Alastair Crooke - Iran 's ONLY Choice: Humiliate the US (Video - 1h10mn)

    It is refreshing to listen to Alaster Crooke with his profound knowledge of the world today as well as his deeper analysis that the West has completely lost its moral compass. 

   I have found over the years that he is one of the most reliable predictor of what's coming next and how the current situation will unfold. 

   Iran: The war is not over because the current equilibrium is unstable. Israel will never accept a stronger and stronger Iran and conversely, Iran knowing that a confrontation is unavoidable cannot return to a status quo of sanctions. 

   Ukraine: The West badly miscalculated. By putting "pressure" on Russia, they are obliging Russia to finish off Ukraine by cutting the Odessa port and land-locking the country, transforming what's left of Ukraine into a bankrupt rump state.    

   There is more to his analysis below which is quite interesting:  

Alastair Crooke - Iran 's ONLY Choice: Humiliate the US

 

Bessent's 'Yentervention' Does Not Fix Japan's Underlying Structural Issues by Ed Dowd

   This is serious as once again Japan finds itself at the core of a systemic risk to the international financial system. The Yen has been crashing for the last 20 years generating immense wealth for those who could profit from the extremely lucrative "carry trade". (Borrow in Yen, swap into dollar, cash a 5% coupon every year instead of 1% in Yen, swap back into Yen to repay the principal in cheaper Yen and make money both on the higher coupons and on the weakening of the Yen.) 

   This has been welcomed by Japanese manufacturers although in the end, it is the Japanese population which has paid the price finding itself in 2026 no richer than in 1986 when the Yen started rising following the Plaza Accord signed in new York in September 1985. So 40 years going nowhere while amassing a gigantic pile of debt thanks to ever rising government deficits. What could go wrong? 

   What will go wrong is that as the Yen weakens further, both the commercial and budget deficits explode requiring "interventions" and therefore Japan selling dollars and buying Yen. Unfortunately selling dollars means selling American Treasuries and bonds in large quantities which happens to be the wrong time of the cycle as the US Government needs buyers for its own huge deficits, not sellers of its debt.   

   Someone on either side of the Pacific will soon find itself squeezed between a rock and a hard place. The choice will be between restrain and massive inflation. No prize for guessing which solution will be favored although inflation is already high on both coasts. The question will be who can sustain the more pain without the market revolting and yields exploding?    

by Ed Dowd via 'Beyond The Narrative' substack,

...a delicate meal to cook before Midterms...

My conclusions on the Bessent yen intervention:

• The move is a temporary Band-Aid at best and sharp yen strength can historically trigger carry-trade unwinds and risk-asset volatility, but it does not fix Japan’s structural debt or rate differentials. The Fed, BOJ and Treasury are walking a tightrope.

• Consensus is correct that the primary driver is preventing forced sales of Japan’s $1T+ UST holdings that would spike US yields.

• Expanding the FIMA repo facility is a backdoor start to yield-curve control, letting Japan borrow dollars against Treasuries instead of dumping them.

• Bessent is explicitly worried about contagion in his own words by citing the Asian financial crisis trigger from a weak yen and framing the intervention as “stopping an emergency” before it spreads.

• I believe one of the motivations was to delay any major market or yield disruption until at least the midterms.

• Interventions like this rarely stick without fundamental policy shifts and often unleash unintended consequences down the road.

Background

On Friday last week:

July 31 (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury has informed a number of ‌banks that it may intervene in the Japanese yen market on Friday and that they should “stand ready for future action,” a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The notice to banks, channeled through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, comes a day after Japanese authorities stepped in to prop up the yen, setting ​the currency up for its biggest weekly rise since February, pulling it off of four-decade lows against the dollar.

News of ​the potential intervention by the U.S. Treasury helped push the yen higher against the dollar on Friday. It last traded at ⁠159.09 to the dollar after trading as low 163.65 on Thursday.

On Sunday August 2nd Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed intervention on X:

The Trump Administration delivers for America’s trusted partners. Economic security is national security. And the U.S.-Japan alliance is built on both.

Friday’s coordinated foreign exchange actions countered disorderly yen movements.

Treasury remains attentive and in close communication with our counterparts at MOF and BOJ. We will not hesitate to participate in further joint intervention.

The FIMA Repo Facility is an important backstop. We would encourage it to be upsized in the coming months.

We strongly support Japan’s decisive market and monetary steps to correct the substantial undervaluation of the yen.

The Takaichi government is moving into an exciting new phase of Abenomics, as nearly 15 years of powerful stimulus have created durable, robust underlying economic dynamics.

Market commentary on X quickly coalesced around protecting the US Treasury market. Japan is one of the largest foreign holders of USTs. A collapsing yen raises the risk of liquidation to defend the currency, pushing US yields higher at a politically sensitive moment. Many skeptics noted the fix is temporary and that the yen’s weakness is rooted in Japan’s public-debt burden and policy divergences, not purely speculative overshoot. Without follow-through on BOJ rates and Japanese fiscal discipline, official buying merely delays the inevitable.

