it is more rewarding to learn that framework after doing critical thinking of one’s own. As he puts it, “the mind is deprived of all its elasticity by much reading, as is a spring when a weight is continually applied to it,” and “the surest way not to have thoughts of our own is for us at once to take up a book when we have a moment to spare”; furthermore, “the truth acquired through our own thinking is like the natural limb; it alone really belongs to us.”
After being spoon-fed material from book after book, someone will lose the ability to creatively solve problems and will learn to rely on others’ mental pictures exclusively in the effort to comprehend a subject. That person will essentially forget how to figure things out for himself. All of humanity will benefit from spending time reflecting on their thoughts.
Schopenhauer anticipated another likely objection: “What if all you get from your own thinking is the same material that has already been discovered and published by another person, or several other people, many times?” If someone tries hard to solve a problem himself, but finds out later that his solution had already been a well-publicized discovery, Schopenhauer would still appreciate the mental effort the person used to come to that conclusion. He would call that “small volume” of experimentation “valuable.”
Schopenhauer’s broader philosophical point is that the human mind forms a sort of stabilizing structure to make sense of an irrational, crooked world of “vicious little men.” People are so entwined in their self-centered desires that they “commit atrocities” to get their way and generally only use reason to justify their actions. The human mind must form a force of good intellect and strong moral character as a guard against falling into these irrational ways, according to Schopenhauer. Critical thinking is a way to strengthen the mind and develop good character traits (i.e. diligence), so it should be encouraged by all means. Regurgitation may become fuel for selfish desires (i.e. laziness) because of how easy and mentally painless it is, so it must be discouraged.

One person helped build companies spanning electric vehicles, space exploration, brain-computer interfaces, AI, and underground transportation.

The combined value created is measured in trillions.
That's not just wealth creation.
That's industrial-scale innovation. pic.twitter.com/4uRrjLChJC
— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) June 13, 2026

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/2065445696287703472?s=20

Elon Musk announced a chip factory 10 times the size of Tesla's Gigafactory. The goal is to produce enough AI compute to equal twice the entire electricity consumption of the United States.

He called it the Terafab.

Here is the number that stopped me cold.

The entire global AI… pic.twitter.com/5oxVTP0HqO
— Ihtesham Ali (@ihtesham2005) June 13, 2026

JEFF BEZOS: “I'M VERY ADMIRING OF WHAT SPACEX HAS DONE AND I WANT THE WORLD TO HAVE AT LEAST TWO SPACEX'S — MAYBE EVEN MORE. GREAT INDUSTRIES ARE MADE UP OF MANY COMPANIES.” pic.twitter.com/wwHWN12nA3
— Vivek Sen (@Vivek4real_) June 13, 2026

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell on CNBC yesterday on Elon Musk:

"I think he is very misunderstood across the board. I want people to know him. In fact, he participated in some of the discussions that we’ve had over the last couple of weeks with investors.

The investors left… pic.twitter.com/xPQb3zNM3x
— Nic Cruz Patane (@niccruzpatane) June 13, 2026

November 2023. The most powerful companies on Earth lined up to make him kneel.

Disney. Apple. IBM. Comcast. They pulled their money and waited for the apology.

The whole press corps wanted one word out of him. Sorry.

Sorkin leaned in and offered him the exit. Just walk it… pic.twitter.com/6l8CA3lvSZ
— Dustin (@r0ck3t23) June 14, 2026

https://twitter.com/tslaming/status/2066131447992443060?s=20

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Debt Rattle May 15 2023

May 152023

May 15, 2023 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:11 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, counteroffensive, Discord leaks, OPCW, Prigozhin, terrorism, WaPo, white supremacy, Zelensky 38 Responses »

Alessandro Allori Portrait of a Lady c1560

• Wagner Chief Offered To Give Russian Troop Locations To Ukraine (WaPo)

• WaPo Deletes Part of Zelensky Interview Accusing It Of Aiding Russia (Antiwar)

• Here Are The Zelensky ‘Treason’ Quotes The Washington Post Deleted (RT)

• Western Pressure Can ‘Screw Up’ Ukrainian Counteroffensive: Ex-US General (RT)

• Ukraine Now De-Facto ‘State-Sponsor Of Terrorism’ – Kremlin (RT)

• White Supremacy Is ‘Most Dangerous Threat’ To US – Biden (RT)

• The Charlemagne Prize for Hypocrisy and Mass Murder (Vogel)

• G7 and EU To Ban Restart Of Russian Gas Pipelines (RT)

• Play it Again Uncle Sam… Debunked Syrian Chemical Weapons Card in Ukraine (SCF)

• Deliver Us from Reality (Kimball)

• The Dynamics Driving The Dollar Down (Macleod)

• Never Forget: A Retrospective On The Media Lies Surrounding COVID (ZH)

• Assange Allies Turn to Squire Patton Boggs to Help Lobby DOJ (BBL)

Whistleblowers

Really chilling clip.

