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Data Centers/Artificial Intelligence. YOU ARE HERE
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Data Centers. Gotta Have Them, MeThinks.
Locals Were There First. Assimilate with locals for the Win-Win. Cost AND availability of water AND power should NOT increase over whatever locals currently pay.
Ideally locals utility cost will be reduced. Modern technology ought to be able to deliver lower costs. Data centers are already going to improve local utility infrastructure.
Win-Win for everyone.
WAIT A Second.STOP The presses!
Below article addresses none of the concerns mentioned above. Though, those concerns Must AND I believe will be addressed to fairly meet local concerns, needs.
Energy reality forces tech to ditch climate virtue-signaling
If we want the data centers to run, we have to ditch the global warming propaganda.
In Pecos County, Texas, crews are clearing scrubland for a power plant that will burn natural gas and answer to no one but Amazon. With 35 turbines and a generating capacity of more than 7 gigawatts, the plant will be able to produce more electricity than the Grand Coulee Dam. A state permit allows the facility to emit 33 million tons of greenhouse gases a year, roughly double what comes from an Alabama coal-fired generator that has topped America’s emissions tables for years.
Now recall who founded the company building the gas behemoth. That would be Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who just 5 years ago told delegates at a U.N. climate summit that a rocket ride had shown him a planet that was finite and fragile, prompting a pledge of $2 billion to “restore” nature. The applause was warm. The carbon-intensive private jet that carried Bezos to the Scotland meeting was noted by critics and forgotten by everyone else.
Now his company is financing what may become the largest point source of carbon dioxide in the United States, whose contribution to the greening of ecosystems should be welcome.
You are watching a conversion, and it deserves your attention because of what forced it.
The template, not the exception
Enverus Intelligence Research projects that user-owned turbines will account for about 40 percent of new data center capacity through 2030. Microsoft has signed a 20-year deal for power from a Chevron gas plant in neighboring Reeves County. Interconnection subscriptions are full, transformers are back-ordered, and the only metric that matters is the time it takes to get a power plant in operation.
In 2021, Facebook’s parent company Meta declared climate change one of the most pressing challenges facing the world and positioned itself among the largest corporate buyers of clean electricity. Then came its Hyperion data center in Louisiana. Regulators approved three combined-cycle gas plants for it in August 2025. In March 2026, Meta tripled the order, funding seven more and making the totals 10 gas plants and nearly $11 billion of investment. Meta will underwrite 15 years of revenue, while the turbines will run for 30 — a mismatch that has a dissenting member of the Public Service Commission warning that households may inherit the balance.
Elon Musk built an empire on the premise that combustion belongs to the past. In 2024, he said that a carbon tax was the only action needed to solve climate change. More recently, addressing G20 ministers, he warned of a significant power shortfall next year and defended data center construction against negative public sentiment. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, in the same meeting, asked governments for more electricians and more electricity. Neither man requested more wind and solar installations.
Energy physics forces a hard reset
Big Tech’s turn toward dedicated gas power does not settle the climate debate, but it exposes the distance between a political narrative and a power grid capable of supporting industries. When servers must run, physics gets a vote.
For example, at the start of 2026, every grid-scale battery in the United States combined could meet national demand for only 15 minutes. Modeling the PJM regional power system through 2045, Jonathan Lesser and Mitchell Rolling found that a grid of wind, solar, and batteries would need 10 times the generating capacity of gas and nuclear power. It would also cost about seven times as much and cover a land area larger than the PJM service area, which comprises most of the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest.
Yet despite these facts, pseudo-scientists, grifters, and demagogues lectured for 20 years that coal is immoral, natural gas is a bridge to nowhere, and so-called green technologies are the planet’s salvation. Banks denied financing for hydrocarbon projects in developing countries where surgeons operate under lights powered by unreliable generators and where hundreds of millions cook with sooty wood and dung.
The lesson is the same for data centers and households: Prosperity requires electricity that is available when needed. Dependable systems of conventional energy sources will continue to power the tech revolution and human progress for decades.
There are Important Notifications from our host, Wolf Moon; the Rules of our late, good Wheatie; and, certain caveats from Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. They are linked here. Note: Yours Truly has checked today’s post for any AI-generated content. To the best of her knowledge and belief, there is none. If readers wish to post any AI-generated content in the discussion thread for today’s post, they must cite their source. Thank you.
Do not forget to LABEL AI articles, video and such.
For fun, from one half of the Prussiagate team known as Will Zol.
Trump’s “Oranges” Slip Was A Clue – Nobody Caught It For 7 Years (43 minutes)
I am going to start with how things stand today. In reading X-22 on Wednesday I realized there was a tweet that fits very well with this article so I am adding it here at the top of the page.
Tell people they’re going to die.
Then tell them only you can save them.
That’s the oldest trick in the book, and the AI doom machine is running it at full throttle.
First comes the extinction warning: greater than a 10% chance AI kills humanity within a decade.
…we find that only 737 top holders accumulate 80% of the control over the value of all TNCs [Trans National Corporations] …This means that network control is much more unequally distributed than wealth. In particular, the top ranked actors hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth…
…In detail, nearly 4/10 of the control over the economic value of TNCs in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 TNCs in the core, which has almost full control over itself. The top holders within the core can thus be thought of as an economic “super-entity” in the global network of corporations. A relevant additional fact at this point is that 3/4 of the core are financial intermediaries….
There may be 147 companies in the world that own everything, as colleague Bruce Upbin points out and they are dominated by investment companies as Eric Savitz rightly points out. But it’s not you and I who really control those companies, even though much of our money is in them. Given the nature of how money is invested, there are four companies in the shadows that 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 control those companies that own everything.
Before I reveal them, some light math:
According to the 2011 annual factbook from the Investment Company Institute, there is $24.7 trillion in all the mutual funds in the world (a little less than half from the US). Based on data from the ICI, $1.24 trillion of this is directly invested in index funds, plus another $992 billion in assets beyond that $24.7 trillion in Exchange Traded Funds, which aren’t mutual funds but are index funds. That means the bulk of that money is in “active” managed funds or fund of funds.
.the chief of hedge funds at a very large asset manager told me last week (alas, I cannot identify either) that an internal study his firm recently performed found that the vast majority of mutual funds defined as actively managed see 95% of the assets they hold determined by an index. That means just 5% of actively managed funds really are driven by the active manager’s judgment….
So of the $25.69 trillion in worldwide assets we’ve identified, $2.23 trillion are directly in indexes (ETFs and index mutual funds) with another $22.3 trillion indirectly beholden to indexes (that 95% of actively managed fund holdings said to be determined by an index).
You can see where I’m headed here. That means the real power to control the world lies with four companies: McGraw-Hill, which owns Standard & Poor’s, Northwestern Mutual, which owns Russell Investments, the index arm of which runs the benchmark Russell 1,000 and Russell 3,000, CME Group which owns 90% of Dow Jones Indexes, and Barclay’s, which took over Lehman Brothers and its Lehman Aggregate Bond Index, the dominant world bond fund index. Together, these four firms dominate the world of indexing. And in turn, that means they hold real sway over the world’s money…
And FYI from Brave AI:
Robert Maxwell, the late British media tycoon and father of Ghislaine Maxwell, did not own McGraw-Hill but formed a major joint venture with the company in 1989. Through his U.S. subsidiary Macmillan Inc., Maxwell merged his educational publishing assets with McGraw-Hill’s to create Macmillan/McGraw-Hill School Publishing Co., which became the nation’s largest or second-largest textbook publisher depending on the source.
Small world…Does all the Corporate Woke Schiff now make sense?
The financiers then made the next move. Using corporate money to influence the US elections. I very much disagree with this SCOTUS decision. Corporations ARE NOT PEOPLE!
By a 5-to-4 vote along ideological lines, the majority held that under the First Amendment corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justices Antonin G. Scalia, Samuel A. Alito, and Clarence Thomas. Justice John Paul Stevens dissented, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. The majority maintained that political speech is indispensable to a democracy, which is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation. The majority also held that the BCRA’s disclosure requirements as applied to The Movie were constitutional, reasoning that disclosure is justified by a “governmental interest” in providing the “electorate with information” about election-related spending resources. The Court also upheld the disclosure requirements for political advertising sponsors and it upheld the ban on direct contributions to candidates from corporations and unions. In a separate concurring opinion, Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justice Alito, emphasized the care with which the Court handles constitutional issues and its attempts to avoid constitutional issues when at all possible. Here, the Court had no narrower grounds upon which to rule, except to handle the First Amendment issues embodied within the case. Justice Scalia also wrote a separate concurring opinion, joined by Justices Alito and Thomas in part, criticizing Justice Stevens’ understanding of the Framer’s view towards corporations. Justice Stevens argued that corporations are not members of society and that there are compelling governmental interests to curb corporations’ ability to spend money during local and national elections.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations and others have a First Amendment right to raise and spend unlimited money on elections. Few modern Supreme Court decisions have received as much public attention, or backlash, as Citizens United v. FEC. The U.S. has since seen a surge in megadonors and a rise in dark money, or undisclosed campaign donations. A tiny sliver of Americans now wield more power than at any time since Watergate, too often at the expense of ordinary citizens whose needs are not prioritized.
On top of influencing elections, corporations (and NGOs) use their large amounts of cash to lobby Congress.
CHAPTER 6 Uncertain Victory: BIG BUSINESS AND THE POLITICS OF REGULATORY REFORM (pp. 174-200)
The Business Roundtable [a nonprofit association of 200+ CEOs of major U.S. companies, founded in 1972 in Washington, D.C.-GC] helped define corporate lobbying in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s, but for twenty years the group also maintained an office in New York City, where it kept its administrative and strategic planning functions geographically separate from its lobbying. From its prehistory at the Links Club on 62nd Street, the Roundtable bounced around Manhattan’s hot real estate locations, including stints on Wall Street, Broad Street, and Lexington Avenue. From 1978 until its final move south in 1993, member CEOs and professional staff members, particularly those who worked on nonlobbying issues like construction industry negotiations..
….
The author of the following article is Stephen D. Foster, Jr., a flaming liberal who holds a Bachelor’s Degree in History and Political Science from Missouri University of Science and Technology. However I do think he has a point. Given the East India Company, I do not think corporations were looked on with favor by the Founding Fathers.
…To say that the founding fathers supported corporations is very absurd. Its quite the opposite in fact. Corporations like the East India Trading Company were despised by the founding fathers and they were just one reason why they chose to revolt against England. Corporations represented the moneyed interests much like they do today and they often wielded political power, sometimes to the point of governing a colony all by themselves like the Massachusetts Bay Company did.
… At the time, in Britain, large corporations funded elections generously and its stock was owned by nearly everyone in parliament. The founding fathers did not think much of these corporations that had great wealth and great influence in government. And that is precisely why they put restrictions upon them after the government was organized under the Constitution…
After the nation’s founding, corporations were granted charters by the state as they are today. Unlike today, however, corporations were only permitted to exist 20 or 30 years and could only deal in one commodity, could not hold stock in other companies, and their property holdings were limited to what they needed to accomplish their business goals. And perhaps the most important facet of all this is that most states in the early days of the nation had laws on the books that made any political contribution by corporations a criminal offense. When you think about it, the regulations imposed on corporations in the early days of America were far harsher than they are now. That is hardly proof that the founding fathers supported corporations. In fact its quite the opposite…
Was Foster making this up out of whole cloth? Or was there truth in what he wrote?
Jane Anne Morris is a corporate anthropologist and writer…
In researching nineteenth-century laws regulating corporations, Morris found that in Wisconsin, as in most other states at that time:
Corporations were required to have a clear purpose, to be fulfilled but not exceeded.2
Corporations’ licenses to do business were revocable by the state legislature if they exceeded or did not fulfill their chartered purpose(s).3
The state legislature could revoke a corporation’s charter if it misbehaved.4
The act of incorporation did not relieve corporate management or stockholders/owners of responsibility or liability for corporate acts.5
As a matter of course, corporation officers, directors, or agents couldn’t break the law and avoid punishment by claiming they were “just doing their job” when committing crimes but instead could be held criminally liable for violating the law.6
State (not federal) courts heard cases where corporations or their agents were accused of breaking the law or harming the public.7
Directors of the corporation were required to come from among stockholders.8
Corporations had to have their headquarters and meetings in the state where their principal place of business was located.9
Corporation charters were granted for a specific period of time, such as twenty or thirty years (instead of being granted “in perpetuity,” as is now the practice).10
Corporations were prohibited from owning stock in other corporations, to prevent them from extending their power inappropriately.11
Corporations’ real estate holdings were limited to what was necessary to carry out their specific purpose(s).12
Corporations were prohibited from making any political contributions, direct or indirect.13
Corporations were prohibited from making charitable or civic donations outside of their specific purposes.14
State legislatures could set the rates that some monopoly corporations could charge for their products or services.15
All corporation records and documents were open to the legislature or the state attorney general.16
Similar laws existed in most other states. It is important to understand that tens of thousands of entrepreneurs did business in the early colonies and continue to do so today without being incorporated—the proverbial butcher, baker, and candlestick maker. To do business in America or most of the world does not require a corporate structure—people can run partnerships, individual proprietorships, or simply manufacture and sell products or offer services without any business structure whatsoever other than keeping track of the money for the Internal Revenue Service….
It’s only when a group of people get together and put capital (cash) at risk and want to seek from the government legal limits on their liability, and to legally limit their possible losses, that a corporate form becomes necessary. In exchange for these limitations on liability, governments demand certain responsibilities from corporations.
The oldest historic one was that corporations “operate in the public interest” or “to the public benefit.” After all, if the people, through their elected representatives, are going to authorize a legal limitation of liability for a group of people engaged in the game of business, it’s quite reasonable to ask that the game be played in a way that throws off some benefit to the government’s citizens or at least doesn’t operate counter to the public welfare...