In a clip aired on Bannon’s War Room on August 4, Bessent laid out the contagion risk directly: “One of the things that triggered the Asian financial crisis was a very weak Japanese yen that caused a tsunami across Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Someone asked me, ‘What’s the emergency?’ The emergency is stopping an emergency. We don’t have to wait for the crisis. We can remediate it early.” Bannon’s own brief framing that day was that the effort ultimately keeps Japan financing US deficits so they neither sell nor stop buying Treasuries.

My analysis

I posted this right after the weekend announcement on X:

“Massive, coordinated Yen intervention announced this weekend. Traditionally large delta rapid strengthening of the yen has been associated with risk asset weakness especially global equities. So far this is a 5% down move in USD/JPY (yen strength). Rapid moves can sometimes cause the Yen carry trade to become more expensive and liquidations can occur. In August 2024 a 10% move provided some volatility especially in Japanese equities. The cooks are in the kitchen now and it’s a delicate meal they are preparing.”

Meaning the authorities want to halt the Yen slide but they also don’t want it to strengthen too much and cause the Yen carry trade unwind. The goal is stability. Put another way, we simultaneously don’t want Japanese selling our treasuries out of reserves to defend a weak Yen but we also don’t want to see rapid yen strength cause a cascading global margin call. We saw a milder version of margin call in 2024 when the Yen strengthened 10% very quickly. The market is currently applauding the move. However, a coordinated official bid changes the near-term price action, but it does not erase the underlying positioning or the rate differential that keeps the trade alive.

I agree with the consensus that the core motive is preventing Japanese sales of US Treasuries and that the FIMA expansion is a backdoor beginning of yield-curve control. By letting Japan post Treasuries as collateral for dollar liquidity instead of selling them into the open market, the authorities are effectively capping the upward pressure on US yields. It is a clever, low-visibility way to manage the curve without an explicit Fed QE announcement. Combined with the direct yen purchases, it buys some time. I believe one of the motivations was to delay any major market or yield disruption until at least the midterms. But it is temporary. Japan’s debt dynamics and the need for eventual BOJ normalization remain. History shows these interventions lose effectiveness once markets test the resolve and the size required grows with diminishing returns.

Officials can signal and buy for a while, but without sustained Japanese policy follow-through the yen will eventually drift weaker again, forcing larger and more frequent interventions. Each round raises the risk of the very asset volatility and liquidity events that the cooks are trying to manage. Keep watching the carry-trade heat and the pace of any further coordinated actions…that will tell us whether the meal is cooked well or burnt.

“But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.” Matthew 7:26-27

What Else Are They Hiding? - The Fall of Dr Fauci

   The fall of Dr Fauci should be a great time for transparency and democracy. Unfortunately instead of the indictment of a system, it is a man who is sacrificed. His responsibility is undeniable. The damage he did was profound. But he certainly was not alone in this endeavor. 

   When Bill Gates recently said that "We were not aware that Corona Virus was kind of like the flu!" Who was he kidding? Corona Virus WAS the flu or rather a well known variant representing 15 to 20% of the cases year after year. What was different in 2020 is that many laboratories around the world (Not just in Wuhan) had been working for over a decade to weaponize the virus, nicely renamed "gain of function", thanks to its high mutability, including inserting HIV and other dangerous sequences to make it more potent.    

   All this was well known from the beginning. This is why the Chinese were furious when the W.H.O. was on the brink of denouncing "Wuhan", statement on which they quickly backtracked after visiting the laboratory and checking that "no window had been left open!". (Literally. There was no investigation whatsoever as by then the place was under military control.) This would have opened a can of worm since the Wuhan P4 laboratory was well integrated worldwide, specialized in doing what was legally not permitted in Europe and the US with minimum oversight. 

   This was the cover up. Then Dr Fauci "happened" and transformed a seemingly innocuous crisis into an opportunity to test the new mRNA vaccines knowing full well that in normal times people would have resisted this dangerous vaccine which was neither safe nor tested appropriately. The pandemic phase was the destructive one when society was locked down and confined with long term consequences still at work today. The vaccine phase was the money making opportunity when Dr Fauci and many other people made a fortune profiting from the crisis they had unleashed. 

   The fight is not over. mRNA vaccines may one day become complex solutions to fight virus against which to this day we have very fell tools. But this is still too early. Our knowledge of genetics remains at the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" level. Doctors who said that the "tune" was wrong were punished. Fauci was the "Pied Piper" who played the flute and should in turn be punished for the crime.    

by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

This past couples of weeks was a wild ride. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released many thousands of pages of documentation concerning the strange world of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) while Dr. Anthony Fauci was at the height of his power as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci’s wife headed the ethics department for the entire agency.

His tenure there came to an end in December 2022, following three years in which he was celebrated by mass media as the nation’s leading voice for science and the man with all the answers for dealing with a respiratory pandemic. He was on television daily, sitting for as many as 12 interviews a day.

All this while, he kept careful logs of each day, while working with a large staff to prepare the document as the first draft of an autobiography. He believed that he would go down in history with exactly the reputation the media had cultivated for him. He lobbied for and amassed dozens of awards, some of which paid in the high six figures. He was sought after and doted on by all the elites.

All at once, it has fallen apart.

The simple reason: The agency he once occupied is now run by a man and people he had ferociously denounced in public and private.

The release was an act not of revenge but of simple transparency.

The American people deserve to know the truth about a time in which accurate information was denied to them through censorship and media propaganda.

It’s a rare treat.

