The Next Five Weeks

    Sometimes, quietly, the tension rises until its reaches a paroxysm. It looks more and more that we have entered such times. 

   Debt has been rising for a long, long time but this is very much part of the credit cycle and it could still go on for a while, unless interest rates keep rising in which case as with a receding tide, we will soon see who is swimming naked (and cannot refinance.)  

   Likewise, tensions around the world have been increasing markedly recently. This is also to be expected with dwindling resources. Think about it, 3 years ago, the Houthis, actually Ansar Allah, were little more that a ragtag army in sandals. Now, it's a force to be reckoned with. 

   And then of course there is Iran, the last of the seven countries the neo-cons planned to destroy which unlike the others didn't go according to plan. It would have been a good idea to study geography and history before attacking, to realize that the Iranians were not Arabs but the proud descendants of the Persian empire and that their country's borders were forged along impregnable mountain ranges during countless battles. This would have made the rally around the flag more predictable.

   Now Trump is facing, military, political and economic disaster. What will he do? He is flattering himself about being unpredictable which few people count as a virtue in political circles. Will he use nuclear weapons? Very unlikely but not completely impossible. Will he contest the results of the mid-term elections? Almost certain since in his mind a defeat can only be the result of the democrats shenanigan. And then of course there is the economy. The whole edifice of debt is balancing on the illusion that the AI bubble will never pop: "This time is different!" It never is. 

   When all these black swans flock together in a few weeks, the chance of history accelerating will be huge. How high is the waterfall? Nobody knows. The interaction of diverse unrelated factors as well as the rule of unintended consequences will decide. It could be higher than most people expect.     

Post by Eric Peters

It’s just over a month until the midterms elections. Normally, the result would be a change of guard and nothing more. But these are not normal times due to the abnormal man who plunged this nation into a war that has already had catastrophic economic consequences and that will soon have political consequences even more catastrophic.

Almost anything could happen between now and early November.

One thing that is likely to happen is an escalation of the war. People who know something about war – such as Col. Doug MacGregor – believe the current lull is just that, a temporary pause before a major resumption – a go for broke attempt to win the war that Israel and its Golem-proxy (that’s the United States) have lost so far.

The abnormal man openly talks of “annihilation” and total civilizational destruction, which all-but-says the “N” word. That this man was not netted and taken to a mental hospital is a barometer of the abnormality of our time. MacGregor says the Golem-proxy (the United States) does not have the army or the conventional power to achieve the win the abnormal man so badly needs to salve his sense of himself as the Greatest Field Commander of All Times (to borrow an honorific bestowed by Wilhelm Keitel upon the Austrian corporal, who – in his defense – actually did conquer most of Western Europe). The abnormal man is no Austrian corporal, much as he probably likes to think of himself as the latter entering his hometown of Linz after the Anschluss.

If the “N” word is used, it won’t matter whether there’s a changing of the guard. People will be preoccupied by other matters.

Well, what if the current drift doesn’t shift course and if – as expected – the reds are douched in favor of the blues? If that happens, is it beyond the ambit of reasonable speculation that the abnormal man will declare the douching invalid and disband the Congress and become America’s version of Keev’s president for life? It is a matter of public record that the abnormal man admires the little man who rules Keev as its “president” without elections. The latter hipped the abnormal man to the way you avoid elections.

You have a war instead.

When you have a war, you can also rule by fiat – or truth social post, via Natalie Harp, who is the abnormal man’s almost-50-years-younger Geli Raubal (who was the Austrian corporal’s niece, who had an unnatural relationship with her much older uncle). Not only is it within the ambit of possibility that the abnormal man will declare a blue douching to be “fake” and so invalid, it may well be an example of 55D chess that his supporters say he’s playing while the rest of us dopes play checkers.

The play being to trigger the mass unrest that they need to shit-can whatever’s left of the “freedoms” we still have. To usher in the 24-7 Palantir Panopticon they’ve been rushing to build, curiously accelerated to Warp Speed after the abnormal man got re-elected by pretending to be a populist and getting more than half the country to believe it – which is (to his credit) an astounding achievement. Here, after all, we have a New York Democrat, a reality TV show host and member of the world wrestling hall of fame who declared the “emergency” that led to four years of extreme abnormality – including the first-time-ever use of mass coercion to push people into submitting to being injected with strange drug cocktails, the full effects of which are as yet not fully known. This man managed to convince truckers, waitresses, plumbers, electricians – the help, as it were – that he is One of Them. That he cares about them.

Can you imagine the guffawing behind close doors?

The doors have been cracking open just a bit lately. The abnormal man increasingly does not bother to hide his contempt for the decent, ordinary people who thought he was One of Them. Or – at least – that he didn’t hate them. Like all of the rest of them. They now know better, too late.