James Comer, Chair of House Oversight, says 9 of the 10 whistleblowers that they’ve identified are missing! They’re either currently in court, they’re currently already jail, or they’re missing. He also says he knows who is intimidating them. pic.twitter.com/Uow0XEnPaa

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) May 14, 2023

Soros Ukr

Just so you know who set up the war in Ukraine and our billions in taxpayer dollars are paying for it pic.twitter.com/d2gG9A6zU5

— • ᗰISᑕᕼIᗴᖴ ™ • (@4Mischief) May 15, 2023

Macgregor

US colonel Douglas McGregor-
The Ukrainian army loses 500 people daily. pic.twitter.com/VPlPXZwtwg

— Spriter (@Spriter99880) May 10, 2023

Prygozhin talks to Kiev. But does he offer to give up military secrets? That’s a stretch.

• Wagner Chief Offered To Give Russian Troop Locations To Ukraine (WaPo)

In late January, with his mercenary forces dying by the thousands in a fight for the ruined city of Bakhmut, Wagner Group owner Yevgeniy Prigozhin made Ukraine an extraordinary offer. Prigozhin said that if Ukraine’s commanders withdrew their soldiers from the area around Bakhmut, he would give Kyiv information on Russian troop positions, which Ukraine could use to attack them. Prigozhin conveyed the proposal to his contacts in Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, with whom he has maintained secret communications during the course of the war, according to previously unreported U.S. intelligence documents leaked on the group-chat platform Discord. Prigozhin has publicly feuded with Russian military commanders, who he furiously claims have failed to equip and resupply his forces, which have provided vital support to Moscow’s war effort. But he is also an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who might well regard Prigozhin’s offer to trade the lives of Wagner fighters for Russian soldiers as a treasonous betrayal.

The leaked document does not make clear which Russian troop positions Prigozhin offered to disclose. Two Ukrainian officials confirmed that Prigozhin has spoken several times to the Ukrainian intelligence directorate, known as HUR. One official said that Prigozhin extended the offer regarding Bakhmut more than once, but that Kyiv rejected it because officials don’t trust Prigozhin and thought his proposals could have been disingenuous. A U.S. official also cautioned that there are similar doubts in Washington about Prigozhin’s intentions. The Ukrainian and U.S. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. In an interview with The Washington Post this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would not confirm the contacts with Prigozhin. “This is a matter of [military] intelligence,” he said. The Ukrainian leader also objected to airing classified information publicly and said he believed that the leaks had benefited Russia.

Zelensky doesn’t appear to get it. This is the Discord leaks.

• WaPo Deletes Part of Zelensky Interview Accusing It Of Aiding Russia (Antiwar)

The Washington Post deleted a portion of an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, where he accused the paper of helping Russia by posing a question about information contained in leaked classified documents. The interview was conducted on May 1 and published on Saturday. An archived version of the interview shows a testy exchange between Zelensky and the Post, which was later deleted. The Post asked Zelensky about documents they obtained that they said showed members of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, known as HUR, had “back-channel contact” with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian mercenary force Wagner Group. Zelensky appeared to think the Post received the information from a Ukrainian and demanded the paper reveal its source.

“I would also like to ask you a question: With which sources from Ukraine do you have contact? Who is talking about the activities of our intelligence? Because this is the most severe felony in our country. Which Ukrainians are you talking to?” he said. The Post said the information “did not come from Ukraine” and that it was part of the Discord leaks, which revealed information that was obtained by the US spying on Zelensky. The Post said the documents showed Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, informed Zelensky about a “Russian plan to destabilize Moldova with two former Wagner associates.” The Post added: “Budanov informed you that he viewed the Russian scheme as a way to incriminate Prigozhin because ‘we have dealings’ with him.