We find out, for example, that the billionaire Bill Gates has special security clearances at NIH, where at every visit he was treated like royalty. Gates cleared his book on pandemics with Fauci, who recommended an editor at NIH, none other than Dr. David Morens, who has been charged with document destruction.

The revelations go on and on seemingly without limit. I started reading as soon as the diary was released. I saw that it was 1,100 pages, but that’s full pages in small type. In book form, it would be 2,400 pages. I could not stop reading. Having lived and breathed every day of this, I was fascinated to see Fauci’s own thinking in light of the world outside.

Not only was my weekend gone completely, but also, without notice, the project took up the next day and evening and then again. And again. It was late Thursday afternoon before I finished. My notes on the salient parts, the truly astounding material, alone took up 30 pages along with screenshots. I had lost so much sleep over these days and canceled every appointment. It was all too delicious to resist.

And you know why, correct?

For years we had been stuffed to the gills with the greatness myth. Then it suddenly all unraveled, slowly but furiously and all at once. The author was put in front of a Senate subcommittee and questioned in great detail about the origin of the virus, the contracts, the cover-ups, the angling for fame and fortune, and so much more.

At every question, the witness would only invoke his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination. But this alone was strange because the witness had already gained a full pardon for any misdeeds dating back to 2014. He could have confessed all and then some and faced no prosecution. All he had to do was tell the truth.

He was vulnerable only to the charge of perjury, but even that he could not risk. So he remained silent throughout, invoking his Fifth Amendment right 111 times. I have watched many Senate hearings in my life. I had never seen one like this. The drama was intense. I was not there, but those who were said it was even more fiery in person.

There is really no way to sum up our current moment.

In 2019, the economy was doing well and Trump was popular. There were the usual political divisions but no real emergency on the horizon. All at once in the first months of 2020, everything fell apart and a foreign regime was visited upon us, complete with new protocols that required staying home and standing apart from people and covering our faces. We could not go to church, visit the sick, or travel to other countries.

A year later came the promised relief that turned out not to hold up but instead caused more suffering. All the while, trust in the system we had never really questioned began to collapse. We were routinely instructed to trust this Dr. Fauci. Most of the dissidents, including my friends who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, were censored. Our accounts were threatened and removed. Many were debanked.

Our world collapsed completely, and all these years we’ve cried out for answers. We’ve received only bits and pieces, enough to cobble together workable theories.

Seemingly out of nowhere, we are sitting on tens of thousands of pages of revelations. We can only read with amazement at the inner workings of government, the chaos, the pettiness, the corruption, the confusion, the deception. It’s all here, and now we see that there was a strong basis for why trust had evaporated. It seems as if every conspiracy theory was coming true.

Consider too that we have all these documents only because Fauci left so much behind on government computers. We also have men and women of conscience in charge of releasing them. Millions of hours of painstaking work are behind these releases, all done in the service of truth.

It’s really not possible to feel any joy from what we read. There is only tragedy, not only in the life of one man but also in all those who followed him and the nation that suffered so much from living under his diktat. At the very least, we are entitled to hear answers from him, point by point, but instead we get silence.

The list of institutions that have been hit hard by this is long and includes large media, academia, the scientific establishment, the world of professional medicine, and government itself. We cannot help but wonder today what is real and what is fake, what can be trusted and what is too far gone ever to be trusted again. No one ever wanted to be where we are today at the 250th anniversary of the country, to see how the dreams and ideals of our Founders have been so trounced and disrespected by so many in power. And yet that is where we are.

There is some deeply profound poetry about this moment. As sad as all of this is, and as much as it pains us today to think of all who have suffered, we should feel gratitude mainly for the truth to which we suddenly have access. For me, reading all these releases has been something of a catharsis. I hope you too will read and not merely trust media summaries or artificial intelligence reductions. It needs to be read in full to get the whole picture.

Nor can we shelve that great, great question: What else is being hidden from us, and for how long? Trust cannot return until we know the full truth. I suspect that this will take many years, and that’s fine. We can be patient.

Let there be no despair in the land today. These files have been released by men and women of enormous courage and conviction. They have taken huge risks to stand up for what is right. They have given us all a gift, the evidence that our instincts that something was not right were on target. They are evidence that redemption is not only possible; it is happening.

In those dark days of 2020 when the world seemed to be collapsing, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University would call me with a grave sense of moral urgency. “What can we do to stop the madness?” he would ask. He did what he could then. Now he finds himself as the head of the National Institutes of Health, working to begin the process of rebuilding. We have a very long way to go, but the essential first steps are done.

We are going to get what we seek: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

AI Surveillance Pricing: “One of the Biggest Scams ever”

   There are several dark sides to all the data centers being built currently. An obvious one is surveillance everywhere. With cameras and other data sources linked in real time, privacy will soon be gone. Another more insidious and irritating application will be the explosion of dynamic pricing. 

   Surprisingly, fix prices are a modern invention. Go to any "developing" country and haggling is the norm. Sometimes it's part of the culture. Not arguing about the price in most Arabic countries is almost an insult since the initial asked price is easily twice the real price of the goods. Elsewhere, almost everywhere, street markets have no price although everyone knows the right price.       