A perfect storm is brewing. It is one of those thunderheads Lenin was talking about when he said “There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.”

It is likely we are currently in those weeks, right now.

The End of Europe

   We keep coming back to this theme of the decline of Europe but the continent thanks to its lack of foresight and investment in the future looks more and more like the obvious casualty of the current energy crisis.  

   Prices are rising much faster than people can keep up with guarantying massive unrest later this year if the trend does not revert which is highly unlikely. Likewise, the high price of oil is slowly giving place to shortages exactly as was predicted 6 months ago. Go figure! 

   What did Europe do about this looming and predictable crisis? Exactly nothing. Lukewarmly supporting Trump on his Iranian misadventure and doubling down on restrictions of Russian gas and oil, shooting itself in the foot in the process.   

   Energy and commodities are not incidental lines on a balance sheet, they are the linchpin on which our whole modern economy depends. Remove cheap energy and your industrial strength unravel in a few short years which is exactly what we are witnessing especially in Germany. 

   The most amazing is that while this is happening almost nobody in Europe is showing much concern... well, beyond managing the rise of the AfD in Germany and LePen in France of course. 

by Philip M. Byrne, CFA  GeoVest at: https://geovestadvisors.com/ 

I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies – Thomas Jefferson

Europe is failing. Europe’s leadership is preparing for war to cover their mistakes of the past fifty years and the people aren’t having it.  Europeans don’t want war and to date, Russia has been unwilling to be provoked into a wider conflict. 

It’s obvious to anyone who knows anything about military campaigns that Russia lacks the logistical capacity to invade Western Europe.  Their domestic semiconductor fabs are 25 years behind the West which means they are unable to fight a modern war.  Besides, Western Europe is a hollowed out economic shell that offers no advantages to Russia and innumerable headaches.

Northern Europe has outstanding defensive militaries, backed by NATO.  Eastern Europe has Poland with their massive, modern army which is more than capable of blunting Russia if it somehow gets past Ukraine.  Turkey’s massive army sits on Russia’s flank.

It would take an extraordinary level of credulity to paint Russia as a military threat that warrants mass mobilization of Europe’s limited industrial base.  Regretfully, it’s not stopping them. 

All Wars Are Bankers Wars

War is a racket – General Smedley Butler (US Marines)

Europe is run by bankers and politicians; every other economic power center has been marginalized.  Green energy policies, pushed by bankers and politicians, have destroyed domestic energy production in Germany and Britain and have left the regional economy dependent on high-priced, imported natural gas, and ultra-high-cost renewable energy.  The result is a regional economy that can no longer compete on world markets.

The German Mittelstand, the economic rock that Europe is built on, has been decimated by these disastrous decisions.  The Mittelstand refers to the small, private or family-owned businesses that represent the excellence of German engineering and manufacturing and employs roughly 60% of Germans. 

These businesses are being tasked with shifting from domestic products to military products, to fight a war that is unlikely to start.  Many of their industrial inputs such as natural gas for chemicals and metallic inputs were formerly sourced from Ukraine and Russia but now come from new and more expensive sources.

The Mittelstand, already decimated financially, needs to re-tool and find new input sources, which will require massive capital investment.  To make this happen, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Union, has proposed using €10 trillion from household bank deposits to fund this capital investment, claiming these deposits are “idle” and “lazy”.

The people who destroyed the European economy in the first place want the voters to turn over their savings to fund a fool’s errand.  They want to fight a war that has no reason to be fought other than to bail out bankers and politicians.     

The scary thing is that European leaders would rather risk destroying the world than loosen restrictions on the pan European economy.  They can’t think of any better ideas than World War III.  It’s little wonder that voters in Germany, Britain, and France want the current leadership voted out.

There is no appetite for war in Europe.  The bankers and the politicians have failed the European people and will not be allowed to destroy the world.      

Whither the Euro?

It’s the invincible arrogance of Europe’s elites that gets me.  These are people who have seen the euro collapse.  These are people who are presiding over a migration crisis on their borders, and yet do they ever acknowledge that they need to change?  No.  They say that they need more integration, more of our money, more control over this country – Michael Gove

The euro was created to compete with the US dollar in global trade and ultimately replace it as global reserve currency.  The euro was initially introduced at $1.18 for each €1.  Over 27 years, it has remained roughly the same – presently $1.14 per euro.

Yet at the start of the GFC or Great Financial Crisis of 2008, the euro hit just under $1.6 per euro when it appeared that the Federal Reserve was losing its collective mind, only to fall dramatically since that time.  That was Europe’s opportunity to replace the buck and they failed.  They won’t get another chance. 

  

Von der Layen’s plan risks driving domestic savings out of the Eurozone into other currencies such as the dollar and yen.  If this happens, the value of the euro in currency markets will fall, making it much harder for the remaining European manufacturers to shift to arms production.  Inflation is already decimating European consumers, a drop in the euro would accelerate an already untenable economic situation forcing consumer inflation even higher.