You instructed Budanov to inform Moldovan President Maia Sandu, and Budanov told you that the GUR [HUR] had informed Prigozhin that he would be labeled a traitor who has been working with Ukraine. The document also says that Budanov expected the Russians to use details of Prigozhin’s secret talks with the GUR [HUR] and meetings with GUR [HUR] officers in Africa.” Zelensky responded by asking if the paper wanted the help Russia. “You are releasing some sort of information that does not help our state to attack and does not help us to defend our state. So, I don’t quite understand what you are talking about. I don’t quite understand your goal. Is your goal to help Russia?” he said. When the Post responded by saying it didn’t want to help Russia, Zelensky replied, “Well, it looks different.”

It’s not clear why the Post deleted the portion of the interview, but it could have been done at the behest of the Ukrainian government, which had previously pressured CBS News to remove a documentary on military aid to Ukraine. On Sunday night, the Post published a report on the HUR’s alleged contacts with Prighozhin. The report said Prighozhin, who is known to speak out against Russian military leadership, offered to give Ukraine information on Russian troop positions if Ukrainian forces withdrew from Bakhmut. But the report said US and Ukrainian officials thought the proposal was disingenuous. Prigozhin on Sunday made light of the allegations about his contacts with the HUR. According to the Post, he met with Ukrainian intelligence officials in an unnamed country in Africa. “Yes of course I can confirm this information, we have nothing to hide from the foreign special services. Budanov and I are still in Africa,” Prighozhin wrote on Telegram.

There’s more at the URL.

• Here Are The Zelensky ‘Treason’ Quotes The Washington Post Deleted (RT)

The Washington Post has deleted a large tract of an interview with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in which he lashed out at alleged “traitors” in his ranks. RT is publishing the entire section that the US newspaper would rather keep hidden. The following section appeared in an interview with the Ukrainian president published on Saturday. By Sunday it had been removed with no explanation. After discussing a trove of recently leaked Pentagon documents, which revealed – among other things – that the US monitors Zelensky’s communications, the newspaper presented him with a fresh allegation that has not yet been reported in the US media. Note that Evgeny Prigozhin is the founder and head of the Wagner Group, a Russian private military company currently fighting in the Donetsk People’s Republic.

WaPo: The documents indicate that GUR, your intelligence directorate, has back-channel contact with Evgeny Prigozhin that you were aware of, including meeting with Evgeny Prigozhin and GUR officers. Is that true?

Zelensky: This is a matter of [military] intelligence. Do you want me to be convicted of state treason? And so, it’s very interesting, if someone is saying that you have documents, or if someone from our government is speaking about the activities of our intelligence, I would also like to ask you a question: With which sources from Ukraine do you have contact? Who is talking about the activities of our intelligence? Because this is the most severe felony in our country. Which Ukrainians are you talking to?

WaPo: I talked to officials in government, but these documents are not from Ukraine, they are from…

Zelensky: It doesn’t matter where the documents are from. The question is with which Ukrainian official did you talk? Because if they say something about our intelligence, that’s treason. If they say something about a specific offensive plan of one general or another, this is also treason. That’s why I asked you, which Ukrainians are you talking to?

WaPo: About these specific documents? You are the first person I am talking to about them.

Zelensky: Okay.

WaPo: And I can read you what information exactly there is about Prigozhin and the GUR. On February 13, Kirill Budanov, chief of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, informed you about a Russian plan to destabilize Moldova with two former Wagner associates. Budanov informed you that he viewed the Russian scheme as a way to incriminate Prigozhin because “we have dealings” with him. You instructed Budanov to inform Moldovan President Maia Sandu, and Budanov told you that the GUR had informed Prigozhin that he would be labeled a traitor who has been working with Ukraine. The document also says that Budanov expected the Russians to use details of Prigozhin’s secret talks with the GUR and meetings with GUR officers in Africa…

Zelensky: Listen, to be honest, well, you just read something, you say something. I just don’t understand where you get it, whom you talk to and so on. You talk about how I met with Budanov. This suggests that you – how do you put it? It looks like you have people who have some records or you have some evidence or you have something, because that’s what it looks like. You are again doing, I apologize, what you were doing before. You are releasing some sort of information that does not help our state to attack and does not help us to defend our state. So, I don’t quite understand what you are talking about. I don’t quite understand your goal. Is your goal to help Russia? I mean, that means we have different goals. If I’m not sitting at the same table with them, I don’t quite understand what we’re talking about. Each of these inquiries simply demotivates Ukraine, demotivates certain partners to help Ukraine. Well, one way or another, I just don’t understand your goal.

WaPo: Our goal is not to help Russia.

Zelensky: Well, it looks different.