   Fix prices were actually "invented" or rather implemented by department stores and catalog companies around the end of the 19th Century which immediately gave them a huge advantage on their competitors and led to their meteoric rise. So much so that in the 20th Century, everybody else ended up obliged to apply fix prices too in order to stay competitive. Then later still fix prices became the rule, an finally in many countries the law. 

   But it is one thing to discuss the price with a merchant and quite another thing when a company online will show you a certain price based on the data they have about you which can be quite deep these days. The more active you are on the Internet, the better companies can segment your profile and understand how much you are ready to pay.  

   Is this fair? Companies will argue that the data is anonymous and therefore show no prejudice. This was most certainly true 20 years ago when the amount of data was indeed quite limited. Nowadays, data points can be so numerous that in reality, vendors end up knowing who you are and can therefore as in the example of the video double the price of a plane ticket if they know you are desperate and need to go to a funeral. In such case the imbalance of information coupled with your inability to discuss the price or buy elsewhere makes a transaction extremely unfair. Now imagine dynamic pricing changing prices in real time in the store (let's not talk about the Internet where it is so much easier.) A price for you, a different one for me. A lower price for rainy days a higher one for sunny days. 9pm, plus 20%. Poor sales? -20%. Express counter? Plus 30%, Disney-like. Wants to see the doctor immediately in a high-end neighborhood? Sure. Price x3! In fact the sky is the limit. Some of these ideas are "fair", others discriminatory. What is certain is that under pressure, most companies will try to optimize their margin and where competition is gone, they will have a field day to do so and technology will make it so much easier. 

   PS: I didn't mention AI specifically because the article would be 3 pages long and very irritating. There is so much you can do with AI such as manipulating people's perception or psychology. Eventually, we will all need our own AI agent in order to do our shopping. But that's another article for later.        

AI Surveillance Pricing: “One of the Biggest Scams in American History”

Karen Kwiatkowski: U.S. Military Breaks Down & Economy Crashes ( Video - 1h12)

   Interesting insight about the US nowadays. This confirms that the US has no plan, no strategy and not even tactics. With Iran, the curtain of imperial power has been lifted and the emperor is naked. The war itself has nothing to do with nuclear weapons since already 20 years ago Iran was on the list of countries to be subdued for total control of the Middle East so the US is just following the script. It didn't happen then only because Iran was a hard nut to crack and not knowing how to do it, previous Presidents wisely decided not to. Well, we now know how hard it really was! 

   So now what? This is almost impossible to answer. The loss of prestige for the Trump Administration is immense but on the other hand doubling down seems almost impossible. The crisis will probably continue to fester while Trump tries to exhaust Iran economically and Iran conversely tries to exhaust Trump politically. A game of chicken with not so peaceful spectators around. What could go wrong?  

Karen Kwiatkowski: U.S. Military Breaks Down & Economy Crashes

Senate Panel Holds Fauci In Contempt For Refusing To Answer Questions

   All what we have been arguing about the Covid crisis over the last 6 years is finally coming to the front with Congress confirming the accusations to which Dr Fauci refused to answer saying this was a witch hunt. In this exact way, absolutely ALL criminals can accuse the prosecution of "witch hunt", that is literally their job. And the job of the defense is to defend the accused party. Here, in this specific setting Dr Fauci only had to answer questions which he refuse to do. 

   Unfortunately, it is in the next step that the strength of the Deeps State will be revealed. Now that he has been held in contempt of Congress, the DOJ (Department of Defense) should prosecute him. Based on recent antecedents, I wouldn't hold my breath. They probably won't. Remember Epstein? There was a file, then there was none. Same Department of Justice. Different priorities, probably after powerful people made a few phone calls.    

   Those people you cannot indict or prosecute are de facto above the law. A list of these people will tell you who really has power in America today. And it is definitively not "We, the People" as written in the Constitution. Do we still need one then?

Senate Panel Holds Fauci In Contempt For Refusing To Answer Questions

Anthony Fauci has been held in contempt of Congress by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, after he repeatedly refused to answer lawmakers' questions about funding risky research to genetically manipulate bat coronavirus in Wuhan China, and his role in the ensuing lockdown quagmire that cratered the economy after he was put in charge of leading the COVID-19 response. 

Oh, and they obtained a copy of his cell phone. 

In an 8-5 vote brought by Committee Chairman Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), the contempt vote seeks to refer the case directly to the DOJ for prosecution - bypassing a full vote from the Senate. 

"Seeking the truth is not a witch hunt," Paul said be fore the vote, per the WSJ. "Accountability is not vengeance. Accountability is what stands between the American people and a repeat of the mistakes and the very real consequences of the past." 

The Committee's top Democrat, Sen. Gary Peters, called the investigation "one-sided from the beginning," claiming that "Information has been selectively released to support conclusions that the chairman reached years ago." 

The minority keeps trying to hijack the Fauci hearings with the lie that we haven’t shared the records from this investigation with them. This is a cop-out lie. This has been an intentionally open and transparent investigation. Not one Democrat on the committee cared enough to… pic.twitter.com/hHGtQDV5Ez

— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) August 6, 2026

Which of course is complete bullshit. Fauci funded the research, botched the response after COVID-19 broke out, lied about it under oath, and then pleaded the 5th when receipts came out.  