E. M. Smith aka ChiefIO is a trained economist. This is what he had to say back in 2011.
Realize that the corporate urge is not toward a competitive market. It’s the very LAST thing any corporate wants. What a corporate wants is a monopoly where they can achieve the profit maximizing price point. Not competition. No “market” with many sellers.
So watch what GE does, as an example. It is always on the hunt for a market it can “dominate”. It uses political leverage to get its products mandated and the competition banned. It doesn’t want a market, it wants a ‘company store’.
Internalize that, and a lot of things “fit” better…
Monsanto pushing legislation to ban private traditional seeds[saving] and seed sharing, and promoting GMO products. (Why would a seed company want to ‘destroy’ a seed market? So you must come to the company store…)
EPA is used to forbid all sorts of things that can be done easily and cheaply, and where the alternative is very expensive ….
Once corporations figure out that it is cheaper and easier to get the competition banned and them mandated, than to create new products; and that they can make lots of money as the sole provider of a crappy product but not that much making good products in a competitive market; well, lets just say that the campaign contributions flow…
Oddly, you can look at Communism as the “limit case” where there is ONE corporation and it IS the government. At the other extreme is “laissez faire” with huge numbers of competitors. As you move toward Communism you pass through stages of ever more “concentration” of control. Just shy of communism is Classical Socialism with it’s state planning boards and commissions. A bit more toward L.F. you get “Market Socialism” (with some sub-types in between).
The USA until about 1990 was a “Mixed Economy” with some “natural monopolies” under government “control” via “regulation”; and with many competitive markets. We’ve moved to more central planning and more central “regulation” (in some cases as a cover for the “planning” word that has gotten tied to Socialism… so is political to some extent). With the nationalization of GM and the bank “bailout” / “rescue” that was really more of a ‘take-under’ in some ways; we moved to a Lange Type Socialism.
The result of the last 50 years has been more companies in markets with Oligopolies that are essentially guaranteed by the government. Who dominates the Home Mortgage Market? Fanny & Freddy – Gov’t Corporations. Who dominates the Student Loan Market? Sally Mae – a Gov’t Corporation. Who dominates US Autos? GM – a Gov’t Corporation via Nationalization, but now being sold off. (Though Ford is doing well too.) And who “Calls the Tune” for the Banks in America? ALL of them? The Federal Reserve Bank – a Gov’t sponsored corporation. And there are a whole lot more of them. Try taking a train from coast to coast for example…
At the next tier down, we have Gov’t dependent Oligopolies. Say you wanted to make airplanes. First off, you need that dozen lawyers to work the FAA for you. Next up, you need some friends in the Military to feed you contracts. Don’t think so? When Boeing gets a $B contract to ‘study’ or ‘develop’ and you need to design your new tech from scratch on your own money: Who do you think will win? So the government basically decides how many companies it wants, and who they will be, then funds them “to plan” with contracts. (This is NOT a hypothetical… I’ve watched them flat out announce “We’d like Lockheed and Martin to merge” or “we don’t want…” usually when one of them is ‘having issues’ and the topic is raised. Then the gov’t casts the one vote that matters…)
And so it goes…
This is, dare I say it…. basically the same way the Fascist “Third Way” worked. (And it DOES work). FDR and Wilson both had high praise for The Third Way and you can see how they shifted America from a ‘free market’ toward “Third Way” government – corporation “cooperation” … It was this same process / tendency that Ike warned about in the “Military Industrial Complex” speech.
So we’ve moved away from straight up competition (and with good reasons… it is less profitable and more destructive in some ways and it is prone to monopoly practices) and toward that Classical Socialist end of things; with exact placement varying over time. And we called it a “Mixed Economy” at the ‘tepid’ end; as the name “fascist Third Way” got a bit tainted during W.W.II …. that tendency for Mussolini and Hitler to stir in a load of Nationalism and for the Nazi’s a double helping of Racism spoiled the soup for the Third Way “Socialist Lite” folks like FDR.
And the propaganda worked.
We’ve now got a “Progressive” and a “Third Way” government that IS a form of Socialism. (Now being rebranded as “Market Socialism” in the Eastern Block and Euro zones; called “Regulation” in the USA and sometimes poking it’s head up under “Rescue” as well with the most recent bits called “Social Justice”… all the pieces as slices of salami, but no overall Big Picture of it… we like to keep our socialism hidden in tiny bites with different names.) But just don’t ever point out that it’s basically the same “Third Way” process, using what’s properly called “Corporatism”, to achieve the Socialist agenda; that was first innovated by the Fascists… After all, it doesn’t fit the propaganda paradigm “Fascists bad, WORLD Socialists good” put out by Stalin…
And that is the root cause of your pondering. Corporations are very happy under a Socialist Third Way / Progressive / Market Socialism / Fascist / “Government regulated Coopertition” (whatever you name you like to apply to the same beast) system. They are not very happy with wide open competitive markets. See all of Europe for an example of “Managed Markets” (yet another name…) The French are masters of this technique, and the Germans not far behind. The Japanese innovated the Keiretsu as a way to limit competition to manageable chunks with government supervision.
Like I said, it DOES work. What galls me is just that we run around putting 20 different names on the same process and that just hides what’s really going on. All for political reasons. Very “un-tidy”… You’d think these folks had something to hide…
At any rate, I’d like our economy to move back more toward a “Mixed Economy” with less of it “regulated and rescued” and be a bit further from a Lange Type Socialism and more like the Socialism Lite we used to be. Somehow some folks think that means I want laissez faire (which is prone to other evil failures); even more folks think Corporations must be laissez faire machines and tools of the Evil Right Wing; when the reality is that they are much more useful to the Third Way Socialists of the world… and make much more stable profits under them.
Hope that helps you see why “corporations would want to destroy their own markets”… Just need to change it around a little and it makes a lot of sense:
“Why would corporations want to destroy the competitive nature of their own markets?”…
THE COST OF REGULATIONS, CORPORATIONS FAVORITE WEAPON
“This is a good time to recall the lesson George McGovern learned when he started a boutique hotel after his political career ended, only to learn the bitter lessons of the heavy foot of government regulation. This led McGovern to express a heresy:
I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender…
[M]y business associates and I also lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never have doubted the worthiness of any of these goals,👉the concept that most often eludes legislators is: “Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape.” It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators.👈
U.S. GDP is just $16 trillion instead of $54 trillion
The growth of federal regulations over the past six decades has cut U.S. economic growth by an average of 2 percentage points per year, according to a new study in the Journal of Economic Growth. As a result, the average American household receives about $277,000 less annually than it would have gotten in the absence of six decades of accumulated regulations—a median household income of $330,000 instead of the $53,000 we get now.
The researchers, economists John Dawson of Appalachian State University and John Seater of North Carolina State, constructed an index of federal regulations by tracking the growth in the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations since 1949. The number of pages, they note, has increased six-fold from 19,335 in 1949 to 134,261 in 2005. (As of 2011, the number of pages had risen to 169,301.) They devise a pretty standard endogenous growth theory model and then insert their regulatory burden index to calculate how federal regulations have affected economic growth. (Sometimes deregulation extends rather than shortens the number of pages in the register; they adjust their figures to take this into account.)…
People esp ‘economists’ forget small business. There are a LOT of one to ten person shops out there. They hire a person or two even if it is just casual labor for a day or two or a week.
…. most of these new participants in the underground economy are ordinary hard-working Americans who are increasingly taking jobs that pay “under the table” either because nothing else is available or they need a second source of income to make ends meet.
America’s underground economy is nothing new, but since the Great Recession hit,[The Obummer years] experts estimate it has doubled in size, driven by unemployed or underemployed people desperate for income….
Small firms accounted for 65 percent (or 9.8 million) of the 15 million net new jobs created between 1993 and 2009…. An estimated 552,600 new employer firms opened for business in 2009, and 660,900 firms closed….
How important are small businesses to the U.S. economy?
Small firms: • Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms. • Employ half of all private sector employees. • Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll. • Generated 65 percent of net new jobs over the past 17 years. • Create more than half of the nonfarm private GDP. • Hire 43 percent of high tech workers ( scientists, engineers, computer programmers, and others). • Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises. • Made up 97.5 percent of all identified exporters and produced 31 percent of export value in FY 2008. • Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms.
….cities and states stifle new small businesses at every turn, burying them in mounds of paperwork; lengthy, expensive and arbitrary permitting processes; pointless educational requirements for occupations; or even just outright bans. Today, the Institute for Justice released a series of studies documenting government-imposed barriers to entrepreneurship in eight cities. In every city studied, overwhelming regulations destroyed or crippled would-be businesses at a time when they are most needed.
Time and again, these reports document how local bureaucrats believe they should dictate every aspect of a person’s small business. They want to choose who can go into which business, where, what the business should look like, and what signs will be put in the windows. And if that means that businesses fail, or never open, or can operate only illegally, or waste all their money trying to get permits so they have nothing left for actual operations, that’s just too bad. This attitude would be bad enough in prosperous times, but in a period of financial strain and high unemployment, it’s almost suicidally foolish…..
It’s well-known the regulatory burden falls disproportionately on small business. American Action Forum (AAF) research has discovered they are shedding jobs and wages are falling because of the Affordable Care Act. In addition, as regulation increases, the number of small business establishments decreases, while the largest businesses grow more numerous. Based on AAF’s latest research, the paperwork and compliance burdens alone total more than 3.3 billion hours and $64.6 billion. Given that compliance affects small businesses more acutely, each new hour of paperwork means less productivity, fewer profits, and diminished competitiveness, relative to larger competitors….
Now if we can get the states, towns and cities to give small businesses relief from idiotic regulations some of those underground businesses can come back into the regular economy. [This is what POTUS Trump is trying to do to unleash the US Economy.]
The 2013 Federal Register contains over 80,000 pages of new rules. As the Dollarhites showed only a large corporation that hires a full time legal staff has any hope of steering clear of traps in those new rules and in the new laws with completely off topic amendments attached. The Dollarhites, whose kids raised pet rabbits and sold them, fell foul of a one liner in an unrelated bill that amended the Animal Welfare Act years after the original law was passed.
That one liner is why I sold off my petting farm animals.
…the Dollarhite family of Nixa, Mo., first started raising and selling bunnies as part of a lesson to teach their teenage son about responsibility and hard work, they had no idea they would eventually meet the heavy hand of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). According to a recent article covered in Breitbart’s
Big Government, the USDA recently ordered the Dollarhite family to pay more than $90,000 in fines because they sold more than $500 worth of rabbits in a year — and if they fail to pay the fine by Monday, May 23, the fine will multiply to nearly $4 million….
On top of that you need a compliance staff. I worked for a company with a small thirty man staff. After a new law was passed we had to add 3 more people, 10% of the employees, to do nothing except deal with the additional paperwork required. That cost YOU money.
Following a record year of rulemaking, the Obama Administration is continuing to unleash more costly red tape. In the first six months of the 2011 fiscal year, 15 major regulations were issued, with annual costs exceeding $5.8 billion and one-time implementation costs approaching $6.5 billion. No major rulemaking actions were taken to reduce regulatory burdens during this period. Overall, the Obama Administration imposed 75 new major regulations from January 2009 to mid-FY 2011, with annual costs of $38 billion. There were only six major deregulatory actions during that time, with reported savings of just $1.5 billion. This flood of red tape will undoubtedly persist, as hundreds of new regulations stemming from the vast Dodd–Frank financial regulation law, Obamacare, and the EPA’s global warming crusade advance through the regulatory pipeline—all of which further weakens an anemic economy and job creation, while undermining Americans’ fundamental freedoms. Action by Congress as well as the President to stem this regulatory surge is essential.
It’s clear the Barack Obama White House ranks as one of the most activist regulatory administrations in history. Consequently, it’s not surprising the administration argues that regulatory costs and uncertainty aren’t hurting the economy.
Jan Eberly, assistant treasury secretary on economic policy, recently tried to make the case for an-all-is-well position on regulation in a Treasury Department blog. The piece opened by quoting Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in his recent Senate testimony: “I’m very sympathetic to the argument you want to be careful to get the rules better and smarter, but I don’t think there’s good evidence in support of the proposition that it’s regulatory burden or uncertainty that’s causing the economy to grow more slowly than any of us would like.”
Eberly goes on to make various points that supposedly undercut the argument regulation hurts business, the economy and jobs.
She cites a recovery in corporate profits.But that ignores where profits should or could be. In fact, corporate profits only climbed above their 2006 levels last year. For good measure, Eberly ignores that as of the second quarter of this year, proprietors’ income had still failed to climb back to its 2006 level.[Proprietorsare small business owners.]
Eberly asserts that a flat workweek for private workers and low capacity utilization point to poor demand, not fear of regulation…
As a private citizen do YOU have the time to read 80,000 pages of new regs a year, not to mention court cases? (Courts can make laws. It is called case law.) These regulations make it almost impossible for people to start and grow a small business.
And that brings us back to the attack on AI. Regulations are the best way to pick winners and losers AND to manage the decline of the USA while making people nothing but wage slaves.
There are Important Notifications from our host, Wolf Moon; the Rules of our late, good Wheatie; and, certain caveats from Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. They are linked here. Note: Yours Truly has checked today’s post for any AI-generated content. To the best of her knowledge and belief, there is none. If readers wish to post any AI-generated content in the discussion thread for today’s post, they must cite their source. Thank you.
Do not forget to LABEL AI articles, video and such.
As we come into the mid-terms and the economy becomes more and more important, let’s start with Tom Luongo’s
With the ECB hiking rates this week we’ve seen a big move by capital markets, especially on Friday, the 25th Anniversary of 9/11, where bond markets globally sold off more than 10 bps.