The timing is yet to be determined but the conditions have been set; the euro is going to break, not the US dollar.  Within ten years, Europe will be irrelevant as an economic bloc and the euro, if it’s still around, will resemble the Indian rupee.   

Twilight of the Central Bank Model

The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments – Ludwig von Mises

Central banking is a British invention and it started with the Bank of England in 1694 although it can be argued that the Knights Templar represented the first central bank in history.  Their power was seemingly destroyed in 1307 by King Philip IV of France.  I believe the power of the European central banks and their offshoot, the Federal Reserve Board, are presently facing an existential fight.

At the heart of central banking is the process of money creation.  National governments borrow from central banks and pay interest on that money.  Central banks, which are largely private institutions, make money by creating more money.  They are incentivized to expand money supply.

My formative years in the investment business were built on the belief that central banks needed to be independent to prevent runaway inflation.  The truth is the opposite. 

Central banks loot economies and destroy them.  We can see this in Britain, France and Germany where prices have been driven too high to compete.  That’s when industrial activity is exported to the lower cost venues, hollowing out the economies that supported borrowing in the first place.

The Fed is in the process of destroying the US economy.  The country is littered with former industrial cities and towns, a testament to the destruction wrought by bankers.

The chart below shows US government debt over my lifetime.  Everything has been inflated and monetized and now we’re left with the financial wreckage of excess debt and a hollowed out industrial base.

 

It was both political parties.  JFK issued silver certificates to counter the Fed; he was shot.  Ronald Reagan was exploring a return to a gold standard, not coincidentally, he was shot.  From George Herbert Walker Bush through Joe Biden, US Presidents ceded power to the Fed incrementally until we got to our present condition.

M1 money supply has grown by 80% since 2020.  This represents cash and checking and it is the reason consumer prices are much higher.  The chart above shows how that money got there.  It also shows why our capital markets have remained elevated.  It’s not sustainable.

The only part of the yield curve that global central banks can impact is the long end – 7 years and up.  We can see the spike in 10-year bond yields below.  This doesn’t indicate rising inflation expectations; it represents the death throes of global central banks desperate to derail the efforts of the US to drain dollars out of global money markets. 

The inflation damage has already been done during the years 2020 through 2024.  US dollars are being drained out of the global economy and re-invested in the US.  The US is effectively sucking the lifeblood out of the global central banking system.  I view the rise in long term bond yields as a generational buying opportunity because interest rates will be forced down to 0% in the US before long. 

Eurodollars

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake – Napoleon Bonaparte

I wrote a piece called the Main Event that discusses the draining of the Eurodollar market in detail.  Here’s a link: https://geovestadvisors.com/the-main-event/  The Cliff Notes version is that the abundance of oil and natural gas developed in the US shale fields has resulted in the reversal of energy flows from into the US to out of the US.  Inversely, this redirects US dollars from moving out of the US to moving into the US, leaving global central banks bereft of US dollar assets.

US dollars are being drained out of Europe and Europe’s international banks in London, Paris, Zurich, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt.  The war on the international drug trade by the US military is destroying the profitability of European banks which regretfully, rely heavily on this ugly trade. 

The City of London and UK Crown dependencies launder an estimated 40% of the world’s illicit trade.  Banks in Paris, Rome, Zurich, and Amsterdam also feed at that trough.  By cutting them off from this lifeblood, these bad actors are going to be sharply curtailed in power and global influence.  Central banks in Europe are rapidly losing the ability to move markets around the world.

Globalism was created by the Bank of England and other European Central Banks but those banks are being marginalized in global matters, particularly since their regional economies are fractions of their former relevance.  The pan European economy has been over-harvested by bankers and politicians as discussed previously. 

Food and energy are traded in US dollars and the European banking establishment is watching those dollars head back to the US.  Every oil tanker or LNG tanker that docks in the Port of Antwerp drains dollars from European banking coffers.  Without dollars, European banks decline in relevance.    

European central banks have relied on hidden swap arrangements with the US Federal Reserve Bank to supply them with US dollars when they are short.  I expect increased scrutiny of these arrangements by the US Treasury going forward and if those swap arrangements are curtailed, the euro is going to drop like a stone versus the US dollar.

Here’s the same chart from above with some lines marking important levels.  If the euro falls convincingly below parity with the US dollar, it’s game over.  The Europeans have relied on their extraordinary influence with the US Congress for 200 years but that influence is rapidly waning. 

As Europe goes, so too goes globalism and the central bank model.  This is why they need to drag the world into a war.  It’s their final lifeline.