WaPo: No one gave us this information personally. These were in the leaked documents, which do indicate, as I said earlier, that the United States is listening in on you.

“..This narrative is promoted by those who “don’t want to see Ukraine win..”

• Western Pressure Can ‘Screw Up’ Ukrainian Counteroffensive: Ex-US General (RT)

The West could sabotage Ukraine’s much-hyped anticipated counteroffensive against Russia by piling up too much pressure on Kiev, a retired US general has warned. In an interview to Business Insider released on Thursday, Ben Hodges, former commander of US Army Europe, cautioned that portraying Ukraine’s push to reclaim lost territories as a make-or-break offensive could set a dangerous precedent and derail it even before its starts. “The only thing I think that can screw this up is if the West exerts so much pressure on Ukraine and it causes them to stop short of a total victory,” he told the outlet. Echoing remarks by some top Ukrainian officials, Hodges went on to say that he would “reject the talk that Ukraine’s only got one shot” at the offensive, and if it fails to “achieve a knockout blow,” then its Western backers would stop supporting Kiev.

This narrative is promoted by those who “don’t want to see Ukraine win,” he added. Hodges also noted that many top White House officials “are not committed to Ukraine absolutely winning,” rebuking the administration of US President Joe Biden for failing to clearly define its strategic objectives in the conflict. With speculation rampant in recent months about an imminent spring push, in late March Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba attempted to downplay its significance, saying that “we should counter by all means the perception of the counteroffensive as the decisive battle of the war.”

Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky claimed that Kiev was ready for the offensive, but still needed a bit more time for the conditions to become optimal and for the groundwork to be laid so as to avoid “unacceptable” losses. However, in late March General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, voiced skepticism about the planned offensive, warning that Ukraine would have a hard time “kicking every Russian out” of the territories it claims as its own. In April, commenting on the potential move by Kiev, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said that the Russian military “thoroughly tracks all the relevant information.”

This implicates us who support them.

• Ukraine Now De-Facto ‘State-Sponsor Of Terrorism’ – Kremlin (RT)

Ukraine has de-facto turned into a “state-sponsor of terrorism,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said. The official made the remarks in an interview with journalist Pavel Zarubin that aired on Sunday. The spokesman was asked for comments about a recent pledge by Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Kirill Budanov, who vowed to “keep killing Russians anywhere” across the globe. Despite their explosive nature, the remarks did not face any criticism from Kiev’s Western sponsors, Peskov noted. “The statement is unprecedented in its essence. And of course, it will be strange not to hear any words of condemnation from European capitals and from Washington. Logic says it’s impossible to do without condemnation,” he said. Budanov’s admission was yet further proof that Kiev has been directly orchestrating terrorist attacks against Russians, Peskov added.

The spokesman said that Russia’s “special services know what to do after such statements,” but did not elaborate on the potential countermeasures against such activities. “It’s evident that the Kiev regime is behind the killings, not only sponsoring them, but organizes, incites and carries them out. De-facto, we’re talking about a state-sponsor of terrorism.” The controversial remarks were made last week by the boss of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR) in an interview with Yahoo News. Budanov boasted that “we’ve been killing Russians” and will “keep killing Russians anywhere on the face of this world until the complete victory of Ukraine.” The statement came in response to a question whether the GUR had anything to do with last year’s murder of Darya Dugina, a journalist and daughter of prominent Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. Budanov dismissed accusations of engaging in terrorism, stating that what Russia calls “terrorism, we call liberation.”

The terrorist activities that Moscow has attributed to Kiev have picked up in recent months. In April, for instance, Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky was killed in St Petersburg with an improvised explosive device that had been concealed in a statuette handed to him during an event. The blast killed the blogger on the spot and injured over a dozen others. Russia’s Security Service (FSB) has blamed the blast on “Ukrainian special services and their agents, including fugitive members of the Russian opposition.” Last week, Russian author and political activist Zakhar Prilepin was targeted in a car bombing near the city of Nizhny Novgorod. The blast left Prilepin critically injured, and killed his close associate, who was inside the vehicle at the moment of the attack.

Plenty old videos with Joe as supremacist.

• White Supremacy Is ‘Most Dangerous Threat’ To US – Biden (RT)

In a speech to black college graduates on Saturday, US President Joe Biden labeled ‘white supremacy’ the most dangerous terrorist threat to the US. The statement – which is contradicted by crime statistics – was condemned by conservative pundits. “White supremacy… is the single most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland,” Biden told graduates from Howard University, a historically black university (HBCU) in Washington DC. “I’m not just saying this because I’m at a black HBCU. I say this wherever I go,” Biden continued. “Fearless progress toward justice often means ferocious pushback from the oldest and most sinister of forces. That’s because hate never goes away… it only hides under the rocks.”