WATCH: Democrats across the board vote to protect Dr. Anthony Fauci. pic.twitter.com/y9xm1mFDbc

— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) August 6, 2026

Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., questions Fauci on Wednesday.Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

Or, as Paul wrote prior to the vote: "Dr. Fauci appeared under subpoena and invoked the Fifth Amendment to refuse answering questions. During the hearing, I ruled that the Fifth Amendment did not apply because of the pardon, and that Fauci had waived any remaining privilege by giving opening testimony. I ordered him to answer and warned him about contempt, yet he still refused. That is obstruction of a congressional investigation. The Committee will act accordingly."

PASSED BY REPUBLICANS ON BEHALF OF THE MILLIONS OF AMERICANS AND THEIR FAMILIES STILL AFFECTED YEARS AFTER THE COVID PANDEMIC, THE RESOLUTION TO HOLD ANTHONY FAUCI IN CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS HAS PASSED OUT OF THE SENATE HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE BY A VOTE… https://t.co/9wgO1KeMd2

— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) August 6, 2026

Meanwhile, the WSJ reported last night that the panel obtained a copy of Fauci's cell phone.

A Senate panel investigating Dr. Anthony Fauci has obtained a copy of the doctor’s iPhone, potentially securing even more records related to the doctor’s actions during the Covid-19 pandemic. The copy of the phone was transferred by the Department of Health and Human Services to the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is chaired by Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.).

This revelation comes just days after copies of Fauci’s journals were publicly released following their transfer from HHS to Congress. Two Republican senators, Johnson and Rand Paul of Kentucky, have increased pressure on Fauci in recent days to answer questions related to pandemic health measures and the origins of Covid-19.

The subpoena, issued in July, directed Fauci to testify on the committee's investigation into "risky life sciences research and the origins of the COVID-19 virus," according to the Epoch Times.

The July 29 hearing itself was a prolonged exercise in refusal. Fauci opened by accusing Paul of an "unhinged obsession" with him and claiming the sole purpose of the session was to trap him into saying something that would land him "behind bars."

From that point forward he answered nothing of consequence. Senators pressed him on gain-of-function research funding, the lab-leak evidence he had privately acknowledged while publicly promoting a natural-origin narrative, lockdown policies, school closures, personal financial awards solicited with federal employees on taxpayer time, and contradictions between his public statements and private diary entries. He declined them all.

Government Propaganda Is a Trojan Horse

    To be honest, governments around the world have always used propaganda. You do not get people to wage wars without it. But propaganda turns toxic when other sources of news are suppressed. If the risk of people believing "something else" grows, it tells you there must be something rotten inside the apple. 

   Propaganda in the US has always been "soft" as it was abutted by a strong social norm to conform. Explicit during the MacArthur years, implicit otherwise, Hollywood-like.   

   Europe had a freer patch from the 1970s to the 1990s. The youth rebellion of the 60s opened the gates which were more slowly closed post 9/11.  

   Then growth stopped in the 2000s which you couldn't see by looking at counterfeited inflation numbers but that people painfully felt year after year.  

   Then people started looking at the causes. Populism, proposed external causes, but in reality, excess spending to pander to the electorate was almost always the real cause, and the source of constant lying. You simply do not get elected by telling the truth to the common folks to paraphrase Jean-Claude Juncker: 'We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it.'  

   Then you start staring at the abyss. More contradictions, more lies, more of what doesn't work, suppression of the truth, legislation to cement the lies, criminalization of the truth. Cicero already described the process 2,000 years ago!  

   But if you read this blog, you already know this. Navigating between propaganda and slops is exhausting and slowly goad people back towards the mainstream medias as they give up the fight. Switching from one type of propaganda to another is likewise tiring. I have noticed this phenomenon especially acutely while going back to France recently where mostly what's left of the news is almost pure disinformation, often by fabrication but mainly by omission.   

   Just as the Jesuits in the Middle Ages who were not permitted to lie and ended up master of not telling the truth through countless subterfuges, our governments are slowly advancing the "science" of "mis, de, non, -information" so that in the end the only truthful fact left in the newspapers is the date!    

 

By J.B. Shurk (American Thinker) — Ignore the bureaucrats; listen to the free thinkers.

***

If the Trojan War were being fought today, the Greeks would not need to hide inside of a big, wooden horse and hope to be dragged inside Troy’s city gates.  They’d simply disseminate all kinds of lies on social media and wait for the Trojan people to fight each other.  Such is the power of corrosive ideas: They can destroy a civilization before its defenders understand that they are under attack.

Information warfare is the name of the game today.  It exists all around us.  Soundbites attack us from every phone, computer, tablet, and television screen.  Succinct messages ripple through social media platforms until people from opposite sides of the world repeat the same words without knowing why.

The most powerful bits of information are the ones that sound unquestionably true.  “Believe all women.”  “Black lives matter.”  “Build back better.”  Their simplicity assists their deception.  We certainly shouldn’t distrust women, right?  Who wants to argue that black lives mean nothing?  Surely nobody wishes to build something worse than it was before.  People hear the soundbites, nod their heads, and repeat those words to their friends and neighbors.  Some place signs in their yards with those three-word messages, as if they were brilliant expositions of fundamental truths.