Conclusion

In politics, stupidity is not a handicap – Napoleon Bonaparte

Europe isn’t going to disintegrate; it will cease to matter.  Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as Scandinavia have bright futures.  Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain have serious problems.  The money has run out for those trust fund babies

The US has been hampered by European influence since the beginning.  Presidents such as Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, McKinley, Kennedy, and Reagan have tried to limit European influence in banking and policy but the connection was too strong. 

As the US melting pot integrates the world into our hybrid genetic mix and as European bureaucrats destroy what’s left of their economy, the connection is finally breaking.  Good riddance!  Without the US, the global central banking model finally fails and with it, the artificial asset inflation that is preventing the US economy from renewing itself.    

The financialization cycle is over after 125 years.  The future is about re-building a destroyed industrial base, not about trading crypto and Mag 7 stocks. 

What's Really Behind The AI Panic...

   The case for panic is real but it shouldn't be about AI itself but about what the AI bubble exploding will do to the economy. 

   As we have argued countless times, the case about alignment is misleading. What we are creating are intelligent entities, close or even already beyond human capabilities which consequently will find great, and mostly misaligned solutions to the challenges we throw at them. 

   The purpose of intelligence is by definition to find original solutions, so AI as its capabilities grow, will come up with more and more original ideas, some we might not like. This is unavoidable and an intrinsic part of the discussion. 

   Of course the AI companies know this perfectly well, including the fact that the bubble is about to pop and that they must urgently find an exit otherwise, although the AI will be fine, their IPOs with 100+ P/E ratios will never materialize. 

   The question remains: with the military, financial and medical sectors already extracting as much as they can from an anemic society, can we afford to add a few more AI leeches to the club?      

by Mark E. Jeftovic via Bombthrower,

They want you scared, stupid and subservient...

Just heading into mid-September, a purported moral panic broke out amongst the frontier AI leaders that their own products were "too dangerous" and so the only remedy would be for the government to regulate all AI models.

Weeks earlier, Bernie Sanders had introduced The Ban AI-Superintelligence Act, that would make it illegal to create an AI model that was more intelligent than humans, going so far as to prescribe a 20-year prison term for any person who did and the "corporate death penalty" for companies.

Sanders' Bill is truly the domain of dystopian sci-fi. It reminded me of an episode from the ill-fated Twilight Zone reboot ("Examination Day") which culminated in a distraught couple mourning their child, who had just been exterminated by the state for testing too high on his pre-adolescent IQ test.

It all started with a "resignation in public" tweet from one Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic employee, on September 8th posted his parting thoughts on X, stating that AI could exterminate humanity within 10 years.

One of Anthropic's trust and safety leads, Evan Hubinger, then endorsed the tweet, citing a "non-zero chance" of 10% or more that such an outcome was possible.

That original resignation tweet, now closing in on 200 million views, which emanated from a heretofore unknown X account, less than a year old, with no followers, and two name changes in the last six months went absolutely viral - with some well-timed, fortuitous boosting from some of the biggest "AI Alignment" personalities on the internet, and then the Wall Street Journal came out with an "exclusive" on the story, ....which actually went live on the WSJ site 18 minutes before Coxon's tweet.

Before long Sam Altman said we "definitely" need more government regulation on AI and even Elon Musk chimed in and agreed that the frontier labs should be reviewing each other's models for safety.

Within days a full-blown hysteria was underway - for me it bore all the hallmarks of mass formation psychosis or at least a well-organized attempt to manufacture one.

Within a week, King Charles was speaking at an AI Safety summit at Buckingham Palace, urging government oversight and increased regulation of AI...

"Surely we need sufficient means of control before it is all too late?" the King ruminated.

Also, that guy behind him, looking rather pleased with himself, is "Tino" Cuéllar, Anthropic's Chief Global Affairs Officer.

The "AI Safety Summit" itself was announced on September 7th, leaked via Politico - the day before the Coxon tweet that ignited what had become at this point, a global(ist?) furor.

Even the Pope weighed on AI safety, and not to be left behind, Bill Gates hit the Sunday talk circuit this past weekend with another doozy of a soundbite:

"AI is powerful enough to cause a billion deaths" - which means we need to turn control of it over to politicians and a new class of global inspectors."

Several things about this relatively sudden AI panic did not pass the smell test, among them, the facts emerging around Coxon himself, who had "barely been at the company long enough to find the bathroom" (as the All-In guys put it), turned out to be neck-deep in the "Effective Altruism" movement, a well-connected network of young WEF types, which espoused global governance over potentially harmful technologies like AI.

He had received scholarships and grants from the EA Infrastructure Fund, the Long Term Future Fund and was a fellow at the Newspeak House in London (yes, newspeak).

Who are the Effective Altruists?

Effective Altruism (EA) is a movement that purports to "use evidence and quantitative reasoning to identify the most consequential problems and direct resources toward reducing them".