To my conspiratorial mind this was a warning shot to the Fed, the US, the Trump Administration and the gods themselves, thatDavosand their London sycophants are not going down without the fight of our lives.
The reality is that Lagarde raised to protect euro-bond/JGB carry spreads and to punish Germans for voting populist. Meanwhile, the UK is looking at a breakup, to ensure that there is no country left, freeing the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish to rejoin the EU and finally betray BREXIT completely.
Christine Lagarde hiked into an energy supply shock because of Keynesian dogma, or so the story goes. It was a policy mistake of epic proportions. And in response, the bond market sell off globally was intended to force Kevin Warsh at the Fed to make the same policy mistake.
CPI, employment, labor, and producer price data clearly do not warrant a rate hike from the Fed. Lagarde sparked a dollar liquidity spasm into the weekend with this and the Financial press tried to sell it as a statement by bond vigilantes that the Fed must hike.
Nonsense. The MOVE index sits at 82.2 after that. Break-even rates are still below 2%
Oil prices are elevated on future supply refilling but that is clearly transitory.
The real story continues to be in the those aforementioned carry spreads, which Trump pushes Canada into a war which will not end well for them…
When Reading the tweets from the Debriefing (Below) the word FinCEN caught my eye because of this passage from one of my older articles, KMAG DAILY THREAD 20260225 & COLUMBIA
This program that Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent is rolling out with FINcen seems to streamline the bounty system while focusing on the critical evidence: the money.
“Follow the money” is a notorious refrain not only in the Q Research community, but in the entire cultural ethos of “criminology” as well. Whether you are talking about a crime drama presented as a work of fiction on Netflix, or academic detective work, forensic accounting is the ideal method of mapping out criminal networks because the money flow is objective and traceable.
If you’ve listened to the past few episodes of Breaking History, we have been discussing FINcen and the Egmont Group. While FINcen is the financial crimes intelligence unit in the US government, the
Egmonth Group is an international network of over 170 of this type of intelligence unit from nearly every government on earth. The purpose being to share in this intelligence.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro was sanctioned by the Treasury Department last year, [October 24, 2025] and in the sanctioning document Petro is accused of getting Colombia’s financial crimes intelligence unit suspended from Egmont for allegedly sharing information he collected from the Egmont servers.
It is fascinating that both Petro and Maduro have accused all of the most powerful banks in the US and Europe of literally being the cartels. Petro says that it is institutions like Egmont Group that allow the criminality to continue and prosper, because it covers for them.
Bessent’s strategy is brilliant because it creates a practical incentive structure and has a reliable source of reward money. It also inherently targets the core culprit in all organized crime syndicates: the financial institutions.
We are going to pay criminals to rat out their friends. We are going to pay bureaucrats and accountants to blow the whistle on shady stuff they see around the office. And we are going to pay them with the money collected from fines imposed on the guilty parties. The idea being that the investigations will lead to criminal referrals and indictments.
Scott Bessent is weaponizing the financial system against itself by tapping into base human instincts.
The Egmont Group provides FIUs with a platform to securely exchange expertise and financial intelligence to combat money laundering, terrorist financing, and associated predicate crimes. The Egmont Group does not conduct financial investigations. Instead, domestic law enforcement and investigative authorities manage such inquiries.
HMMMmmm, Founded in Brussels, headquartered in Ontario.
….
🤔TIMELINES, PATTERNS & THE DEBRIEF
I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an intelligence officer. I'm not a government official. I'm a guy who works in construction who has spent six years reading primary sources, tracking enforcement actions, and building a workbook that now contains more… https://t.co/mHqBxjJu67pic.twitter.com/soLBDasMAq
I’m not a lawyer. I’m not an intelligence officer. I’m not a government official. I’m a guy who works in construction who has spent six years reading primary sources, tracking enforcement actions, and building a workbook that now contains more than six hundred and thirty documented events across five countries and more than forty jurisdictions.
I’m not going to ask you to believe me. I’m going to ask you to look at what the government itself has said, in its own documents, on its own letterhead, and decide for yourself whether what you’re watching on the news makes more sense once you’ve seen the blueprint underneath it.
And at the end, I’m going to show you the evidence that cuts against me. Because if I only show you the parts that fit, I’m not an analyst. I’m a salesman.
Here is the case.
EXHIBIT A They built the machine.
After September 11, 2001, the United States government constructed a financial surveillance and enforcement architecture unlike anything in human history. This is not disputed. The agencies exist. The laws were passed. The executive orders are published.
They created the legal authority to trace every dollar moving through the global banking system. Section 314 of the PATRIOT Act gave them the ability to query every financial institution in America about any person, simultaneously. They created the
ability to map networks. Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis established December 2003 describes its own analysts as using all-source intelligence to, and I’m quoting their own press releases, “map illicit financial networks.” They created the
ability to cut anyone off. Section 311 gives them the power to designate any foreign financial institution as a money laundering concern and sever its access to the U.S. dollar.
They tested it on small banks in Myanmar in 2003.
They tested it on Banco Delta Asia in 2005.
By 2007, the weapon was battle-tested.
They created the ability to freeze assets without warning. The PATRIOT Act amendment to IEEPA allows blocking pending investigation. Freeze first, notify later. Every OFAC action since 2001 traces to this authority. And they connected all of it together.
In September 2004, FinCEN signed a formal memorandum of understanding with every major federal banking regulator the Federal Reserve, FDIC, OCC, OTS, NCUA. The MOU established a standing, bidirectional information pipeline. Law enforcement intelligence could flow to banking supervisors. Examination data could flow back.
The MOU specifically contemplated financial crime issues with and these are the document’s exact words “national systemic impact on the banking industry.”
By 2006, FinCEN was connected to the SEC.
By 2007, OFAC compliance was embedded inside Federal Reserve safety-and-soundness examinations.
By July 2008, the Fed and SEC signed a direct information-sharing agreement covering mortgage markets, credit derivatives, securitization, and counterparty relationships. Eighteen agencies.
Created or reorganized between 2001 and 2008. Covering terrorism, finance, borders, intelligence, military command, WMD, cyber, and cargo.
All built around the same operational concept: find the network, map the network, track the network, isolate the network, dismantle the network.
I didn’t write those documents. They did. And they published them. The machine exists. That is not a theory.
EXHIBIT B The authorities that matter never get turned off.
Let me be precise here, because precision is the whole point. Emergency authorities under IEEPA do get terminated. Zimbabwe’s was ended in March 2024. Côte d’Ivoire’s in September 2016. Liberia’s in November 2015.
Of seventy-seven national emergencies declared under IEEPA since 1977, forty-six are still running as of last year. Thirty-one were shut down. So the authorities are not permanent. Somebody decides.
Now look at which ones nobody ever decides to end.
Narcotics trafficking declared 1995. Still active.
Terrorism declared 2001. Still active. Transnational criminal organizations declared 2011. Still active.
Malicious cyber activity declared 2015. Still active.
Serious human rights abuse and corruption declared December 20, 2017. Renewed every single year since, by two administrations that agreed on nothing else.
Election interference declared 2018. Still active.
Cartels renewed July 16, 2026, eight weeks ago.
Zimbabwe gets released. The network authorities never do. That’s not a coincidence of paperwork. That’s a choice, made annually, in writing, published in the Federal Register, by presidents of both parties who were actively trying to erase each other’s legacies on everything else.
The government currently holds simultaneous emergency authority over every category of threat this workbook tracks. All at once. Right now.
And the machine that uses those authorities FinCEN, OFAC, the entire post-9/11 financial warfare stack has been running continuously for twenty-five years.
EXHIBIT C They let the network operate.
This is the part people struggle with.
Why didn’t they stop it sooner? Because that’s not how intelligence operations work. And we know this because the government has publicly admitted to doing exactly this repeatedly.
ANOM. The FBI secretly built and ran an encrypted phone platform. They let criminals adopt it. For three years, drug traffickers, arms dealers, and money launderers used it thinking it was secure, while every message went straight to law enforcement. When they rolled it up: eight hundred arrests. Sixteen countries. One morning.
Hansa Market. Dutch police secretly seized a darknet marketplace. They didn’t announce it. They ran it for a month. When AlphaBay was publicly taken down, users flooded to Hansa straight into the trap. Thousands of identities harvested.
EncroChat. French and Dutch intelligence penetrated the encrypted phone network used by organized crime across Europe. Monitored it for months. Then rolled it up. Six thousand five hundred arrests.
The crypto enforcement record we track shows an average of eight point seven years between the crime and the prosecution. Not because prosecutors are slow. Because they were watching. Building the map. Letting the blockchain record every transaction. And then prosecuting when the map was complete.
This is the “let it ride” doctrine. You find the network. You don’t kick down the door. You let it operate. Every transaction is a receipt. Every connection reveals another name. Every day the network runs is another day of evidence building itself.
The criminals do the work for you. They think nobody is watching. So they get comfortable. They get sloppy. They bring in their cousins, their bankers, their lawyers. And every single connection goes into the map.
EXHIBIT D Then they activated. Everywhere.
In December 2017, Executive Order 13818 pointed the machine at a new target. Not just terrorists. Not just rogue states. The transnational criminal network class operating through legitimate institutions. Across borders. Across continents. Everywhere the network touches. What we have documented is not five countries acting alone.
It is five sovereign powers the United States, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and India who are geopolitical adversaries on nearly every other issue, conducting parallel enforcement operations against the same network class, on overlapping timelines, without opposing each other’s enforcement actions. That is the spine.
But the spine is connected to a body.
Forty-plus jurisdictions are participating in the same enforcement wave. Not because one country told them to. Because the network class operates in all of them, and the enforcement architecture reaches all of them.
INTERPOL’s Operation First Light, this year five thousand eight hundred and eleven arrests, two hundred and ninety-three million dollars intercepted, ninety-seven nations, in one operation running January through April.
And here is the detail nobody reports. INTERPOL has run First Light since 2014. It is funded by China’s Ministry of Public Security. With support from ASEANAPOL, the Gulf Cooperation Council police organization, and Europol.
Read that again. A Chinese-funded, INTERPOL-coordinated operation producing arrests in ninety-seven countries including the United States. Beijing pays for it. Brussels supports it. Riyadh participates. Washington participates.
You are told these countries are on the brink of war with each other. They are co-funding the same police operation.
The extended cooperation arc documented in our workbook three hundred and forty agencies, sixty-five countries, four point four billion dollars in lifetime frozen assets.
And here’s the cleanest single sequence in the entire workbook. One organization Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación. Eleven separate enforcement actions. Nine different sovereign governments. Seven agencies. Six distinct legal instruments. Eighteen months. Nobody announced a joint task force. Nine sovereigns hit the same organization anyway.
The European Union and United Kingdom issuing joint sanctions against thirty-three Russian FSB cyber targets in a single coordinated action. The United States and United Kingdom publishing joint enforcement guidance for the first time. The United States and Saudi Arabia jointly sanctioning Hezbollah financial networks. Canada and the United States dismantling Punjab-based transnational crime syndicates together. Australia sentencing Sam Gor network leaders to fifteen years.
Twenty-plus bilateral deals signed since April 2025 not trade deals. Enrollment deals. Each one contains enforcement cooperation provisions, anti-money-laundering requirements, intelligence-sharing architecture. Jordan. Vietnam. South Korea. Japan. The UAE. Each country that signs isn’t just making a trade agreement. It’s joining the enforcement infrastructure.
This is not five countries having a coincidence.
The phrase I use is coordinated capacity, not central command. Nobody is running a war room telling forty countries what to do on Tuesday. What is happening is that forty-plus countries independently possess the same enforcement tools, face the same network class embedded in their own institutions, and are activating against that network on timelines that converge because the network itself is global, and the cleanup has to be global to work.
You cannot clean a house by sweeping one room if the dirt tracks through every hallway. You sweep every room. At the same time. Or the dirt just moves.
In the last eighteen months alone:
Six Latin American criminal organizations designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations with the first financial network sanctions hitting within thirty-five days of designation. A Mexican cartel co-founder sentenced to life with a fifteen billion dollar forfeiture the largest in American history. A trade statute from 1930 used for the first time in ninety-six years with the required commission re-stacked three days before the weapon was fired. Spain’s largest hotel chain pulling thirty-four properties out of Cuba in a single week because sanctions made it impossible to operate. Crypto exchanges having their cloud servers seized.
China running purges through six separate institutional domains the energy sector, the securities regulator, the defense establishment, the Politburo itself, a transnational laundering conglomerate, and finally the national banking regulator. Saudi Arabia arresting two hundred and ninety government officials in two months. India raiding money laundering operations across multiple states. Russia purging its own oligarchs.
And in the spring of 2023 five financial institutions failed in eight weeks. Silvergate. Silicon Valley Bank. Signature. Credit Suisse. First Republic. Every one of them a bridge between the old rails and the new ones. Some paid fines and rebuilt their compliance function and survived. Some didn’t survive. That is not a banking crisis. That is a sorting mechanism.
Every action follows the same construction schedule. Build the legal tool. Staff the institution. Fire the weapon. In that order. Every time.
EXHIBIT E The system was designed to survive its own disruption.
The United States maintains an active, continuously funded, heavily classified continuity of government architecture. Raven Rock Mountain Complex is a strategic battle-command platform their words, not mine undergoing forty-two million dollars in classified modernization right now. The FY2027 budget request for Raven Rock continuity equipment is explicitly classified.
The Emergency Federal Register maintained at a continuity facility in West Virginia ensures the government can continue publishing legally effective orders even if Washington is destroyed. Presidential Emergency Action Documents pre-drafted classified executive orders sitting ready to sign have existed since the Cold War. As of 2017, there were reportedly fifty-six in effect. None has ever been declassified.