Throughout his time in office, Biden has often talked up the threat of white supremacy, claiming that belief in the superiority of the white race motivated former President Donald Trump’s supporters to riot at the US Capitol in January 2021, and declaring last year that black people live in fear of being “gunned down by weapons of war deployed in a racist cause.” In mid-2021, the Biden administration published the US government’s first ever National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, which named “racially motivated violent extremists” and anti-government extremists as “the two most lethal elements of today’s domestic terrorism threat.”

According to FBI crime statistics, the average Howard University graduate is 11 times more likely to be murdered by a member of their own race than a white perpetrator. While African-Americans commit the majority of all violent crime in the US, most crime – whether committed by white or black Americans – is intraracial. Biden’s statement was condemned by conservative pundits, who accused the president of using divisive rhetoric to solicit votes. “The Democratic Party spent most of the 19th Century and much of the 20th using overt racism to win elections,” libertarian activist Jon Miltimore tweeted, adding that “They are doing it again in the 21st century. The racism just looks a lot different than the 19th century version.” Journalist Julie Kelly called Biden a “pathological liar” and accused him of fueling “dangerous racial division.”

“exceptional work performed in the service of European unity.”

• The Charlemagne Prize for Hypocrisy and Mass Murder (Vogel)

On Sunday, 14 May 2023, Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky will receive the Charlemagne Prize for “exceptional work performed in the service of European unity.” The Prize will be given to Zelensky himself and to the Ukrainian people. The official citation is full of praise, lofty terms and high ideals, but somehow there is a ring of insincerity about it. Obviously, the Prize is given because eight years after starting a war against what it claims to be its own citizens, the Ukraine is now engaged in a real battle with its Russian neighbor. After shelling cities of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, killing at least some 15,000 civilians and wounding countless others, Ukrainian soldiers and their NATO mentors now have to face a real enemy.

With European nations, as members of NATO and US vassal states, participating in brutal killing sprees in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, and given the violent past of nations like England, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Sweden and Denmark, what right do they have of lecturing Russia? The citation speaks of “an unspeakably brutal Russian war of aggression that contravenes international law, directed against the European Social Order, Security Order and Peace Order, with the objective of destabilising the European community of peoples…” As for upholding the principle of sovereignty that the EU supposedly holds so high and for which Zelensky is being praised to the skies, like everything else in the citation, it is a cynical sham. If the Ukraine is entitled to sovereignty and independence, what about Catalonia?

The last time the Catalans, who since the 17th century have desperately wanted to be sovereign and independent, tried to achieve this peacefully, they were brutally repressed by the government in Madrid and the unelected apparatchiks in the European Commission in Brussels. The European values defended by the guy with the hoarse voice and the olive green t-shirt are actually the same as those of the years 1941-45 when all of Europe was in the East trying to defeat the Red Army. Nevertheless, the Charlemagne Prize citation says about Zelensky and the Ukraine: “His country is defending Western values, unassailable principles of coexistence, peace and freedom, and therefore precisely what the European Union stands for politically.” All of it pure baloney.

Since 1950, the German city of Aachen has been giving the annual prize for helping to promote “European unity.” In 1955, it was given to Sir Winston Churchill who, only eleven years before, had in fact been responsible for flattening the ancient city with all its priceless monuments and killing almost two thousand of its citizens. Apparently, the Prize Committee believed that killing men, women and children with aerial bombardments was “exceptional work performed in the service of European unity.” The Committee still held that view half a century later when it gave the Charlemagne Prize to Tony Blair (1999), Bill Clinton (2000) and Javier Solana (2007). In their respective functions as British Prime Minister, US President and NATO Secretary General, this trio was responsible for destroying the European nation of Yugoslavia and bombing the European nation of Serbia, killing thousands of Serbian men, women and children. Many of those who escaped NATO bombs were contaminated by radioactive material from the depleted uranium munitions dropped on Serbia. Indeed, “exceptional work performed in the service of European unity.”

Wait till it gets colder.