Love the euphemistic language (it's actually what ChatGPT will use when you ask it). The punch line for the EA raison d'être is, as usual, a society ordered under expert, technocratic management - their expertise, their management.

One of their earlier recruits was Sam Bankman-Fried, whose FTX empire was run by a cadre of EAs at the top and who seed-funded Anthropic as the lead investor with $500M of a $580M Series B round in 2021.

A recurring EA strand is its fixation on existential risk from advanced AI, advocating stronger safety research, governance, and oversight to reduce the chance of catastrophic or irreversible outcomes.

We've all seen this movie before, with global warming, then with Bitcoin mining (causing more global warming) and now, AI exterminating humanity.

The common through-line is that the "problem" is some unfalsifiable calamity that could happen someday and for which the only logical response is to put a bunch of globalist technocrats in charge of... well, everything.

What people didn't seem to understand, then or now - is that the problem isn't really about the problem - I've long reported on proposals that would make personal choice and individual liberty things of the past, because letting people think for themselves would be "too dangerous" for the problem at hand.

Global warming meant personal carbon quotas, limits on travel, even living space, according to some "degrowth" advocates, how many new outfits you could buy.

The panic around Bitcoin mining wasn't about that, it was about energy - and who gets to decide how much you're allowed to consume and what you can use it for.

Bitcoin mining today, Netflix tomorrow. Why not? Once you concede oversight to some external authority for one form of energy use, you've tacitly done so for all of them.

The problem that politicians and aspiring technocrats see with AI is that it grants the rabble cognitive superpowers.

More specifically, open-source AI does.

Frontier models are proprietary. They have guardrails, training biases and actively scan and filter your conversations for potential safety issues. It's arguably their purview to do so.

But it's the open-source software movement that is the unfiltered Promethean agent here and just you wait - we'll soon see what the ultimate target of this AI Doom cult really is: open-source LLMs.

That is why the frontier labs are gleefully courting government oversight - not because their own products are "too dangerous" (if so, then why are you going public?) but because oversight instantly creates an AI oligopoly - a cartel, namely Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, on the inside - and everything else, effectively outlawed - at least that would be the preferred outcome.

This is the exact playbook I've told you about in the past, one that was described to me personally by an EIR from a Bay St. private equity firm in a meeting with two out of the four Big Four Canadian banks, back around 2015 - talking about Bitcoin:

"You get funded, you get out front, then you work with the government to create the regulations around it, and *BOOM*, you get to turn around and pull the ladder up behind you"

I still remember the look of absolute glee on his face when he got to that last bit. When I got home, I took a shower.

What To Do About It

I've been dutifully building out local compute capacity - both at home and thanks to our CTO, easyDNS now has a modest GPU farm out at our main datacenter.

I make it a point to download the latest open-weight models, Qwen, GLM, DeepSeek - which are, ironically, all Chinese...

But that won't last. In fact, it's already changing. We recently had "another country heard from" with the Japanese NII LLM-jp-4, Swallow, PLaMo and Rakuten AI 3.0 models weighing in.

France has Mistral, even Canada (yes, Canada) has Cohere Command A+ (my SolomonAI demo was, in case anybody needed to be told, a joke):

And from elsewhere in "Big Tech," there are Google's Gemma 4.0 and IBM Granite.

Any of these models could be used to start iterating software, weights, and the next generation of more powerful open-source LLMs.

In other words, it's over.

The incumbent ruling caste basically sees this, and viscerally realize that the entire edifice of Industrial Age institutions are ripe for existential disruption. I've written about this many times. We're transitioning from a linear, top-down world to a network-shaped, decentralized one.

So the next best thing they can do, since they can't put the genie back in the bottle, is to convince the masses that AI is bad, and rogue AIs are going to literally exterminate humanity.

Hence the AI doom psyop (with another wave breaking out right now around swarms of rogue AIs), and, of course, this has become a political issue.

Now, the same people who were wearing N95 masks in 2025, adding their pronouns to their names, putting the Ukrainian flag in their bio, keying Teslas and stomping around in "No Kings" parades are now protesting data centers.

They want you scared, stupid and subservient, instead of spending your time creating software, building out your personal business empires, not to mention analyzing public data and proofreading all these hypothetical models they use as a justification for incessantly changing the rules.

What they really need are legions of frightened and stupid voters, not cognitively supercharged and wildly entrepreneurial or creative cyberpunks.

AI Doom vs AI Boom is a choice, and the choice is yours.

Europe on the Brink

   Walk around any European large city nowadays and you will be surrounded by the beauty of architecture created centuries ago during times of earlier prosperity. Madrid is baroque, Paris Haussmanian, London Georgian, with its unmistakable columns. All beautiful but misleading. 