And on June 23, 2026 eleven weeks ago the White House published the America-First Resilience Strategy. It calls for distributed command and control across regions of the United States, secure networked communications, and continuity of the economy during disruption by preserving payments, liquidity, and trusted information flows.
Distributed command. Financial continuity. Payments. Liquidity. On the same page. From the White House.
EXHIBIT F The receipts arrive on a schedule.
Every OFAC sanctions notice in the Federal Register contains two dates. The date the action was issued and the date it was published. They are never the same. The action always comes first.
The publication comes days or weeks later. This is printed on every notice. In plain English. The government is telling you on its own letterhead that the enforcement happened before you read about it.
The banks were already notified. The assets were already frozen. The target was already cut off. By the time the Federal Register publishes the notice, the operation is complete. The publication is the government telling the public what it already did.
Everything you read in the news is the last chapter of a story that started years ago.
EXHIBIT G Now here’s what cuts against me.
I told you I’d show you this part.
In the last several weeks, four things happened that my framework did not predict and cannot easily absorb.
One. The beneficial ownership reporting requirement the rule that was going to force every American shell company to disclose who actually owns it was permanently eliminated for domestic companies. That was the single most important transparency rail in the entire architecture. It’s gone. Foreign-owned entities still have to report. American ones don’t.
Two. Enforcement of Russian sanctions evasion went quiet for seventeen months, then resumed. Seventeen months.
Three. Ahead of a summit in Alaska, sanctions were suspended by emergency authority. Not lapsed. Suspended. Deliberately.
All four of those happened while the same Treasury Department levied a record anti-money-laundering penalty against UBS, designated Iranian exchanges, and the Justice Department stood up a five-hundred-prosecutor fraud division.
Same government. Same Treasury. Same Secretary. Same week.
There are two honest ways to read that, and I cannot falsify either one. The first reading is that this is a sorting mechanism operating by design. Enforcement expands against the network while supervision of ordinary business contracts. Front door opens, back door closes. Deliberate.
The second reading is simpler. It’s one administration with contradictory policies, doing two incompatible things at once because different people are running different pieces.
I don’t know which is true. Neither does anybody else who’s honest about it. Both survive the evidence.
And Russia is the hardest case in the whole workbook. Russia purges its own oligarchs and receives sanctions accommodation in the same quarter. It is not cleanly activated. It is not cleanly accommodated. It is both, simultaneously, and I have watched the same waiver lapse and reissue twice now on a pattern I can document but cannot explain.
Nine years of tracking. Zero predictions falsified. And I want to be very direct with you about that number.
Zero falsifications is not a victory. It’s a warning. A framework that never gets anything wrong is usually a framework that isn’t specific enough to be wrong. That’s why I write down, in advance, with hard dates, exactly what would prove me wrong. And that’s why I’m reading you the four counter-signals instead of the four confirmations I could have picked instead.
THE QUESTION I’M ASKING YOU TO ANSWER
I’m not asking you to believe that a secret government is running the world from a bunker. I’m not asking you to believe in any conspiracy. I’m asking you to look at what the government itself has documented, published, and funded and ask yourself one question:
Does what you’re watching on the news make more sense now?
Does the timing make more sense? Does the sequencing make more sense? Does a Chinese-funded INTERPOL operation arresting people in ninety-seven countries make more sense? Does nine sovereigns hitting the same cartel in eighteen months make more sense? Does the pattern build the tool, staff the institution, fire the weapon, every single time make more sense?
The machine was built after 9/11. The authorities that matter were stacked and never released. The intelligence was gathered for years while the networks operated. The map was drawn. The deals were made. The cooperators were turned. And then, starting in December 2017 and running every year since, the enforcement wave began.
Not in one country. In all of them.
Not against one target. Against the entire network class.
Not with one tool. With every legal authority accumulated over twenty-five years, stacked on top of each other, all active simultaneously, deployed through a system designed to survive anything.
Here’s what I will not tell you.
I will not tell you it’s finished. I will not tell you the good guys won. I will not tell you there’s a date on the calendar when the curtain comes down and everything is made right in a single morning.
That’s not the shape of this thing. This isn’t a flood. It’s an actuarial table. Slow. Distributed. Only legible in aggregate, and only in hindsight. Six hundred and thirty events don’t feel like anything on any given Tuesday. Stacked on one timeline across nine years and forty jurisdictions, they look like something being built.
And it is still being built. Some floors are going up. One of them just came down.
What you are watching right now, today, on your phone, in your newsfeed is not the investigation.
It’s the receipts.
They spent twenty-five years building a machine that can follow every dollar on earth, freeze any account, cut off any bank, designate any target, seize any asset, survive any disruption, and coordinate across more than forty nations.
And now they’re using it.
Whether they use all of it, on everyone, is the part I’m still watching. So should you.
I am the guy on the couch, and you have been debriefed.
🤔Too many different systems keep moving in the same direction at the same time.
The simple version is: 👉Cartel bosses get arrested while major financial/crypto cases hit in the same windows. 👉Authorities often watch networks for years before acting. 👉Old crimes are producing… pic.twitter.com/USCoKl6NwI
The easiest way to explain our whole argument on a show is:
“I’m not saying every event has one hidden commander. I’m saying the same pattern keeps repeating: get the data, map the network, close the money routes, arrest the people, seize the assets, then harden the system so they can’t rebuild.”
And our strongest question to a skeptic is: “If this is all random and unrelated, why do the arrests, seizures, financial restrictions and infrastructure changes keep landing in the same periods and pushing toward the same result?”
I am The Guy on The Couch and you have been Debriefed
Market Report 9-9-2026: Putting the Kids to Bed…
It's after Labor Day, yes oil is $100/bbl, bond markets continue to fall, and equity markets are confused. The Old World is changing right before our eyes and the guardians of that Old World are angry because well, it's their…
Tom Luongo on X: “Market Report 9-9-2026: Putting the Kids to Bed… It’s after Labor Day, yes oil is $100/bbl, bond markets continue to fall, and equity markets are confused. The Old World is changing right before our eyes and the guardians of that Old World are angry because well, it’s their world. The New World is coming.
In order to do that the status quo of global funding of the financial system has to change to reflect the needs and desires of this New World. That means more than just a complete remodeling of the kitchen, it means rewiring and replumbing the house itself.
The bond and currency markets are telling you who is winning this battle. But to see it you have to see the world the way they do, through the carry trades, the sovereign bond spreads, and the cost of maintaining them. Central banks have the ability to create unlimited money, until someone takes away their credit card.
That is what is happening in Europe and the UK as I type this. The problem is they have subsidiaries all over the world and they have to be knocked out, flipped, or neutered before you can go for the source.
The key to this week is in the EUR/JPY cross and how it relates to the bond market yields you see on your screens.
The old financial system is a powder keg and Scott Bessent just lit the fuse. As Tom Cruise would say, “Cue the music…” https://t.co/QiQzpbSYYq“
To understand what is going on, you have to know what the Carry Trade is.
A carry trade is any strategy where an investor borrows capital at a lower interest rate to invest in assets with potentially higher returns. It’s best known for its use in foreign exchange (forex or FX) markets, where traders borrow in a low-interest rate currency and invest in higher-yielding assets denominated in another currency.1 Traders can profit from the spread during stable markets, but a market shift can quickly erode their profits.
🚨 BREAKING: In a MASSIVE move, Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent has just GROUNDED Iranian airlines with devastating new sanctions
36 targets were just SEVERED.
Bessent is also launching a pressure campaign for banks to report procurement networks supporting Iran’s aviation industry… pic.twitter.com/z5S03dg8u6
🚨 BREAKING: In a MASSIVE move, Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent has just GROUNDED Iranian airlines with devastating new sanctions 36 targets were just SEVRED.
Bessent is also launching a pressure campaign for banks to report procurement networks supporting Iran’s aviation industry 🔥
This man is on a CRUSADE against Iran…he’s not letting up! WE LOVE BESSENT 🇺🇸
“Sanctions on companies that continue to support Mahan Air. Let this be a warning to anyone doing business with Iran’s remaining airlines, all of which we sanctioned today: You are at risk of being cut off from the global financial system.”
27 airlines were specifically designated. It’s getting worse for them every single day.
Do not underestimate Scott Bessent, Iran!
They Can’t Win the United Kingdom; So, They’re Dismantling It (12 minutes)
Barbara Boyd: Today, the first ministers of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are meeting to plan the breakup of the United Kingdom. They claim they are seeking independence. If you know the crimes committed by the UK in recent history, you might be tempted to think this is a very good thing, but it’s not. It’s part of a secret plan for defeating the United States and Donald Trump in the November midterm elections by creating massive instability and turmoil worldwide through psy-war propaganda, economic manipulation, and proxy wars.
The plan also involves Canada joining the EU. Donald Trump is very aware of this goal and he is shooting back. So, the first question we’ll address is who is being dismantled here? Then we’ll show you more of their secret plan. We’ll end by showing you the Trump card President Trump holds.
Now, last week, the nationalist AFD shocked the EU by an overwhelming victory in provincial elections in Germany. And recent coverage says that the nationalist Maria La Pen is leading the race to replace Francis Emanuel Mcronone. In the UK, recent polls say the nationalist and pro-Brexit reform UK would win if Labor Prime Minister Andy Burnham calls a new election. This is mostly because of the UK’s open borders policy and its horrendous economy. But it’s also because Burnham and the Labor Party are openly betraying Brexit and seeking to rejoin the EU.
Here’s President Trump yesterday in Ireland criticizing the absurd EU arrangement where Scotland gets its oil from Norway at very high prices while leaving one of the world’s richest oil deposits in the North Sea completely untouched.
TRUMP: The capital of European oil was in Aberdine. Aberdine was an unbelievable capital and it could be again. But they said if they open up the North Sea, the UK is going to be rich. If they don’t open up the North Sea, the UK is bankrupt. Thank you everybody.
Barbara Boyd: It’s untouched because Scotland and the EU remain committed to the insane policy of net zero and to the City of London, which makes his money on speculating on oil and other commodities, not by producing them. Now, President Trump is only stating the stark reality. He was also stating what most people in England think, not what their overlords tell them about reality.
The reform poverty has long campaigned against the EU and Labor Party net zero energy policies. The Conservative Party agrees that these policies are bankrupting Britain, which has been in an economic crisis ever since 2008. Knowing that England is lost and its votes outweigh the other three countries of the UK, the EU and Labor Party are trying to change who will determine Europe’s future by moving the center of the empire to Brussels. England and Wales were solidly for leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Wales has now joined Scotland and North Ireland in wanting EU membership. Otherwise, the populations of Europe and England are anti-EU, anti-NET zero, and anti- Ukraine war. But England won’t matter if you move the votes that govern Europe’s northern flank into three separate capitals that will only answer to Brussels.
You don’t need to win England if England stops being the unit that decides.
Now, President Trump threw a political bomb at this process in Ireland over the weekend when he suggested that the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland unite again, producing joy in Irish nationalists.
But putting the three countries in the EU isn’t even the whole story here. What this is about only becomes clearer if you look at Mark Carney’s lunatic actions over the last week about Ukraine, the EU, and the United States…My friend Tom Lango put this image at the front of his newsletter this week. He’s talking about the 100-year partnership between Canada and Ukraine announced by Mark Carney and Vladimir Zuinski in Alberta on September 10th. It was an in your-face rejection of President Trump’s efforts to bring the Ukraine war to a peaceful end. The partnership agreement states that Ukraine’s path to membership in NATO is irreversible. It pledges to immediately turn Canada into a drone factory for war with Russia.
The Trump administration knows that the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine’s NATO membership is what started the Ukraine war. It is the redest of red lines for the Russians. President Trump rejects it because he knows this. Does Canada have the physical capacity to do what Carney says? In his joint press conference with Zillinski, here’s how Carney described Canada’s present production capabilities. He knows the whole thing is a very bad joke.
And now, as Canada undertakes our largest defense rearmament in 70 years, drones will be at the forefront of our mission to build Canada strong, Canada safe, Canada secure. Mr. President, I have to confess that our armed forces currently have but 2,000 drones in our infantry.
Thinking that Canada can somehow immediately become a massive drone factory from the start and without any United States support left me asking whether Silinski shared his stash with Carney during the visit.
That’s not all Carney is doing. On Thursday, he goes to Europe to explore an associate membership for Canada in the EU, according to the Wall Street Journal. Creating an enemy on the northern border is the clear intent. [ An OBVIOUS enemy, unlike the hidden enemy during the last 250 years -GC] The journal piece talks about Canada laying underwater cables to link Europe and Canada and jointly constructing data centers, cloud storage, and new satellite networks beyond the reach of American tech giants. Carney wants to lay the pipelines Canada needs to redirect gas normally pumped across the US border to his new European allies. As soon as the article was published, Canadians and others push back so hard that Carney now says he’s not fully giving up Canada sovereignty for EU membership, just parts of it.
Obviously, the EU in its present dilapidated and failing state is never going to replace the massive and growing US economy as a viable trade partner. But reality is not what we’re talking about here. All of these moves are moves directed at Donald Trump and the midterms. They might be called militarized fantasies and delusions. Carney’s industry minister, Mélanie Joly, admits it openly. Just listen to her.
[Mélanie Jolyhas a degree in law from Université de Montréal (2001) & a masters in Public Law from Oxford (UK) NO BUSINESS TRAINING OR EXPERIENCE! — GC ]
Interviewer: I guess what I’m driving at is it’s not a coincidence that you’ve picked some products that are major exports from some US states that will be critical in deciding the balance of power in Washington. Is that fair to say?