Successful information warfare propagates ideas without triggering in those who receive the message any need for reflection.  Like the Greeks’ wooden horse, the communication is hollow.  It is intended to be just attractive enough that listeners drag the soundbite into their heads but sufficiently harmless in appearance to avoid real scrutiny.  Great propaganda does not conquer by force.  It seduces.  It knocks on the door, smiles, and charms its way into unsuspecting minds.  Then it waits — patiently — until the day arrives when it can do the most damage.

Effective propaganda, however, is inherently fragile.  Should anyone take the time to reflect on those three-word messages above, their magic spells are broken.  Once someone asks, “Don’t some women lie?” people remember that accusations matter less than evidentiary proof.  Once a person is shouted down for saying, “All lives matter,” it becomes clear that “diversity” and “equity” have nothing to do with equality and justice.  When anyone stops to ask, “What are we building, and why are we building it?” the World Economic Forum’s plans for a “new world order” stand naked and exposed.

In other words, thinking is the enemy of information warfare.  Those who engage in its dark arts see independent thinkers as missile shields that must be eliminated.  Reason and rational debate remain the most effective defenses against propaganda.  People who ask questions build forts for society with their minds.  The entrances to those forts are adorned with this sign: Come let us reason together.

Reasoned debate is not scary; on the contrary, it is the path upon which we walk toward enlightenment.  It is why people who demand complianceshould never be trusted.  Anyone who says, “The science is settled,” or, “Trust the experts,” seeks to deprive the listener not only of his capacity to reason but also of his prospect for salvation.  When we forsake the mental gifts that God has given us, we hobble our potential for spiritual growth.  Nobody has ever been redeemed for “just following orders.”  A good life comes from good choices, and good choices come from faithful contemplation.  In this way, attacks on free speech are attacks on our very souls.

When propagandists attack our souls from all directions, it is difficult to know who is waging war against us and why.  But there are telltale signs.  When groups and governments attempt to “cancel” individuals for their personal beliefs, they are waging war against individual conscience.

Sometimes acts of war are obvious, as when a British communist allegedly bludgeoned well-known conservative Ann Widdecombe to death with a hammer.  Other times, information warfare is more subtle, as when the British government banned Christian and Finnish politician Päivi Räsänen from flying through London’s Heathrow Airport because she boldly defends the Bible’s prohibition against sexual sin, something that both Finland and the United Kingdom have now officially criminalized as “hate speech.”  Along the same lines, the Polish government recently convicted a young, pregnant mother for the “crime” of speaking at a public rally against mass immigration.  Found guilty of “inciting hatred,” Oliwia Olejniczak has received a harsher punishment for expressing her opinion than many illegal immigrants have for committing rape.

When governments abuse their criminal justice systems to persecute Christians and mothers concerned about their families’ safety, the signs are clear: Those governments are at war with their own people.  When governments “cancel” citizens for their beliefs, politicians and bureaucrats identify for us which independent thinkers they most fear.  As is written in the Gospel of Matthew (5:10), “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”  When people stand up for moral truths — while bearing the brunt of their governments’ hatred — pay attention.  Those people are building forts for society with their minds.  Seek the shelter of those forts; then expand those forts to protect others.  This is the way to defeat government propaganda.

Those who engage in information warfare have a propensity for projecting their crimes onto the innocent.  This is why leftwing groups and governments accuse Christians of “hate speech,” while saying the most hateful things about Christians.  It is also why governments and NGOs insist on categorizing citizens’ dissenting speech as “disinformation” or “misinformation,” when governments and NGOs manufacture false information on an industrial scale.

There has never been a time in human history when self-appointed public censors turned out to be the “good guys.”  Communists, fascists, Nazis, and military dictators all believe in censoring public speech and rigging public debate.  The globalists, socialists, collectivists, and other Big Government parasites that have infiltrated and seized most national governments today likewise believe in censorship and the criminalization of dissent.  Information — whether true or false — does not belong to any one group of people.  Oligarchies are not filled with angels; they are filled with sinful human beings.

We saw how evil oligarchies can be during the COVID lockdowns.  Government bureaucrats and self-described “experts” told us explicitly, “Now is the time to do what you’re told.”  Western governments committed unforgivable crimes against their citizens in the name of “science.”  Australia rounded up people into “quarantine camps,” and we now know that pretend-President Joe Biden’s CDC was planning to do the same thing in the United States.

For eighty years, American schoolchildren have been taught that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII was an unconscionable violation of Americans’ constitutional rights that could never be permitted to happen again.  Yet it almost did happen again.  The U.S. government was preparing to imprison Americans who refused experimental pharmaceutical injections or expressed unapproved speech.  In January 2022, majorities of Democrats believed that “unvaccinated” Americans should be fined, locked in their homes, sent to quarantine camps, and imprisoned for questioning the effectiveness of the experimental injections.  A third of Democrats believed that the government should remove children from homes with “unvaccinated” parents.

How did we get so close to completely destroying the Bill of Rights?  Health bureaucrats and government authorities engaged in an all-out information war against the American people.  They pushed lies into American homes just as the Greeks pushed a wooden horse into Troy.  And their attack on the American people almost worked.  Americans hated each other more than ever before and nearly tore each other to shreds.  COVID was weaponized into the kind of irrational fear that destroys civilizations.