   Look closer and the idyllic pictures enjoyed by throngs of tourists look less charming, with dirty and smelly sidewalks, immigrants sleeping rough and graffiti everywhere. The crowds are mostly old and grim, the younger generations with their discolored hairs overwhelmingly obese, sucking on their latte while walking aimlessly, the working people are sitting on the steps of their office blocks eating cheap lunch boxes. Cosmetically, the scenery has improved over the last 20 years but the people inhabiting it have degraded.   

   Move away from the center and you enter the spiritless zone of 1960s and 1970s  brutalism where run down concrete blocks form the large majority of the urban scenery although of course you will find no tourist there among the mostly Muslim crowds of recent locals. Where the tourists are conversely, and truckloads of them, is in the beautiful old towns like Florence, Amsterdam and Prague or the beach resorts  with most shops selling souvenirs and cheap rags.          

   Difficult in fact to find a better display of decline where the surrounding stays the same but the software running it, is accumulating bugs and defects, year after year, slowly rendering the whole less and less functional.   

   For the vast majority of pensioned senior citizens, living in such a world is relatively pleasant although this large scale "waiting for your own demise" seems to be infectious, making the place less cheerful.  

   The real question is how long can this last? Not investing in the future is in fact a rather nice condition in the present since you can enjoy the day without worrying about the future. But eventually the future comes.  

   A future where the AI will be Chinese or American, the products made in Vietnam, the crowds will not speak the local languages, energy will be gone and competitiveness a distant memory. Such a doom vision is pervasive but nobody wants to speak about it. 2,600 years ago when the Jews were weeping "down the rivers of Babylon, while they remembered Zion", the rest of the crowds were probably enjoying themselves quite a bit watching the sunset between the ziggurat and the Euphrates likewise ignoring the impending end.  

Trump Rejects Iran 7-Day Ceasefire Plan, Likely To Renew Bombing After Midterms

    Trump is stuck. There is no way out of the Iran war which would not be extremely painful politically. The right time to exit was a few weeks after the start of the conflict when he realized he had made a mistake and that the Iranians were circling the wagons. 

   The real question is: Was it going to happen anyway? AIPAC is not a new entity and has been working its way through the American political system for decades to the point that now almost all American congressmen are bought. 

   Likewise, Epstein did a splendid job for MOSAD by entrapping those who couldn't be bought. Trump is obviously one of them. Where are the files by the way? 

   More fundamentally, as we discussed in the previous article, when countries make mistakes they always tend to double down instead of retreating. This is both the case for Trump as well as his instinct to never admit wrongdoing. This may work in real estate but in politics, it is deadly. Many ruined cities under the sands were once the capitals of proud empires who made a wrong move and in a few short years were history. Xi Jinping must have been smiling inside when hearing that America was back on top, although his own country is not out of the woods and the fall of the mighty American empire will not be without nasty consequences for everybody else.   

Trump Rejects Iran 7-Day Ceasefire Plan, Likely To Renew Bombing After Midterms

Summary

• Trump rejects Iran proposal: WSJ

• Tehran denes reports of 'technical talks' after it proposed 7-day roadmap to end the war and (eventually) restart nuclear talks.

• Hormuz reopening discussed in exchange for US concessions in NY, including lifting the blockade. 

• Tehran seeks sanctions relief, declares will hold to conditions, including restored oil exports and access to frozen funds.

• US-Iran talks reportedly show progress, with Qatar helping bridge differences.

• Escalation risk remains: Iran threatens a broader response - to 'spread war to Indian Ocean' if attacked again.

Strait of Hormuz traffic returns to normal by December 31?
Yes 27% · No 74%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

Trump Rejects Iran's 7-Day Ceasefire Proposal

That was fast--huge late Friday night bombshell via The Wall Street Journal:

President Trump has rejected Iran’s proposal for a seven-day ceasefire and has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran after the November midterms, U.S. officials said.

Tehran’s proposal would have reopened the Strait of Hormuz and resumed nuclear talks in return for the U.S. lifting its blockade of Iranian ports, which is causing deep damage to the country’s economy. Trump says openly that Tehran is begging for a deal after the midterms that dismantles its nuclear program.

But privately Trump is skeptical Iran would meet his demands and has told his staff that he sees a renewed bombing campaign as likely, the officials said. 

Where do we go from here? So much for oil prices being artificially kept down, as the entire Friday drop is set to be erased.

Trump is reportedly expected to resume bombing Iran after the midterm elections, WSJ says.

OR, is this a classic Trump 'tough' negotiating ploy? The hardliners in the IRGC are unlikely to play ball.

The Friday Afternoon Denial

Via state media Fars:

Axios and Al Jazeera's claim about Iran-US talks denied, reports Fars; News regarding another round of talks is false, and claims technical experts from Iran were sent to NY to join the talks, is untrue

This was either the result of more premature or false Axios reporting, or else there's a possible in strategy divergence between IRGC vs. presidential delegation in New York. More from Fars:

IRGC Spokesperson says we will not stop punishing the US until Iran's seven conditions are met; our missiles are capable of destroying America's multi-layered defenses, Fars reports

'Technical Talks'

Are we back to headline ping-pong pushing down oil prices?