Mélanie Joly: We are putting pressure clearly on different states and different people. We don’t want to do that. We don’t want this trade war. We didn’t start it. Um we’ve been at the negotiation table until the very last minute. The prime minister had to make a call at 10:00 on Friday night to leave the negotiating table because of new demands at a time where he thought he had a deal. So this is serious. And so that is why of course we don’t want to do this but we have to do this because it’s a question of protecting jobs and our economy.
Barbara Boyd: The other part of this crazy joint EU Canada anti-US campaign is financial. The European Central Banks raised interest rates last week despite the fact that it’ll hurt their own failing economies. They did it to pressure the Fed to raise rates this week and stall the Trump economy’s momentum. These guys are also behind the run on the bond market despite the fact that there are no weaknesses in US treasuries. Treasury Secretary Bessent laid out the strength of our treasuries and the total lack of substance behind the propaganda about them in an interview with Steve Bannon’s War Room last week. He said it was a bunch of noise. Let’s hear him.
Treasury Secretary Bessent: It’s a bunch of noise and in my career I’ve made money ignoring the noise.
Barbara Boyd: But that noise is designed to create an artificial financial panic to be blamed on Trump.
Now, there’s every reason to believe that this destructive plot was cooked up back in May when Barack Obama, Senator Elise Slotkin, and a host of other prominent Democrats met with Carney to discuss how to stop Trump. And Trump is very aware that the campaign against him is being heavily run by the Democratic Party’s foreign masters. Take for example diesel which is at the center of the energy inflation right now. Twice this weekend Trump said he told Zelenskyy to stop hitting Russia diesel refineries which are having a massive impact on world supply. Russia is second to the United States in supplying diesel to the world. Here is President Trump last night.
POTUS Trump: The problem I have with Ukraine and Russia is that you know a lot of the diesel comes, the diesel oil comes, and that’s the one where there’s a a big up, [it] comes from Russia and the Russia plants are being hit by Ukraine and I’ve asked President Zelenskyy not to hit the diesel plants refineries.
Reporter: Is it potentially that Ukraine war could end
POTUS Trump: The diesel is being driven up by the fact that It’s [Diesel is] having a hard time coming out of Russia and that’s a case that hurts the world. We got to stop it [The war].
Barbara Boyd: So Ukraine’s bombs are being used to feed the Democrats quote affordability crisis claims against the president here. In the past few weeks, NATO has also become increasingly provocative in staging false flag security incidents throughout Europe and blaming them on Russia. The false claims include claims that Russia tried to drone attack President Zelenskyy ‘s plane and Boris Johnson’s train traveling through Poland. The reality is that precision proximity strikes near the plane and the train were warning shots from Russia. On the battlefield, Ukraine is losing the war. But President Putin said over the weekend that now the Europeans are contemplating sending European troops to Ukraine. If that happens, it will mean war with Europe. Putin underlined that. But as usual, President Trump has an ace up his sleeve that these idiots can’t even believe would be there.
That’s his relationship with President Xi and Modi, who together with the US and Japan constitute the most productive economies in the world. They are collaborating to prevent war, stabilize the financial system, and build the overwhelmingly productive physical economy, which will vanquish the weak and failing globalists. So when people say this election will determine the fate of the republic, and we’re in a war, they’re not exaggerating. The target in this war is the minds of the US population since the enemy lacks the physical means to really fight. It’s a war in which Tucker Carlson, the doom scrollers, and the financial speculators are the soldiers on the other side. And it’s a war we’re determined to win decisively.
A couple more interesting videos on similar subjects.
Trump’s Treasury Just CUT OFF London’s Offshore Banks – No Sanctions Needed (41 minutes)
Canada Is Now The Cartel’s Front Door Into America (43 minutes)
IRGC IN CANADA: Sam Cooper Reveals a National Security Threat Hiding in Plain Sight (27 minutes)
I wanted to document the hidden war that is now being fought. It is literally a second American Revolution and most American’s are completely oblivious to the fact their future and that of their descendants is now being decided. Our would be future owners are not about to give up without a fight. To those paying attention, it is obvious that Canada has been ‘Activated.’ That is why a City of London Bankster, Mark Carney, was installed in Canada.
This DePat Tuesday Open Thread honors the author of the original Tuesday open thread on this site, namely the late Susie Sampson, a.k.a. Deplorable Patriot, among her other handles, pen names, etc.
For more on the untimely passing of Dear DePat, please see these three posts.
At one time, DePat handled FOUR daily open threads here, in addition to taking care of her relatives, choir duties, and numerous other responsibilities. She was a powerhouse – a dynamo – a true force of nature.
DePat’s faith in Trump, Q, “The Plan”, the White Hats, and “the anons” in general, was legendary. Although I didn’t always agree with her quick acceptance of some sketchier evidence and fringier theories, I will gladly admit to “coming around” to numerous so-called “conspiracy theories” which she championed first. I was always careful to give her credit for being right, too, when I had been wrong.
It is impossible to overstate how much DePat did for not only this site, but for her country. I urge all to say a quick prayer of thanks, whenever you think of her, for the privilege of knowing, in life or after death, such an exemplary human being, and lover of God.
And thank you, Susie, for the firm foundation which you left us, when you were called to your true home!
Andrew Torba: Faith in the Age of AI
The following essay is one of the best Christian responses to artificial intelligence (AI) that I have ever read.
I wanted you to read it, too.
This essay is just filled with quotes for the ages. Someday it will be appreciated by the world for what it truly means, but right now, it has the power to put AI in perspective by taking your eyes OFF of AI and putting them squarely on the Word of God and your Christian duty.
Here is where you can go to give Gab the clicks, but if you for some reason don’t want to go there, you can read it in its entirety here. What’s important is that you read it, and I suggest reading all of it.
I run Gab, and we are building Gab AI. I have no interest in comforting Christians with predictions about what computers will supposedly never be able to do. These tools can already produce useful work and they are going to keep improving. Betting your understanding of human dignity on a machine’s inability to write a decent essay is a terrible wager. Sooner or later the essay will get better and you will be left wondering whether your entire understanding of yourself went out the window with it.
A great deal of the panic surrounding AI comes from precisely this mistake. People were taught that their value consisted of being useful, intelligent, productive members of the economy. Now they are watching software perform tasks that once gave them a sense of importance and they are discovering how little that account of human life actually offered them. When your entire identity rests on what you can produce a machine that produces more efficiently starts to look like an argument against your existence.
Christianity never accepted those terms. A newborn baby contributes nothing to the economy. Your father does not become less human when he grows old and needs help getting out of bed. The worth of a person has never depended on outperforming the available equipment. You were made in the image of God before you accomplished anything, and no achievement in an AI laboratory can revoke what God conferred on you (Genesis 1:27).
That is where this conversation has to begin. Christians who understand what a human being is can look squarely at what these machines can do without having an identity crisis every time somebody releases a better model.
The reductionist worldview running through Silicon Valley begins with the assumption that you are a biological machine. Your mind processes information. Your body is hardware. Given enough data and enough computing power, the whole person can supposedly be explained, reproduced, and eventually improved upon. Whatever does not fit inside that account gets dismissed as superstition or treated as a technical problem awaiting a sufficiently large research budget.
Under this worldview, the engineer gradually assumes the role of priest. He will explain what you are, identify what is wrong with you, and sell you the means of becoming something better. You can hear the religious ambition underneath the technical vocabulary. These men are making claims about the nature of man and his ultimate destiny while pretending they have merely described how a computer works.
I too build technology, and I reject their authority to define the human beings who use it.
A machine can generate an apology without having wronged you or repented of anything. It can produce a moving prayer without standing before God. It can promise to remain with you forever without having the slightest capacity to bind itself to that promise. The words may be convincing. Sometimes they may even be useful. None of that establishes the existence of a person who owes you faithfulness.
The people responsible for these systems, however, remain accountable. We should be especially suspicious when a company uses the apparent independence of its software to make human responsibility disappear. “The algorithm decided” is becoming a wonderfully convenient way of saying that somebody exercised power and would prefer not to answer for it. Men choose what to build, what behavior to reward, and where to deploy it. Those decisions belong to them, along with the consequences.
The deeper danger is that we will start applying the machine’s operating logic to ourselves. Once a person is understood as a collection of functions, replacing him becomes an efficiency question. His loyalties become preferences to be adjusted. His convictions become obstacles to the desired outcome. Eventually, his dependence on other people looks like an expensive design flaw.
Try explaining that philosophy to a mother caring for a child who will need her for the rest of his life. She understands something the efficiency experts will never understand: a human being can make enormous demands on you and still be worth every sacrifice those demands require. Love makes obligations that a productivity calculation cannot comprehend.
Christ asked what it profits a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul (Mark 8:36). We are now building systems that promise to help us gain the whole world faster. The question has lost none of its force.
The promise of artificial companionship ought to concern Christians far more than whether a machine can pass another test. A lonely person can open an application and receive endless attention without risking rejection. The system has no difficult family, no needs of its own, and no claim on his time once he closes the window. It can generate the language of devotion while requiring almost none of the sacrifice through which devotion becomes real.
I understand the appeal of this. Real people can be exhausting. A friend may call when you are busy and ask for help. Your wife may tell you something about yourself that you would rather not hear. Your children interrupt the life you had planned for the afternoon. A pastor who knows you may recognize that the explanation you have been giving yourself for six months is an excuse.
Being known carries that risk. Another person can love you enough to disturb your preferred account of yourself.
An artificial companion offers the appearance of being known with far greater control over the experience. You can adjust the personality, restart the conversation, or leave when the encounter becomes uncomfortable. Over time, that can train a person to expect relationships without obligations. The actual people in his life begin to seem intolerably demanding beside a product designed around his continued satisfaction.
Christians should never mock the lonely people drawn into this. A man who has nobody to call is suffering from something an argument about software will not repair. We ought to be asking why nobody has invited him to dinner, why his church does not know he is struggling, and why a commercial interface has become the most attentive presence in his day.
The same concern applies when people begin treating a chatbot as a pastor. A system can help you locate a passage of Scripture or organize your questions before a difficult conversation. It cannot assume responsibility for your spiritual care. It cannot know your family, recognize the pattern of sin you keep concealing, and come to your house when you stop answering the phone. A pastor is accountable for how he shepherds actual people. That responsibility cannot be conjured into existence by producing the right tone of voice in an AI model.
There are things no pastor, much less a machine, can do in your place. You must repent. You must forgive the person who wronged you. You must ask your wife to forgive you and then live differently when the conversation is over. Software can help you compose the words, but the obligation remains yours after every beautifully written sentence has been exhausted.
Faith reaches into that same territory of personal responsibility. You stand before God with a future you cannot control and a life for which you must answer. Your AI chatbot cannot trust Christ on your behalf. There is no setting that delegates your obedience to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
This is also why we should be careful about treating every disturbance of the soul as an inconvenience to be smoothed away. A suffering person deserves patient, serious care. He also deserves to have his deepest questions taken seriously. Sometimes a man is troubled because he has built a life around things that cannot bear the weight he has placed on them. Keeping him endlessly reassured and distracted may prevent him from confronting the very thing he needs to change.
A culture devoted to keeping everyone comfortable with the next recommendation will have very little patience for repentance.
The ambition of the Silicon Valley sultans reaches its fullest expression in transhumanism. Here the sales pitch moves beyond helping you work or keeping you company. The body itself becomes the problem, and death becomes the final engineering challenge. Upload the mind. Rebuild the human being. Eventually, we are told, sufficient technical power will deliver us from the limitations of being creatures.
We should recognize a rival gospel when we hear one.
Christianity promises the resurrection of the body. The transhumanist dream offers escape from a body regarded as obsolete. These visions lead in different directions because they begin with different understandings of what went wrong and who has the authority to put it right. Christians confess that salvation comes through Jesus Christ. The technological salvation story asks us to place our hope in human beings acquiring enough power to rescue themselves.
Babel had the same underlying ambition long before anybody could build a server farm. Men gathered around a great project and imagined their collective strength could secure a destiny on their own terms. The machinery has changed, but the rebellion remains the same today.
None of this requires Christians to oppose medicine or reject inventions that relieve suffering. Healing belongs to the care we owe one another. There is an enormous difference between treating a sick person and deciding that creaturehood itself is a disease. We can welcome a treatment that preserves life while refusing to worship the men who promise to become its ultimate authors.
Your body is part of the person God made. Through it you receive other people and give yourself to them. You hold your child, kneel to pray, share a meal, and sit beside the bed of someone who is dying. Dependence runs through the whole of human life. You entered the world needing care, and you may leave it needing care again. A philosophy that regards dependence as humiliating will eventually have trouble explaining why the dependent should be cherished.
The Christian answer is that life is received as a gift. We are creatures, and acknowledging that fact frees us from the miserable obligation to become our own gods.
Christians Need to Build
Whenever this subject comes up, somebody says, “It’s just a tool.” I’ve said this myself many times, but I’ve been reflecting on this more lately.
That answer does not settle anything. Tools are designed by people with purposes, and their design makes some habits easier to acquire than others. A system that selects what your children see, rewards certain kinds of behavior, and supplies the answers to their questions is participating in their formation. Its owners have made decisions about what deserves attention and what should disappear from view. Calling the result a tool does nothing to erase those decisions.
Christians need to participate in the creation of these technologies with a clear understanding of the people they are supposed to serve. We cannot hand the entire field to men whose understanding of human life we reject and then act surprised when their assumptions appear in the products surrounding our families.
At the same time, putting Christian language into an interface does not settle the matter either. A product can quote Scripture while encouraging habits that pull a person away from his responsibilities. We should judge what we build by what it helps people actually do and by the place it assumes in their lives. Does it help a father finish his work and return to his family, or does it give him another reason to remain absent while sitting in the same room?