In the end, it was not the “experts” or government ministers who prevented Western civilization’s collapse.  It was the people who saw through the propaganda and refused to submit to tyranny.  The next time governments send a Trojan Horse, just light the damn thing on fire.

France's €107 Billion Deficit Shock: The Next Euro Debt Crisis?

   We have discussed several times already about the slow motion suicide of Germany which is destroying its industrial base and the cultural suicide of England.  

   France is another category of its own. 40 years ago it was a country of engineers from Polytechnique and other "Grandes Ecoles". These people built TGV High Speed Trains, Ariane rockets, Nuclear Power Plants and Airbus planes. 

   But at the same time, France was also fundamentally a "socialist" country, with a huge civil servant count (57% of employment) and an interventionist state addicted to deficits. Before the Euro, just like Italy, the country balanced its books by devaluing its currency regularly and generating enough growth thanks to its high productivity, which allowed it to compete. 

   But then the Euro arrived. It destroyed growth and exploded the deficits, so much so that nowadays they are literally incalculable and just computed at the end of each year. Twice, three times the European limit of 3%, who cares? The machine is out of control anyway and eventually the European Central Bank will pay for everything, right?      

   Or maybe not as Greece painfully learned. But France is not Greece and as the second largest "customer" of the ECB (European Central Bank), the country knows that when you owe too much to the bank, you are not prisoner of the bank, the bank becomes prisoner of you and is obliged to extend forever more "credit". 

   Everybody knows that such an arrangement is not stable and eventually unravel. It is just a problem for future generations. And then one day, quite suddenly, the future knocks at the door...  

France's €107 Billion Deficit Shock: The Next Euro Debt Crisis?

by Thomas Kolbe

Tuesday marked another low point for European fiscal stability. France, a cornerstone of the euro system, confirmed once again that it remains a leading candidate and potential trigger for a future euro financial crisis.

According to the French Ministry of Finance, the deficit of the French central government amounted to around €107 billion by the end of June. These are staggering figures – a deficit that is 14.4 percent higher than originally planned by the government.

Source

Unless the government builds a fiscal firewall and no economic miracle occurs, the central government deficit could rise to around six percent this year. Not included are the gaps in the social security system, municipalities and regions, which account for an additional significant share of France’s overall deficit. It is possible that the second-largest economy in the European Union will end the year with an overall government deficit of around eight percent.

All budget plans would therefore become obsolete. Last year, the government was already calculating with a deficit of five percent – a figure that, under the originally defined Maastricht criteria, should have triggered an excessive deficit procedure. However, the euro debt club has long abandoned any fiscal restraints.

The problem lies not only on the revenue side. While government revenues recently increased by around 3.7 percent, expenditures rose by 5.4 percent at the same time. The state is growing faster than the economic base that is supposed to finance it.

Despite tax increases and difficult negotiations over spending cuts, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has failed to slow down his country’s debt spiral even remotely.

French fiscal policy can no longer be taken seriously. Forecasts from Paris now have the half-life of the French prime ministers who have failed in increasingly shorter intervals.

The spectacle France is presenting to the world will have consequences. The debt struggle of the Grande Nation no longer concerns France alone, but the entire euro system and the European Union.

It is becoming increasingly clear that European policy over recent years has contributed to a dramatic loss of economic dynamism and productivity. France is facing political paralysis, a president without popular support and the ongoing disintegration of a society that maintains one of the largest welfare states in the world, with a government spending ratio of 57 percent, in an attempt to cover its social fractures.

Cultural alien migration has a price, and sooner or later that price inevitably becomes visible in fiscal policy.

France is also following the German model and constructing its own state economy through debt in an attempt to overcome a never-ending productivity crisis. It is remarkable that this belief in the healing power of central planning can be found throughout the European Union. Has nobody learned the fundamental lessons of history?

The more capital is redirected from the productive sectors of the economy into the construction of a political economy, the poorer the population becomes. This is how socialism works.

We know this pattern from Germany: The state is effectively consuming itself. The greater the damage caused by an expanding state economy in the productive sectors of society, the higher the tax burden and inflationary pressures will ultimately become.

Following this logic, France has raised several taxes over the past twelve months. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu shifted additional burdens primarily onto companies and higher-income earners.

The special levy on large companies with revenues exceeding one billion euros was extended and is expected to generate around €7.3 billion in additional government revenue. In addition, an extended special tax on high incomes is expected to bring in around €650 million. Further measures complete the tax package. Overall, the additional revenues are intended to reduce the burden on the French budget by around €9 billion.

https://www.reuters.com/business/what-is-frances-2026-budget-2026-02-02/

Yet even this fiscal effort is completely out of proportion to the scale of the budget problem. Tax increases are merely treating the symptoms – they do not solve the structural crisis of the French welfare state.

The problems are similar to those in Germany. There are no serious efforts to resolve the migration crisis, no fundamental reform of social programs and no strategy to create new economic momentum through tax relief for the middle class.

France resembles a slow-motion car crash. Everyone sees the collision coming, yet nobody still has the strength to soften the impact.

What happens if the bond market lowers the thumb on France’s creditworthiness?