Latest: Iran-US negotiations in New York have moved beyond initial diplomatic contacts into a more detailed technical phase, with sources in Tehran describing the atmosphere as increasingly positive, CBS reports, citing Al Jazeera.

And an official Iranian caution, or possibly even brush off, in reaction... Tehran signaling it intends to stick by its original conditions:

Senior Iranian official says Strait of Hormuz will remain closed, no nuclear talks with US until Iran's conditions are met, Reuters reports, citing sources; Iran will make no concessions on its nuclear program

AJ: A US official told Al Jazeera says Washington is in a strong position and controls the Strait of Hormuz, therefore we are not in a hurry to reach an agreement with Iran

For a rehash of what's played out over the last 24 hours on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting:

• Iran's proposed seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz if the US drops its blockade is being discussed as an accelerated version of a previously discussed 60-day process, and would include urgent measures to get both countries back into direct negotiations over Iran's nuclear programme.
• The key Iranian demands under discussion include sanctions relief, the lifting of restrictions on oil exports and access to frozen Iranian funds.
• The two sides also continue to discuss arrangements for the Strait of Hormuz, including whether Iran and Oman could return to a form of joint management under an agreed framework involving regional countries and the United States, as well as arrangements governing the passage of US vessels.
• Despite the outstanding issues, sources in Tehran characterised the negotiations as making some progress, with talks continuing and Qatar working to bridge differences between the two sides.

Also, President Trump has just said he discussed the Iran conflict with China's Xi.

And crude tumbles...

BUT...

Independent Iranian Journliast Ghaderi reiterates that the narrative presented by some US media is incomplete

7-Day Roadmap Proposed

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi has newly proposed to the US side a seven-day roadmap aimed at ending the war, while the top Iranian delegation is still in New York City engaged in deep diplomacy on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Aragchi is said to be planning to stay through the weekend while waiting on a US response to the plan. So far it seems Tehran hasn't backed down from its core conditions, and its roadmap proposal is said to closely parallel the 14-point Memorandum of Understanding that was signed by President Trump back in June, but which has since completely collapsed. The plan is new but is still being largely seen as just repackaged.

"Araghchi stressed that Iran was ready to begin putting the plan into effect as soon as Washington agreed to it," Al Jazeera reports.

Interestingly, also last night Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told journalists, "We don't want it to get to the midterm elections." He added: "We wish Americans to return to the MoU before the midterms." Here's where things stand in terms of Iran's position being represented in New York:

• Iran's Foreign Minister Araghchi said the Strait of Hormuz can reopen if certain conditions are met by the US and that it would be better to implement before the Midterms, according to a Sky reporter.
• IRGC spokesperson warned in the event of another attack, Iran's method of defence will change including geography of the confrontation, the type of equipment and weapons used, and targets in defensive operations in line with new conditions.

This contradicted Trump's words given to the UN General Assembly during his speech. He said "They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election."

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly had in follow-up to Trump's address said, "The President is courageously ensuring that such an evil country never possesses a nuclear weapon, which will make the entire world safer and more stable."

Iran has said it will not be 'bullied' - but Pezeshkian appears to be offering something on the nuclear front alongside this seven-day roadmap overture, or at least according to a future timeline assuming a ceasefire is agreed to.

He explained in a Fox interview that in accord the framework of international law, Iran could give eventually up highly enriched uranium. But he was also fundamentally using the moment to highlight who is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty - Israel.

Pezeshkian further said it was up to the United States to choose when the war would end. "It's America that must choose whether it wants to end this or not," Pezeshkian said in response to a question by Fox's Bret Baier.

Tehran has meanwhile said it is ready to escalate, and even spread the war beyond the Persian Gulf region, into the Indian Ocean for example (where the UK-US have the Diego Garcia base).

Further UNGA Highlights

Recap of some of the highlights from the UN this week, via Middle East Eye:

• The US-Israeli war on Iran and the Israel-Palestine conflict continued to occupy prime positions on the fourth day of the UN General Assembly. Somali President Mohamed Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said his country was "suffering" as a result of the US-Israeli war, which has driven up the price of energy and food. Meanwhile, European Union Council president said the EU supports efforts to “find a solution to the conflict". He added that "freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz must be preserved without conditions and without hindrance".