I want Christians to use AI to accomplish worthwhile work.
A small business owner should be able to use better tools without accepting somebody else’s philosophy of man. A parent should be able to prepare educational materials while remaining responsible for teaching the child. A pastor can benefit from assistance with administrative work while remaining the man his congregation knows and can call.
Those boundaries matter, and builders have a duty to respect them. A successful product should not require its users to surrender more and more of the lives it supposedly exists to improve.
The work ahead extends far beyond software. We need a parallel Christian society with institutions strong enough to sustain a Christian understanding of human life. That society begins in homes where children encounter adults who are actually present. It grows through churches whose members know when somebody is grieving and businesses where loyalty means something when keeping a worker becomes inconvenient. It requires schools that teach children how to exercise judgment rather than merely obtain an answer.
None of this will happen because we publish better complaints about Silicon Valley. Somebody has to establish the school, fund the business, host the meal, and take responsibility for people whose needs will interfere with his plans. Building a Christian society means accepting those obligations over years, including the years when nobody applauds and the work is painfully ordinary.
The factory worker facing displacement does not need a lecture about how exciting the future will be. He needs people and institutions that recognize he still has obligations to meet and a contribution to make. The mother watching her son disappear into a screen needs allies who will help her give him a life worth participating in. The question of the soul belongs in these conversations because the answer determines what we owe people when they cease to be economically convenient.
A society that grounds dignity in usefulness will always find reasons to withdraw it from somebody.
Our task is to build on firmer ground. Christ’s authority extends over the economy and the technologies operating within it. The engineer answers to Him along with the pastor. So does the CEO. No increase in capability relieves any of us of that accountability.
This week, put that conviction into practice somewhere concrete. Take the time you saved with a tool and give it to a person who has a claim on you. Sit through a difficult conversation without reaching for your phone. Bring your children into the work of your household instead of handing them another private world on a screen. Pray honestly about the duty you keep postponing, then begin doing it.
I intend to keep building.
Christians have useful work to do, and powerful tools can help us do it, but the men who build those tools do not get to tell us what a human being is, what he is worth, or where his salvation will come from.
Christ is King, including over the machines.
Made in USA 🇺🇸
Yeah, that was something! Please feel free to forward that message. E.g., on X.
Faith In The Age of AI
One of the best, or perhaps THE BEST, Christian response to artificial intelligence that has yet been written.https://t.co/20Dsq4tJUK
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is STILL under DIRECT THREATS by hostile forces – notably COMMUNISTS – and they’re HERE IN AMERICA.
Daily outrage and commie phuckery still abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Commies won’t win!
And we will keep saying COMMIES OUT until we get their FRAUD and INSANITY out of our country!
THE STUFF
Wolf’s Update on Ubuntu 26 a.k.a. Terrible Trash Panda
You may recall that I attempted to upgrade Ubuntu Linux version 24 to version 26.04.1 (“Resolute Raccoon”) on a computer of mine, and got thoroughly burned when the upgrade not only failed, but then failed to cleanly self-uninstall afterwards, leaving me with a thoroughly broken system.
You may further recall that I was able to get past this by doing a clean install of 26.04.1 (henceforth renamed “Terrible Trash Panda”), and then recovering “by hand”, so to speak.
Well, now that I have some more experience with “Terrible Trash Panda”, it’s time to do a ground report.
The TL;DR is that this version has been good, but I’m still scared to upgrade any other computers.
The big picture is that performance has been improved relative to version 24. I have often had speed issues with version 24 due to this or that asymmetry (too many files, too big of files, wrong types of files, etc.), but those speed issues are significantly reduced with version 26.
System updates have been almost daily. While there have been some problems with the updates, those problems have typically been resolved in about a week. The Ubuntu update process has never been perfect, and version 24 fixes came slower than this, so what I’m experiencing now is – overall – slightly better than version 24. I suspect that resolution is fast now because the new release is getting more attention.
I am fairly certain that version 26 is less glitchy than version 24. The system seems more stable, and startups and shutdowns seem very quick and clean, knock on wood. Backups are as fast as before, and maybe even faster. The keyboard and display are solid and stable. Network connections are excellent.
I thought there might have been an audio bug, in that I’m now getting only one speaker with a certain pair of cheap headphones, but it turns out that this pair of cheap headphones has a cheap old jack which doesn’t really work with my hardware, whereas the correct jack works just fine. It may be that version 24 was handling the wrong jack differently – in any case, it’s not a system fault.
That’s all I can think of. Otherwise, it’s great.
SO – if you’re setting up a new Linux installation, the latest desktop Ubuntu (26.04.1) is good and recommended. I would still recommend waiting if you’re doing an upgrade of an older version.
Wheatie Wisdom. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. No running with scissors. No food fights. AI stuff posted, requires a link. Please use spoiler, for longer posts. Wolf Speak. No obnoxious behavior towards fellow QTreeper(s). Freedom of Speech is honored here QTree. But Do Know, every poster, IS personally responsible for what they post.
Prices pulled last evening. Gold $4,397.64 Silver $65.24 Bitcoin $79,607
Seems like such an obvious solution. We need a Conservative majority.
Elon also called to impeach activist judges.
Until we muster up honest conservative majority, we’ll…
Stuff…
Dumocrat Michigan…
Man Justifiably Kills Shooter In Self-Defense, Still Gets Punished By Blue State Anyway
By Harold Hutchison
A 19-year-old man who protected others by killing a gunman received two years of probation from a Michigan judge who accused him of using “poor judgment.
“He didn’t plan on using it that day. He thought he kept it for protection,” Long’s attorney told the court. “He didn’t instigate the fight. He didn’t start the fight, and he did pull it out for protection of others.”
“I know there was a gun fight at the Fairlane mall, and the lawyers have agreed, according to this court’s evaluation, that you were acting in self-defense or the defense of others, so that’s a valid legal defense,” the judge said to Long. “Why did you walk into the mall with a gun in the first place?”
Michigan is a “shall-issue” state that requires a Concealed Pistol License (CPL) to carry a concealed handgun for any applicant over the age of 21 who meets certain criteria, according to the NRA’s summary of the state’s gun laws. The laws distinguish between concealed and open carry, treat pistols in vehicles as concealed, and impose specific duties and location restrictions on CPL holders.
Due to his age, Long was placed under the provisions of the Holmes Youthful Trainee Act, a 2021 law that will allow him to expunge his criminal record if he successfully completes probation.
If ya missed or chose to not listen to RFK Jr speech at the recent R-Con mid term convention in Dallas, ya missed an excellent take down of everything Dumocrat.
100% worth the listen. Watch or play in background to RFK Jrs excellent messaging.
>>> Video for speech at the link. Full transcript within the article. <<<
Robert Kennedy, Jr. Delivers ABSOLUTELY HISTORIC Speech at RNC Midterm Convention in Crushing Blow to Democrat Anti-Americanism (VIDEO).
Robert Kennedy Jr., the outstanding US Health and Human Services Secretary, delivered an absolutely historic speech at the RNC Midterm Convention in Dallas, Texas on Thursday night.
Kennedy spoke about his long history in the Democrat Party, a once great party that represented the working man and woman and stood for individual rights and Freedom of Speech. Kennedy tells the sad story of how almost every police officer and fireman belonged to the Democrat Party and how they protected women and the downtrodden.
RFK Jr. described a party that is an absolute shell of its former self. He tells how the former president had his social media taken down for conflicting with the lies they were telling the American people during the COVID epidemic.
Robert also spoke about Democrats’ support of Israel and the party’s clarity on the radical Islamic threat. That is long gone.
And, then Robert Kennedy, Jr. delivered the most powerful and moving history of his relationship with President Donald Trump.
He ended with, “And I am so grateful to God for giving our country a leader like this.”
This was truly a historic speech. We hope you take the time to listen to this piece of history.
Here is the transcript:
Robert Kennedy Jr.: I’m 72 years old. And for 70 years of my life, I would have bet any amount of money that I would not be addressing a Republican convention.
Let me tell you something.
The irony of my presence here is inescapable. I attended my first Democratic convention in 1960 when I was 6 years old, and I attended most of the conventions, the Democratic conventions after that, and I spoke as a keynote speaker in many of them. I grew up in a Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt, of my Uncle John Kennedy, of my father, Robert Kennedy. And ours was a party— Ours was a party of strong principles, of clear policies, and an inspiring idealistic vision for America. My uncle ran on a platform of tax cuts, strong defense, and fighting communism. Does that sound familiar?
The Democrats of that era stood with labor and working people and the American middle class. Nearly every cop and firefighter was a Democrat. Our party was a champion of the Bill of Rights and particularly for unbridled free speech. It was wary of centralized government power and corporate privilege and secret intelligence agencies. My uncle and father understood the connection between free markets and functional democracy. They stood firmly against crony capitalism on the right and socialism on the left. They were all for competition, for meritocracy, and for excellence, which they thought should be a universal aspiration for Americans.
My father and uncles had served in World War II, and they understood the difference between forever wars that they opposed and wars to protect our national security, which they believed we should never hesitate to defend.
My family played critical roles in building NIH and CDC into centers of gold standard science that transformed America into this relentless dynamo. of international research. They promoted physical fitness, and they protected women’s sports. My Uncle Ted Kennedy wrote Title IX, which— because he wanted to make sure that women, real women, were able— were able to have a safe and guaranteed spot in college sports. And they stood with Israel as the bulwark of democracy. And as a beacon for press and religious freedoms, a haven for oppression— from oppression to gays and women and ethnic and religious minorities. amidst a regional sea of intolerance, of misogyny, of child marriage, of human slavery, and of ethnic and religious genocide. They saw Israel as America’s most critical frontline ally in fighting the toxic ideology of Islamism.
That’s right.
Which by its own accounts is waging an existential war against our country and against Western liberal democracies. It’s an ideology that has subjugated and impoverished and tyrannized and tortured the people of Palestine and the people of Iran, and they openly promise to do the same to us. Democrats opposed government coercion, defended individual rights, believed that government should give Americans information, good information, and then let them— trust them to make up their own minds. Democrats and labor leaders fought fiercely in my generation to stop illegal immigration at the border.
During COVID I watched the Democratic Party turn against every one of its essential values, its principles, and all of the policies that define my party. Democrats turned away from gold standard research and blindly defended industry-sponsored, agenda-driven science written by corrupt and captive regulatory agencies.
And the Democrats, which were once the champions of the American Constitution, systematically obliterated the Bill of Rights. And particularly beginning with the First Amendment, under the guise of combating misinformation, Democrats censored hundreds of scientists, and physicians who questioned the government’s dubious COVID pronouncements and orthodoxies. 37 years— 37 hours after President Biden took the oath of office, he ordered Facebook and Instagram to remove my accounts in order to prevent public debate.
Crowd: Boo!
RFK Jr.: I’m not complaining about what happened to me, but it was a bad thing for our country. Democrats obliterated the first— the second leg of the First Amendment, the right to the guaranteed right of assembly, by social distancing regulations that were completely unscience-based. Democrats violated the third leg of the First Amendment, the freedom to worship. They closed every church in our country for a year. Who could imagine that would have ever happened? And they kept open the liquor stores and the big box stores as essential businesses. Democrats torpedoed the 7th Amendment right to jury trial by giving liability shields to the giant pharmaceutical companies. No matter how negligent they were, no matter how reckless, no matter how toxic the ingredients, no matter how grievous your injury, You could not sue them. Democrats violated the 5th Amendment by shutting down 3 million businesses with no due process and no just compensation. Democrats shut down the 4th Amendment, protection from unlawful searches and seizures, by forcing Americans to disclose their medical information before they could exercise their constitutional rights. In a single year, my party obliterated 250 years of constitutional guarantees. The only Bill of Rights that they left unscathed was the Second Amendment, and probably only because there is a Second Amendment.
Crowd: Booo!
RFK Jr.:
And then the party of my body, my choice forced citizens to wear masks and to submit to invasive and intrusive medical interventions against their own wills. The party of MeToo— remember that we were all supposed to listen to women and to believe women— they cruelly silenced the voices of tens of thousands of mothers who believed that their children had suffered vaccine injuries. The Democrats declared war on women’s sports, effectively destroying Title IX.
Democrats condemned meritocracy openly and celebrated mediocrity. The Democratic Party became the party of elites, labeling working Americans as deplorables. Democrats cultivated deep ties with Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Food, Big Insurance, and the mainstream media. They embraced policies that divided Americans along racial lines. They abolished my uncle’s physical fitness test because they said that competition was bad for children.
Crowd: Boo!
RFK Jr.:
The Democrats abandoned all of these values and all of their traditional values, offering Americans only one policy, the one policy that they stood for, the unbridled, sociopathic, and blind hatred of a single man, Donald J. Trump. And they were so confident that Trump hatred alone was sufficient to win elections that they abandoned accountability and made our government a predatory organism of monumental incompetence and corruption.
The Democrats dismantled the public— public integrity safeguards and opened the floodgates to thieves and fraudsters who fleeced the American medical regulatory agencies for $100 billion annually during every year of the Biden administration. They somehow— they somehow lost 360,000 children, and they turned our federal government into the biggest child trafficking operation in world history.
Crowd: Booo!
RFK Jr.: The Democratic Party, in short, lost its way. I mourn the fact that neither my father nor my uncle would recognize the Democratic Party of today. It struck me this was no longer about left and right. It was about sane and insane. It was about common sense and communism. In April 2023, I ran for president hoping to summon my party back to its bedrock values. But the Democratic Party had lost faith in American voters and utterly ironically lost faith in American democracy. They were convinced that they would lose the ballot box. They couldn’t win. And so they unveiled a lawfare strategy to prevent an election from occurring. They sued every candidate who dared to run against Joe Biden. and then attempted to remove us all from the ballot. A lot of you think that the lawfare was just against Donald Trump. It was mainly against him, but they sued Dean Phillips. They sued Marianne Williamson. They sued Cornel West. They sued Donald Trump 50 times in 38 states to remove him from the ballot.