• G7 and EU To Ban Restart Of Russian Gas Pipelines (RT)

The G7 and EU will ban Russian gas imports on routes where Moscow has cut supplies, according to officials involved in the negotiations, the first time pipeline gas trade has been blocked by Western powers since the invasion of Ukraine, Report informs via the Financial Times. The decision, which is to be finalized by G7 leaders at a summit in Hiroshima next week, will prevent the resumption of Russian pipeline gas exports on routes to countries such as Poland and Germany, where Moscow cut off supplies last year and triggered an energy crisis across Europe. Western powers want to ensure that Russia does not receive a boost to its energy revenues as they attempt to raise economic pressure 15 months after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

One of the officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, said the move was “to make sure that partners don’t change their mind in a hypothetical future”. A draft G7 statement seen by the Financial Times said that the group of leading economies would further reduce their use of Russian energy sources “including preventing the reopening of avenues previously shut down by Russia’s weaponization of energy” at least until “there is a resolution of the conflict”. While the measures are unlikely to affect any immediate gas flows, it underscores a deep determination in Brussels to make permanent the rapid and painful pivot away from decades of reliance on Russian energy. The ban is highly symbolic because, at the start of the war, the EU had avoided targeting pipeline flows given their huge dependence on Moscow’s gas. Russia went ahead and cut supplies anyway, sparking a surge in gas prices to more than 10 times their normal level.

But in recent months prices have fallen substantially as Europe successfully cut demand over winter, accelerated the roll out of renewable energy and sourced alternative supplies such as seaborne cargoes of LNG. Moscow’s share of the European gas imports has fallen from more than 40 percent to less than 10 percent, and a mild winter has boosted gas storage in the EU. Officials are confident that gas storage, which is already some 60 percent full compared with roughly 30 percent at the same time in 2022, will reach capacity long before the next winter arrives. Oil pipelines where Russia has cut supplies, including the northern leg of the Druzhba line that supplies refineries in Germany and Poland, could also be blocked under EU measures to prevent a resumption in flows.

The embargo is being discussed by diplomats as part of the EU’s 11th sanctions package. The commission said it would not comment on sanctions discussions or leaks. One EU diplomat said that the proposal needed more clarification from Brussels to show how the “status quo” would change, particularly as some oil from Kazakhstan flows through Druzhba. “It has to be clear exactly how it would work,” they said. Berlin and Warsaw, despite having an exemption from sanctions on Russian oil, said that they would voluntarily end deliveries of crude through Druzhba last year although Poland continued to receive supplies until Russia cut off flows in February. German refineries stopped ordering Russian crude from the beginning of this year.

Aaron Maté territory.

• Play it Again Uncle Sam… Debunked Syrian Chemical Weapons Card in Ukraine (SCF)

The CW card is a complete dud. That Western media are playing it shows that their role is as sinister as mass drug-dealing. Western media are now accusing Russian forces of preparing to use chemical weapons (CW) of mass destruction in Ukraine, thereby making the case for greater NATO military intervention. The CW card is a complete dud. That Western media are playing it shows they are also complete duds, and that their role is as sinister as mass drug-dealing. Deliberate provocation by Western powers is the watchword. Britain this week supplying long-range missiles, as well as depleted uranium artillery shells, and drone attacks on the Kremlin are part of a sequence to solicit never-ending escalation. Accusing Russia of planning to use chemical weapons of mass destruction, as with earlier claims of Russia willing to use nuclear weapons, is all part of the orchestrated provocation.

The degradation of Western media standards has become so bad that they can get away with retailing such nonsense to consumers of this “information”. First of all, Russia does not have any chemical weapons. As a signatory to the international treaty known as the Chemical Weapons Convention (1997), the Russian Federation verifiably destroyed all of its arsenals as per its signatory obligations. The complete decommissioning of these weapons by Russia in 2017 was verified by the Organization for the Prohibition on Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The United States is the only major power that has not fully implemented the CW convention by retaining stockpiles of these weapons. Not only is speculation about Russian forces possibly using CW in Ukraine baseless, but the Western media are also deploying the shoddy lie used earlier against Syria. Incredibly, for anyone cognizant of the facts, such calumny is still peddled to blame the wrong people when the real perpetrator in Syria was Western-backed militants and their CIA and MI6-sponsored media accomplices, the so-called White Helmets.

Western media continue to claim that the Syrian government forces of Bashar al Assad used CW against civilians during the decade-old civil war in the Arab country. Russia supported the Syrian army to defeat NATO-backed radical extremists. Now the Western media are moralizing that the United States and other Western powers took no punitive action against Syria over CW which, it is contended, is acting as a precedent for Russia to use these weapons in the Ukraine conflict. Euronews quotes Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former British military intelligence officer, as saying: “The international community needs to reaffirm that any use of chemical or biological weapons would not be acceptable in any shape or form… I’m sure NATO and the West would act if they [Russia] used chemical weapons in Ukraine. But having said that they stood by when Assad used such weapons in Syria and that might embolden Putin.”