The rating agencies have already sent warning signals. Fitch downgraded France’s credit rating from AA− to A+ and pointed to the growing debt burden, political uncertainty and the lack of a sustainable path toward stabilizing public finances.

https://www.reuters.com/world/fitch-abaisse-dun-cran-la-note-de-la-france-2025-09-12/

We are witnessing the first signs of a new euro debt crisis emerging on the horizon. Looking back, we must recognize that politics found it easy for a long time to exploit the fiat credit money system and the ECB, integrated into the political process, in order to maintain the illusion of unlimited political feasibility.

Regardless of where in the EU: Politics continues to uphold the illusion that the welfare system has no limits as long as the flow of credit does not dry up.

Reassured and lulled into a false sense of security, nobody questions the political strategy that led to the economic disaster. Yet these quiet times may soon come to an end as interest rates on bond markets continue to rise.

Fauci’s Pandemic of Vanity

   Fauci like Trump is the kind of people our society selects on its road to hell. People intoxicated with their own self, with no values or moral compass, almost completely unable to differentiate between truth and lies.  

   In the case of Trump, it is even worse since his "ideas" follow the rules of Ron Cohn his former mentor and attorney to never back down, attack, deny everything, never admit fault and always claim victory.  

   This failure of democracy was identified long ago by thinkers such as Menken. Initially, the institutions are strong enough to deal with such people, then "they" learn how to game the system. This is where we are today.  

 by Martin Armstrong

Anthony Fauci’s diary, in his own words, provides ample reason to conclude that this man became intoxicated by attention, obsessed with his public image, and disturbingly comfortable turning a national catastrophe into an Anthony Fauci celebrity show. While you were locked away in your home, glued to the television for answers, waiting by the phone for news of loved ones isolated from society, Fauci was basking in his status as an international celebrity.

On March 10, 2020, Fauci wrote, “For better or worse, I am becoming an international celebrity.” Twelve days later, while Americans were losing jobs and watching their businesses collapse, he recorded that the “press is going wild with me.” He then marveled that doughnuts were being named after him, T-shirts carried his face, songs were being dedicated to him, and celebrities such as Trevor Noah and Steph Curry wanted his time.

By May, the self-admiration had become impossible to miss. Fauci wrote that his fame was “explosive and really unimaginable,” adding that he was “the most famous and talked about person in the country.” Who writes that about himself during a mass-casualty emergency? He carefully documented his television profiles, invitations, celebrity encounters, praise from journalists, and even an invitation to appear on Dancing with the Stars. The country was terrified, children were locked out of schools, elderly people were dying alone, and Fauci was keeping a scrapbook of his own stardom.

His entry about Julia Roberts is particularly revealing. He recalled her exclaiming, “Oh my God. It’s Dr. Fauci,” calling him her personal hero, and expressing her delight at speaking with him. He did not merely record the policy discussion; he preserved every drop of praise. The diary repeatedly reads less like the working notes of a dispassionate scientist and more like the journal of a man thrilled that Hollywood had finally discovered him.

The media devoured the Fauci spectacle because he provided exactly what it wanted: a government official willing to sanctify its preferred narrative while treating dissenters as ignorant or dangerous. He appeared across television networks, newspapers, international publications, and glossy magazines, including a special InStyle digital cover photographed poolside in sunglasses while the country remained under pandemic restrictions. Time placed him among its 100 most influential people, Saturday Night Live had Brad Pitt portray him, documentary filmmakers celebrated him, and journalists treated access to him as though they were interviewing a movie star. The press did not scrutinize Fauci as a powerful federal bureaucrat whose decisions affected hundreds of millions of lives; it built a personality cult around him and then attacked anyone who refused to kneel before “America’s doctor.”

The diary contains even more evidence of how completely Fauci came to view himself as the central figure on Earth. On March 22, 2020, he marveled that there were “many print profiles and features on me” and that the “press is going wild with me.” Days later, he catalogued the doughnuts, T-shirts, songs, celebrity calls, and television appearances created in his honor, while in April he wrote that the press remained “hot and heavy about me” and saved a link to an Atlantic story titled “Why America Is Thirsty for Anthony Fauci.”

By May, Fauci declared that it was not hyperbole to call himself “the most famous and talked about person in the country” and “one of the most recognizable” people in the world. Even at the Kennedy Center Honors in December 2022, he recorded being “completely swamped” by people yelling his name and applauding, adding that he was amazed his recognition had reached “such a height.” This was not a passing observation about unwanted publicity; it was a meticulous, almost compulsive inventory of his own importance, written by a man who seemed unable to encounter a compliment, celebrity, magazine profile, or cheering crowd without preserving it for posterity.

Fauci later insisted that he was “certainly not getting a big head,” which is precisely the sort of sentence people write after devoting page after page to how famous, admired, recognizable, and important they have become. This does not prove a clinical personality disorder, but it displays the traits ordinary people associate with extreme narcissism: grandiosity, hunger for admiration, hypersensitivity to criticism, contempt for opponents, and relentless attention to personal status.

The sickest part of this story is that Fauci’s celebrity required the pandemic to continue dominating public life. Every new restriction, frightening prediction, television interview, and conflict with Trump kept him at the center of the national drama. He became more than a bureaucrat; the media transformed him into an untouchable secular saint, and his diary strongly suggests that he loved every minute of it. Americans were ordered to sacrifice their livelihoods, freedom, education, and family relationships while the man presented as “the science” sat behind closed doors recording just how famous the suffering had made him.