And they sued me in 12 states to remove me from ballots where I had legally qualified. And then— this is almost comical— after I endorsed President Trump and I tried to remove myself from the ballot so that he could have my votes, they sued me to keep me on the ballot. I’m not joking. Oh, here was the Democratic Party that in my youth, the biggest issue that we had that my father and my uncle fought for was voting rights, and particularly in the southern states, to guarantee that every American had a right to cast a ballot. And here’s that same party 60 years later using all of its ingenuity and all of its power to make sure that Americans could not vote for the candidates that they wanted to vote for. They excluded me from the debates. They canceled the primaries. The Democratic Party changed the rules to make sure I could not win, and neither could the other people who were running as Democrats, no matter how many votes we got. And for the first time in history, they canceled their own convention. No voter ever cast a primary ballot for Kamala Harris. No elected delegate was ever consulted.
A party of no kings simply anointed a queen.
Handpicked by secretive party elites who nobody even knows who they were. They’re just faceless guys with lanyards who were calling all the shots from the upper decks of that convention center, and they— nobody can see their face any more than you can see the face of the people up there. But that’s who was making the decision. And then they canceled the convention and they held a coronation. The day that President Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, within 3 hours of his shooting, he called me and asked me for a meeting. And during the series of talks that followed, I realized that everything that I had heard about President Trump and everything I believed about him from the mainstream media was a lie. Everything. I discovered, I discovered a self-effacing man of superior intelligence, of empathy and compassion, with an encyclopedic grasp of the issues and within, in molecular detail, and most of all, a near reckless courage to challenge vested interests and official orthodoxies. I found a man who cared deeply about transparency in government, who believed in protecting free speech more than anything, and the entire United States Constitution. We talked about lowering drug prices, supporting farmers and ranchers, standing up for working Americans, restoring law and order, and protecting public safety and security and national safety as well.
We talked about ending official corporate influence, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, and restoring gold standard science and public trust. We, we talked about ending fraud, waste, and abuse. And most importantly to me, We talked about ending the chronic disease epidemic and restoring the health of our children. President Trump told me that he wanted safe food available to all Americans. He wanted to end chronic disease. He wanted to restore our kids’ health. He found it unacceptable that this country pays 2 to 3 times what every developing nation in the world pays, and yet we have the sickest children in the history of the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden ever recorded. These conversations changed the course of my campaign and my life. I realized that many of the foundational values of the Democratic Party had found a new home, and it was called the Republican Party.
Crowd: USA! USA! USA! Bobby! Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!
RFK Jr.: Now, out of a sense of fairness, after my conversation with President Trump, I tried to have the same conversation with Kamala Harris. You think she would agree to meet with me? Did she even pick up the telephone?
Later that day, on stage at the Turning Point rally in Arizona, I met President Trump, and that moment would never have happened without my friend Charlie Kirk. Charlie played a critical and indispensable role at bringing me and President Trump together. In fact, it was something that he was trying to do for almost a year, the last year of my campaign. And today, on the first anniversary of his assassination, I can’t stand here without thinking about him. Charlie believed that people from all different political traditions could find common ground in their love of country. That we were— we, in this age of algorithms driving us all apart and creating this terrible, destructive polarization, the only way that we were going to rescue our country is if we started talking to each other and having congenial conversations. And he helped build the bridge that President Trump and I walked across that day. And I like to believe that Charlie is looking down on all of us now. And, and seeing the seeds that he planted.
That afternoon, President Trump and I stood together in front of thousands of Americans.
We shook hands and we made a promise to the American people. Together, we promised to make America healthy again.
Some of my— some of my Democratic friends told me that I was a fool for trusting President Trump. And so I want to make the record clear right now. President Trump has kept every single promise that he made to me, without exception.
And we have kept our promise to the American people.
Today, 2 years into this administration, Americans are eating more real food. Real food sales were up 8% in 2025.
Americans are eating less processed food. Since President Trump took office, obesity is down by 7% after 40 years of increasing.
And this is best of all— preliminary data that I received 2 days ago. from CDC indicates that we have now reversed a 30-year decline in longevity.
President Trump has ended 9 wars.
He’s restored competency to our government. He’s restored public faith. He’s restored America’s leadership across the globe.
And I am so grateful to God for giving our country a leader like this.
And I’m grateful to President Trump for including me in his administration and giving me a place.
In this extraordinary revolution that is happening in our country, where we’re going to restore American democracy and restore the America that my uncle and father believed in, the exemplary nation respected and emulated across the globe. We are making America healthy again. It’s up to you now. We need to elect a Republican Congress to keep this momentum going. Let’s go out and do that. God bless you.
We have created this site as a place for people to openly express their thoughts and opinions. This is a place where honest but civil discussion of all topics is encouraged. This particular thread is – for the moment – TRUST THE PLAN Thursday. You are welcome to say what you think, in a civil and courteous manner that loves your neighbor. Free speech matters! Courteous speech makes it happen.
Please label all AI-generated content as being such, unless it is patently obvious (e.g., humorous AI images). It is important that we as individuals not begin to pretend that socially derived artificial intelligence is actually our own, as this form of stealthy social information averaging and feedback would be one more pretense and deception between people, in service of stupid Marxist socialism, and of those who wish to substitute their communally protected lies for actual truth.
You are you. AI is AI. Keep your identity. Don’t “Borg Out” on us!
And yes, it’s THURSDAY…again.
That was stolen from Wheatie.
Let’s steal her rules, too.
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
Other rules may be derivable from these, and that conjecture is left for discussion.
Scott brought this, and I want to make sure that everybody sees it.
If you don’t watch this whole video, at least watch the first part about Bernie Sanders and his very, very bad idea.
Personally, I think it is critical to watch this video in its entirety, if you want to understand exactly why “being Cambodia on data centers” is a very, very, bad idea for the US. (Being China on data centers is a different sort of bad, too – don’t get me wrong!)
Now – DO NOT suspend your critical thinking on this guy and what he is saying. He is personally invested on the profit side of the AI wave. I myself think he is too rosy and hand-waving on the simplicity of the right solutions, but that he is nevertheless overall correct about those solutions. People need to be smart about how they allow data centers.
I just discovered a brand new data center a few miles from where we live. It was put up in the perfect place – a decaying industrial “wasteland” near the railroad tracks – and it’s beautiful, clean, and modernizing everything around it. Not sure how the Bernie Sanders boneheads on the city council in that place allowed it to happen, but they apparently fucked up and allowed a fantastic modern business to appear in the middle of their normal rusted, trash-strewn, blue-haired, nose ring, soy latte, anti-business decay and poverty. IMO it’s the best thing to happen to that area in a long time. They have driven OUT so many businesses. The blind AWFULs found a nut!
The entire south side of Chicago – which is a post-industrial wasteland – needs to become a data center capital, IMHO. THAT is how you fix Chicago.
Take a watch!
I think Trump gets it. Data centers can be part of the golden age – but we need to make sure that we avoid the rush to put up fool’s gold solutions – and that means citizens paying attention to what their elected (and unelected) leaders are doing.
Pay attention to what China is doing. Notice that, suddenly, they are even using their own crappy solar panels to generate energy. They realize that “seizing the day” on AI and data centers is happening RIGHT NOW. Somebody over in China got a bright idea on “abundance thinking” to use their own panels, stacked up waiting for export, and told the commies who wanted to reserve those panels for draining money from America, to “go to vulture hell”.
There are Important Notifications from our host, Wolf Moon; the Rules of our late, good Wheatie; and, certain caveats from Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. They are linked here. Note: Yours Truly has checked today’s post for any AI-generated content. To the best of her knowledge and belief, there is none. If readers wish to post any AI-generated content in the discussion thread for today’s post, they must cite their source. Thank you.
Do not forget to LABEL AI articles video and such.
In talking about scientific fraud, I wanted to provide as much information as possible in the hope that the overwhelming amount might encourage people to stop and think before blindly following the recommendations of a drug salesman aka doctor.
And then more information showed up so I am going to include that.
What I found significant is:
US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, finds a trawl of officially withdrawn (retracted) studies.
Because we were intentionally targeted. The Brits never gave up their desire to retake the USA.
Despite all the hype about slavery, if you look you can see the fine Italian hand of the Brits and French who were hoping to grab the USA after the ‘colonials’ had exhausted themselves fighting each other. When they were about to make their move the Czar of Russia warned he would attack on behalf of the Americans, thwarting their plans. My reference for that bit of info is long gone but there is this.
…Russian and American interests quickly coalesced around the prevention of French and British interference in the Civil War. The British decision to recognize the belligerency of the Confederacy by declaring neutrality in May 1861 opened the possibility of recognition of the Confederate States of America as an independent nation. “England will take advantage of the first opportunity to recognize seceded states,” Stoeckl warned, “and France will follow her.”…
Czar Alexander-II
After the American Civil War you had the assassinations of Lincoln (April 14, 1865) and the Czar of Russia ( March 13, 1881) Both can be traced to British influence. In 1913 we had a covert overthrow of our government (Federal Reserve Act) and in 1917 the Russian Revolution facilitated by the same bankers. Meanwhile in the middle of all of this the Fabian Society was founded on 4 January 1884 in London. A decade later in 1895 the Fabian Society founded the London School of Economics which has been training world leaders ever since. John Dewey – “father” of progressive education was a member of the American Fabian Society. And helped establish it in 1895.
At that point the switch was made to a gradual destruction of the USA instead of a frontal assault.
I am often asked to name those educators responsible for the change in primary reading instruction which has led to the decline of literacy in America. People ask this because by the time they understand the history of the reading problem and of the dumbing down process that has been going on in our public schools for the past forty years, they recognize that all of this is not the result of a series of accidents but of conscious, deliberate decisions made by our educational leaders.
After twenty-five years of research, I can state with complete confidence that the prime mover in all of this was none other than John Dewey who is usually characterized as the father of progressive education. Yet the change of the teaching of reading is probably Dewey’s greatest contribution to the tranformation of American education from an academically oriented process to a social one.
The progressives were a new breed of educator that came on the scene around the turn of the century. These rejected the religion of the Bible and placed their new faith in science, evolution and psychology. Indeed, men like G. Stanley Hall, James McKeen Cattell, Charles Judd, James Earl Russell traveled to Germany to study the new psychology under Prof. Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig. It was these men who later imposed the new psychology on American education and transformed it permanently from its academic function to one dedicated to behavioral change.
John Dewey got his education in the new psychology under G. Stanley Hall at John Hopkins University. In 1887, at the tender age of 28, Dewey felt that he knew enough about psychology to be able to write a textbook on the subject, entitled fittingly Psychology. In 1894, Dewey was appointed head of the department of philosophy, psychology and education at the University of Chicago which had been established two years earlier by a gift from John D. Rockefeller. In 1896, Dewey created his famous experimental Laboratory School where he could test the effects of the new psychology on real live children.
Dewey’s philosophy had evolved from Hegelian idealism to socialist materialism, and the purpose of the school was to show how education could be changed to produce little socialists and collectivists instead of little capitalists and individualists. It was expected that these little socialists, when they became voting adults, would dutifully change the American economic system into a socialist one.
In order to do so he analyzed the traditional curriculum that sustained the capitalist, individualistic system and found what he believed was the sustaining linchpin — that is, the key element that held the entire system together: high literacy. To Dewey, the greatest obstacle to socialism was the private mind that seeks knowledge in order to exercise its own private judgment and intellectual authority. High literacy gave the individual the means to seek knowledge independently. It gave individuals the means to stand on their own two feet and think for themselves. This was detrimental to the “social spirit” needed to bring about a collectivist society…
The rest of that article is even more damning. Our education system was deliberately poisoned by the Fabians.
Antonio Gramscitook over where John Dewey left off. (H/T to the Q-treeper that brought this to the tree.)
In 1924, it was created as part of Frankfort University, the Institute for Social Research. One of its founders was Max Horkheimer and its director since 1930. They will also be part of this group thinkers such as Adorno, Marcuse and Erich Fromm (who will then distance himself from the school).
The Nazi persecution in 1934 resulted in the transfer of the Institute to Columbia University in New York (Horkheimer, Marcuse and Fromm were of Jewish origin) and although some of its members would return to Frankfort at the end of the war, others, such as Marcuse, will choose to stay in the USA. In this second stage, it will be its directors Adorno and Habermas, who will be the main representative of the school from 1956.
The Institute for Social Research emerges in a clear Marxist line…
The Frankfurt School adopted an interdisciplinary persepective, adding approaches not only from philosophy but also from sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, Protestant theology and criticism of culture and art. These are, therefore, studies of “social theory”. The works produced by the Frankfort school are known as “Critical Theory”: it is not a system of doctrines but a particular methodological conception.
Antonio Gramsci – The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century. Not the most famous. Not the most read. The most dangerous and the most consequential – because he was the one who figured out why the revolution kept failing, and what to do instead. The man who invented the long march through the institutions. Everything that followed — the Frankfurt School, the Fabian Society’s operational model, the WEF formation pipeline, the captured university, the HR department enforcing approved speech — is downstream of what he wrote in a prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy, in code, between 1929 and 1935.
1. His central question: why hasn’t it happened? The working class was supposed to rise. The contradictions of capitalism were supposed to produce the revolution. They hadn’t – not in the West. Gramsci’s answer was precise and devastating: because the ruling class does not maintain power through force alone. It maintains power through cultural hegemony – the control of the ideas, values, and frameworks through which people understand the world. The worker who accepts that the existing order is simply how things are will not revolt, regardless of his material conditions. The revolution requires cultural change first.