This is an outrageous lie being propagated by the Western media. It has been documented by independent investigations that the CW attacks in Syria were actually carried out by NATO-backed mercenaries in false-flag operations to provoke Western military intervention. One of those false flags in the city of Douma in April 2018 succeeded in its nefarious aims. Following the incident – dutifully amplified at the time by Western media for gaslighting the Western public – U.S. President Donald Trump bombed Syria “in revenge” along with British and French allies. However, it turned out later that Syria, Russia and Iran were vindicated in their initial claims that the CW incidents in Syria were false-flag stunts. Indeed, it was shown that personnel in the UN watchdog, the OPCW, engaged in a cover-up to implicate the Assad government when the real perpetrator was the jihadists backed by the West, as reported by Aaron Maté and other independent journalists.

The defence fund for former Marine Daniel Penny is at $1.6 million.

• Deliver Us from Reality (Kimball)

“Because he can.” That’s the answer one has to give to those who ask how Alvin Bragg, a local district attorney in office by the slimmest of margins—and then only because of a huge subsidy from the anti-American billionaire George Soros—can get away with antics like indicting Donald Trump, a former (and, possibly, future) president of the United States, and, now, with charging former Marine Daniel Penny with manslaughter because he (along with at least two others) intervened to stop Jordan Neely from attacking fellow passengers on a New York subway. Because he can. As a friend remarked when digesting the spectacle of Penny being led away in handcuffs, totalitarian movements often start slowly, almost timidly, but as they gain power, they become more brazen. After a certain point, they do outrageous things just to intimidate the public and demonstrate their power.

We now know that the FBI, the CIA, and other elements of America’s security apparatus intervened directly in the decision making of Twitter and other social media companies to influence the course of the 2020 election. One part of that intervention had to do with organizing 51 senior former intelligence figures to sign a letter declaring that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” That was a lie. They knew it was a lie. It didn’t matter. They did it because they knew they could get away with it. The United States is on the verge of being inundated with thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens. Many are from South or Central America. Hundreds are from China, even though they are crossing that notional line we used to be able to call, without irony, our southern border. Why did the Biden Administration decide to enact a real-life Camp of the Saints invasion of the United States? Because it could. There was no immediate price to pay.

In her classic study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt makes several observations that bear on our current situation. “There is no doubt,” she observes, “that the elite was pleased whenever the underworld frightened respectable society into accepting it on an equal footing. The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it. They were not particularly outraged at the monstrous forgeries in historiography of which all totalitarian regimes are guilty and which announce themselves clearly enough and totalitarian propaganda.”

“..currency as a medium of exchange which allows us to turn our production into our consumption..”

• The Dynamics Driving The Dollar Down (Macleod)

John Maynard Keynes did the world a disservice with his offhand dismissal of Say’s law. Consequently, economists have lost the true relationship between production and consumption. And we have lost our understanding of the true role of currencies as a medium of exchange. Nearly all our economic errors have flowed from this dismissal. In order to understand the seriousness of it with respect to the dollar today, the denial of Say’s law is no less than a denial of the division of labour. Yet, plainly, the division of labour is the basis of all human economic activity. Without having something to sell, we cannot buy the things we need which we are unable to provide for ourselves efficiently or easily. Where we differ from other animals is that we develop our personal skills to maximise the value of our specialised production so that we can increase our wider consumption for the greatest relief of our needs and desires.

Our individual skills are the key that provides our wealth. And it is the role of currency as a medium of exchange which allows us to turn our production into our consumption. Several things follow from this truism. One is that if we reduce our total production, we reduce our total consumption, because the former leads to the latter. No, say the Keynesians, who put it the other way round. They say that if we reduce our consumption there will be a general glut of goods on the market and then prices will fall, leading to unemployment. The error is to not understand that first we must produce in order to consume, so that there cannot be a general glut, only changes in the level of productive output which are broadly matched by changes in overall consumption.