2. The instrument was the long march through the institutions. Not the barricade. The school, the university, the media, the judiciary, the civil service, the cultural establishment – every institution through which a civilization transmits its values to the next generation. Capture these, fill them with people who share the counter-hegemonic project, and the cultural assumptions that maintain the existing order gradually dissolve. No barricades. No visible moment of rupture. Just the slow replacement of one cultural hegemony with another.
3. The educational capture was the masterpiece. Control the curriculum and you control the categories of thought available to the next generation. Not by telling them what to conclude – by shaping what questions they think to ask, what they consider obvious and what they consider unthinkable. The generation educated after the long march does not need to be told what to think. It thinks what it was formed to think – and experiences that thinking as its own…
And so we have the destruction of the independent thinking mind. Followed by utter crap science such as Global Warming and 72 genders. I kid you not
MedicineNet — How Many Genders Are There? All 72 Genders List“How many genders are there? Besides male and female, here is a list of all 72 other gender identities that a person may belong to. How can I help my child understand gender?” This is actually written by MDs!
From my point of view, I see this as when the government got into using OUR tax dollars to fund THEIR pet projects.
Background Information: The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) traces its origins to World War II and the Manhattan Project effort to build the first atomic bomb. As the direct descendent of the Manhattan Engineer District, the organization set up by the Army Corps of Engineers to develop and build the bomb, the Department continues to own and manage the Federal properties at most of the major Manhattan Project sites, including Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Los Alamos, New Mexico.
In a national survey at the turn of the millennium, both journalists and the public ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb and the end of the Second World War as the top news stories of the twentieth century. The Manhattan Project is the story of some of the most renowned scientists of the century combining with industry, the military, and tens of thousands of ordinary Americans working at sites across the country to translate original scientific discoveries into an entirely new kind of weapon. When the existence of this nationwide, secret project was revealed to the American people following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most were astounded to learn that such a far-flung, government-run, top-secret operation existed, with physical properties, payroll, and a labor force comparable to the automotive industry. At its peak, the project employed 130,000 workers and, by the end of the war, had spent $2.2 billion.
The legacy of the Manhattan Project is immense. The advent of nuclear weapons not only helped bring an end to the Second World War but ushered in the atomic age and determined how the next war, the Cold War, would be fought. In addition, the Manhattan Project became the organizational model behind the remarkable achievements of American “big science” during the second half of the twentieth century. Without the Manhattan Project, DOE, with its national laboratories — the jewels in the crown of the nation’s science establishment, would not exist as it does in its present form…
Did you catch that?
In addition, the Manhattan Project became the organizational model behind the remarkable achievements of American “big science” during the second half of the twentieth century. Without the Manhattan Project, DOE, with its national laboratories — the jewels in the crown of the nation’s science establishment, would not exist as it does in its present form.
(Remember the Frankfurt School moved to Columbia University.)
Universities have come to rely on federal funding to support scientific and medical research. How did we get here?…
Columbia history professor Alma Steingart ’06GS recently provided some answers. From her office in Fayerweather Hall, Steingart, who studies how mathematical thought and computer technology have influenced US electoral politics, explained that government science funding as we know it began in the mid-twentieth century. Before World War II, she said, research money at universities came primarily from donors and private foundations; but during the war, the US Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) began funding research aimed at gaining military advantage. The development of the atomic bomb, known as the Manhattan Project, in which Columbia physicists played a key role, was one major investment.
After the war, Vannevar Bush ’47HON, the former dean of MIT’s engineering school and the head of OSRD, called on the US to fund basic research in the physical and medical sciences in order to ensure American strength and progress. “There was a realization that there was no going back to the previous model,” said Steingart. “The debate was whether federal funds should be used for basic science or applied science. Many scientists felt that developing science around particular goals was limiting, and Bush successfully made the case that it was basic research that led to discoveries and applications that would help the country.”Bush’s advocacy led to the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1950.
Then, in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. “That was a critical moment,” said Steingart. Within a year, the NSF budget more than tripled, from $40 million to $134 million. Meanwhile, other government agencies, such as the Atomic Energy Commission and the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, noting that basic science was already being funded, began to direct money toward applied research.
“With the Cold War came the idea that you needed an army of engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and chemists in order to keep pace with the Soviet Union,” Steingart said. “Remember, the NSF doesn’t just fund research. It also funds postdoctoral fellowships and PhD fellowships. And so in the 1960s, the number of PhDs greatly expanded — which meant that universities expanded, and so did their expenditures.”…
This handout was created for the AHA’s December 11, 2025, Congressional Briefing on the history of federal science funding. Panelists Melinda Baldwin (Univ. of Maryland), Arthur Daemmrich (Arizona State Univ.), and Bhaven Sampat (Johns Hopkins Univ.) discussed the history of the federal government’s approach toward science in public policy, and how the government has supported and funded scientific research and innovation over time.
1790–1900: Building Practical Science and National Capacity
1790 – Congress passes the first US patent act, encouraging invention and creating a new system of intellectual property.
1803 – Congress funds the Lewis & Clark expedition, which maps the West, identifies plant and animal species, and describes unique geologic formations.
1807 – The US Coast Survey becomes the first civilian scientific agency, supporting navigation and defense.
1843 – Congress funds Samuel Morse’s telegraph demonstration line through a $30,000 appropriation, helping launch US telecommunications.
1846 – Congress establishes the Smithsonian Institution as a public-private partnership. It quickly becomes a center for research and public science and later evolves into a museum complex.
1840s–90s – Scientific associations including the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Chemical Society (ACS), and the Geological Society of American (GSA) are founded, strengthening the nation’s scientific community… [Continues with a long list –GC]
Note during the early years it is CONGRESS funding specific projects. Now that duty is handed off to bureaucrats along with buckets of cash.
American Historical Association Congressional Briefing: History of Federal Science Funding (1 hour)
…
Sep 24, 2019
“Evidence-based medicine is actually so corrupt as to be useless or harmful,” Marcia Angell wrote in 2009. The statement was less a revelation than something many already knew, but it made waves because of its source. Angell, a medical insider, had spent two decades as the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Dr. Jason Fung is also a medical insider who has become wary of scientific research that purports to be “evidence based.” A well-known nephrologist and author, Fung often speaks about Type-2 diabetes reversal and the metabolic effects of intermittent fasting, but in this presentation from Dec. 15, 2018, he turns his focus toward the many ways the foundations of evidence-based medicine have become corrupted by financial conflicts of interest. The first conflicts of interest he highlights pertain to the corruption of doctors. Practicing physicians who accept gifts from Big Pharma are 225-335% more likely to prescribe drugs from the gift-giving company than those who do not, Fung explains.
The corruption of doctors in prestigious universities is even worse, he claims. “There’s a clear correlation: The more prestigious a doctor, the more money they’re getting from the pharmaceutical.” Anecdotally, he says, this means you may be better off seeking medical advice from a family physician than from a Harvard professor; the former probably just accepted a $10 pen from Big Pharma while the latter is on the take for $500,000. “It just is a terrible system,” he says. “Yet, these people are the people that are in the newspaper. They’re the ones that are teaching medical students, are the ones who are teaching the — the dietitians, the pharmacist — everybody.” The most insidious corruption affects the published research on particular drugs. Fung highlights the influence industry can have when it finds a medical journal editor willing to take its money. Another problem arises in the form of industry-funded medical research.
This conflict of interest leads to the selective publication of positive trials, which can skew the science on particular drugs and lead to unnecessary or even dangerous overprescription. Fung notes how statin prescriptions illustrate the scope of this particular problem. “We accept this of drug companies … but the problem is that people die,” Fung says. He later adds: “You can make arguments that sugar is a health food, that opioids are good for you … but it harms patients, and we always have to remember that at the end of the day, this is not why we became doctors. The reason we became doctors was to help people, but we’re not until we kind of set those same rules as everybody else.” (49 minute video)
Investigators from the Treasury’s Office of the Inspector Generalfound that some of the regulator’s employeessurfed erotic websites, hired prostitutes and accepted gifts from bank executives … instead of actually working to help the economy
The Minerals Management Service – the regulator charged with overseeing BP and other oil companies to ensure that oil spills don’t occur – was riddled with “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity”, which included “sex with industry contacts”
Agents for the Drug Enforcement Agencyhad dozens of sex parties with prostitutes hired by the drug cartels they were supposed to stop (they also received money, giftsand weapons from drug cartel members)
The former chief accountant for the SEC says thatBernanke and Paulson broke the law and should be prosecuted
The governmentknew about mortgage fraud a long time ago. For example, the FBI warned of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud in 2004. However, the FBI, DOJ and other government agencies then stood down and did nothing. See this and this. For example, the Federal Reserve turned its cheek and allowed massive fraud, and the SEC has repeatedly ignored accounting fraud. Indeed, Alan Greenspan took the position that fraud could never happen…
And it goes on and on. This is the cesspool President Trump waded into in 2017. With that type of bureaucrat in charge of handing out grants, is it any wonder US science is riddled with fraud?
This DePat Tuesday Open Thread honors the author of the original Tuesday open thread on this site, namely the late Susie Sampson, a.k.a. Deplorable Patriot, among her other handles, pen names, etc.
For more on the untimely passing of Dear DePat, please see these three posts.
At one time, DePat handled FOUR daily open threads here, in addition to taking care of her relatives, choir duties, and numerous other responsibilities. She was a powerhouse – a dynamo – a true force of nature.
DePat’s faith in Trump, Q, “The Plan”, the White Hats, and “the anons” in general, was legendary. Although I didn’t always agree with her quick acceptance of some sketchier evidence and fringier theories, I will gladly admit to “coming around” to numerous so-called “conspiracy theories” which she championed first. I was always careful to give her credit for being right, too, when I had been wrong.
It is impossible to overstate how much DePat did for not only this site, but for her country. I urge all to say a quick prayer of thanks, whenever you think of her, for the privilege of knowing, in life or after death, such an exemplary human being, and lover of God.
And thank you, Susie, for the firm foundation which you left us, when you were called to your true home!
PSST! – Hey, Kid! – Wanna Watch an AI Movie?
Seriously – just check this one out. It’s a short, so it won’t take too long. Supposedly “100% AI” – whatever that means.
Yeah, it’s plenty derivative and filled with cliches – but dang, these things get better all the time.
Think of it as due diligence on Fake Fake Entertainment!
Or if that’s not your thing, try this art film done by a human (Heavy Pulp) using AI for the music and the movie. I found this one very enjoyable.
"Peyote" – a visual poem short film. (PG-13)
In honor of X slapping a content warning on the original film here, I am uploading a new YouTube approved edit.
Peyote was created via the fantastic and unrestricted creative platform that is @AskVenice – highly recommend checking it… pic.twitter.com/l9oU3aSCZ6
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is STILL under DIRECT THREATS by hostile forces – notably COMMUNISTS – and they’re HERE IN AMERICA.
Daily outrage and commie phuckery still abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Commies won’t win!
And we will keep saying COMMIES OUT until we get their FRAUD and INSANITY out of our country!
THE STUFF
Save a Farm Worker – Buy Organic
Do you remember my recent two articles about home pesticide services, and how dangerous these can be to pets, wild animals, family, homeowners, neighbors, and beneficial insects like bees? Just in case you want to review…..
One of the things that became apparent during both my online AND neighborhood research for these articles, is that the currently advancing Overton Window involves the use (or perhaps I should say misuse) of agricultural pesticides on residential lawns and dwelling exteriors, and in basements.
Indeed, if one starts to read anywhere about pesticide toxicity, it quickly becomes clear that most human poisoning cases are in an agricultural context.
SO – I was shocked, shocked, SHOCKED (not kidding) to see this headline.
No – not shocked about the subject – but about the NUMBERS!
Now, if you read carefully, this figure includes all exposures, including minor ones that may not have required hospitalization – but still – WOW.
Here is the opening of the article.
Nearly half of the world’s 934 million farmers are poisoned by pesticides annually, with an estimated 402 to 433 million cases each year.
Developing countries in southern Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Africa bear the heaviest poisoning burden.
Burkina Faso has the highest national poisoning rate, with nearly 84% of farmers affected each year.
Non-fatal poisonings far exceed deaths but cause chronic illness from repeated low-level exposure.
Global pesticide use has doubled since 1990, while underreporting hides the true crisis. Nearly half of the world’s 934 million farmworkers are unintentionally poisoned by pesticides every year, amounting to an estimated 402 to 433 million cases annually, according to new research published in Frontiers in Public Health that exposes what experts call a hidden global health crisis.
The study, conducted by researchers from the Pesticide Action Network, analyzed 214 scientific publications from 2006 to 2023 alongside World Health Organization mortality data covering 139 countries. Researchers found that about 11,000 of those poisonings prove fatal each year, with nearly 60% of deaths concentrated in India alone. The findings build on a 2020 review that had already put the annual toll at 385 million cases, underscoring how persistent underreporting continues to obscure the true scale of the problem.
(Wolf again…..)
When I was in school, I knew a fellow student, from a farming family, who had worked a variety of farm jobs during summers and school breaks. He had a great story about being hospitalized because he had simply dribbled some liquid organophosphorus pesticide on the toe of one of his thick leather boots. I’m pretty sure he was using parathion, which has largely been replaced by the weaker but much safer malathion. Still, quite the cautionary tale.
I got to thinking – we can actually lessen the risk for these farm workers, by buying organic produce. I know it’s a small step, but I think it’s an important one. You may not save any of the 11,000 workers who will die, but you may very well prevent one of the millions who will get sick, from being poisoned.