Surely, this can be easily understood even by non-experts. But this deliberate error — for that is what it can only have been — has led to a misunderstanding of the role of the medium of exchange. It provides the means to exchange goods of unequal value: for example, a cobbler makes shoes and boots, whose unit value will be greater than the individual food items he requires daily to feed his family. It also provides producers with the credit required to finance production, paying costs incurred before a final product is sold and creditors repaid. This is the essence of trade. And so long as transacting individuals only produce to consume, the expansion and contraction of the sum total of money and credit purely in connection with that trade cannot alter their value in terms of goods and services generally. Not so, say Keynes’s macroeconomists, now joined in chorus by the monetarists. They claim that expansion of money and credit alters the general price relation. Both believe in manipulating credit to this end.

“..the most aggressive global propaganda attack in modern history..”

• Never Forget: A Retrospective On The Media Lies Surrounding COVID (ZH)

Lest we get too comfortable once again and forget that only a couple years ago the western world was on the verge of perpetual medical tyranny, it is important to look back at the massive media disinformation campaign concerning the effectiveness (or lack of effectiveness) of the pandemic mandates and the mRNA vaccines. Only two years ago, the public was bombarded by possibly the most aggressive global propaganda attack in modern history. And, this campaign was a conjoined effort between national governments, global institutions and corporations.

Keep in mind, all the hysteria was generated over a virus with a median official Infection Fatality Rate of only 0.23%. That’s right, all the fear mongering featured in the video below was in reaction to a “pandemic” that 99.8% of the population would easily survive, and this death rate was known only months after the spread started. Also keep in mind that essentially every single claim made by the media concerning covid featured below ended up being false. In many cases, the media knew that scientific evidence ran contrary to their narrative, but they promoted that narrative anyway. Enjoy this flashback of corporate media covid fear mongering, and never forget…

Covid Retrospective Series, Vol. 1

Media: The Unvaccinated Are Scum pic.twitter.com/hPvLfEtW3O

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 12, 2023

No play no pay?

• Assange Allies Turn to Squire Patton Boggs to Help Lobby DOJ (BBL)

A WikiLeaks fundraising organization has hired Squire Patton Boggs to lobby the Justice Department on behalf of the site’s publisher, Julian Assange, amid his espionage charges, according to public records and three sources familiar with the matter. German foundation Wau Holland has paid Squire at least $1.2 million since last October to push DOJ on journalists’ rights to publish classified information, federal disclosures show. The sources said the global law and public policy firm has been seeking a meeting with the department to discuss how the espionage case against Assange holds up in light of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s recent policy to protect journalists from enforcement actions.

The hiring of one of Washington’s most storied and influential firms marks an escalation of a years-long public advocacy campaign. Advocates haven’t yet succeeded in persuading the Biden administration to abandon the Trump-era prosecution of Assange for publishing classified war documents. There’s no sign the two Squire attorneys listed on the lobbying disclosures—both former government lawyers—have made headway in convening with DOJ officials to understand how Assange’s charges mesh with Garland’s press-friendly approach. But their campaign on behalf of someone condemned by members of both political parties, which hasn’t been previously reported, represents the Big Law firm’s most lucrative federally-disclosed work over the past six months.

Assange is a polarizing figure due to his high-profile national security breaches and publication of hacked Democratic National Committee emails in 2016. He was arrested in 2019 in London on a US warrant and remains detained as he fights his extradition. Squire’s efforts align with press freedom and civil liberties groups, major news outlets, and the House’s progressive wing, who have warned that extraditing Assange from the UK and putting him on trial in US court would threaten First Amendment rights. [..] Squire received $600,000 from the Wau Holland Foundation in each of the prior two quarters starting in October 2022, according to lobbying filings disclosed in mid-April. The foundation, a longtime Assange and WikiLeaks financer, enlisted the firm to lobby DOJ on “First Amendment issues related to the publication by journalists of classified information,” Squire said in the filings.

Khan

BREAKING: Imran Khan Says 'THEY' Will Try to Kill Him

During an interview with Sky, Imran Khan expressed his concern that 'they' would make attempts to either imprison or assassinate him.

He believes that 'they' are afraid of a free and fair election, given his party currently… pic.twitter.com/T5UmQMJv51

— Sulaiman Ahmed (@ShaykhSulaiman) May 14, 2023

Leopard

pic.twitter.com/uiC2IxCjM2

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) May 15, 2023

Deepest fish

Scientists at University of Western Australia set new record for deepest fish ever filmed at a depth of 8,336 meters.

During an expedition that took place in August 2022, the research vessel DSSV Pressure Drop embarked on a two-month journey to investigate trenches in the… pic.twitter.com/lITNAsqWBV

— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) May 14, 2023

Big cats