• Crown Prince of Kuwait Sabah Al Khaled condemned the "illegal Iranian aggression" in his address to the UN Security Council on Thursday. Kuwait was one of the Gulf states hardest hit by Iran in retaliation for the US-Israeli war on the Islamic Republic. Kuwait is home to tens of thousands of US troops and military bases. US facilities in Kuwait were attacked along with civilian sites like Kuwait airport and energy infrastructure.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a pugnacious speech at the United Nations General Assembly, attacking everyone from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the leaders of Western Europe, as he tried to counter Israel’s growing international isolation. 

• Meanwhile, hundreds of protesters took up positions around the UN headquarters before Netanyahu's arrival and continued protesting while he spoke inside. Support for Palestinian statehood and disappointment over the ongoing attacks on Gaza were repeatedly brought up during the event.

• Vice President of Yemen Abdullah Abdulkader al-Alimi-Bawzer condemned the Houthis in his address to the UN General Assembly and tried to rally the global community to help fight the group. He said the government of Yemen had supported a peace initiative backed by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Oman, while the Houthis rejected it and "instead escalated their actions in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb to serve an Iranian agenda".

Overnight Developments Recap

via Newsquawk

• Iran Foreign Minister Araghchi said Iran presented a proposal to US through mediators this week to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restart negotiations towards a final deal, while it called for US to meet certain conditions within 7 days, according to CNN.
• Iranian President Pezeshkian said in Fox News interview that Iran does not want a nuclear bomb. They reached an agreement with the US President that was signed, and are still ready to move forward based on the same principles, adds it wasn't Iran that closed the Strait of Hormuz and it was open. They didn't seek war and that it was imposed on them, while they don't seek war but will defend themselves. They didn't start the war but will respond decisively.
• Iranian President Pezeshkian said Iran is ready for an agreement with the US and makes demands only within the framework of international law and could give up highly enriched uranium if it reaches an agreement with the US, according to TASS.
• Iran's President Pezeshkian said Tehran wants to revive its ceasefire memorandum of understanding with the US before the November midterm elections, saying Iran does not want talks delayed until after the vote. said:. Iran is open to inspections of its nuclear facilities and denies that Tehran is seeking to assassinate President Trump or his family.
• Iran's Foreign Minister Araghchi said the Strait of Hormuz can reopen if certain conditions are met by the US and that it would be better to implement before the Midterms, according to a Sky reporter.
• IRGC spokesperson warned in the event of another attack, Iran's method of defence will change including geography of the confrontation, the type of equipment and weapons used, and targets in defensive operations in line with new conditions.
• Iranian Brigadier General Sheikh said "we seek to expand our capabilities and reconsider our tactics and technologies", via Al Mayadeen.
• Sources say a return to the June 18 memorandum of understanding between Iran and the US is no longer sought by either side, with both seeking amendments to some clauses, further complicating negotiations, Al-Akhbar reported.
• Pakistan's Defence Minister said intensive efforts are underway to establish a mechanism for ending the conflict as quickly as possible and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, according to Tasnim.

Will We See Western Capitals Fall?

    No, unfortunately, we will see absolutely nothing. Decadence is relentless but a slow motion process. Decades after the fall of Rome, in many parts of the empire, most people still considered themselves citizen of a Roman empire which was already gone. It is a mix of adaptation and not wanting to see. 

   What's going on in Europe is almost exactly the same. The hollowing of economic capacity, the invasion of "barbarians" and the ideological drift. 

   Very few Europeans, even today consider that Net Zero is a mistake. They truly want to "save" a planet which doesn't need saving. China is proving that by investing in the right technologies while maintaining the old ones, the energy transitions is much smoother and faster but to no avail. "CO2 bad, electric good" is ideology. The whole industrial might of Europe, especially in Germany, is dying on that altar but no awakening will happen until it is too late. The British are just realizing that their defense industry is almost completely dependent on its "enemies". Go figure. Or rather don't. Isn't it what happen when almost everything is gone which is the case in the UK? How do you re-industrialize when the engineers are gone, the knowledge evaporated and the factories closed? This is the circle England must now square. Good Luck!

   Let's not talk about the immigrants in Europe but to say that the wound is self inflicted and just as Net Zero, entirely ideological. Then how do you get rid of them when most are now second or third generation born locally? There is no solution. There was no solution either for the Germans in Roman times. Most were living peacefully on the border regions often representing a majority of the legions' armies. They were romanized and moving in and out of the Roman border which for them was nonexistent since German tribes were living on both sides. In reality, when you look closely, we can only talk about an invasion in retrospect. Up close, nothing much happened except people reacting to economic incentives just as they do today. Only later were some of the tribes pushed by the Hun but mostly they migrated peacefully to areas which were mostly empty founding new settlements.     

   The worst side of these problems is the unwillingness to actually see reality. This once again is due to the ideological aspect of anything "social". You basically cannot talk people out of a general consensus which has been formed over decades. Most societies prefer to fail vaingloriously than recognize their mistakes. Voices of reason exist. They are just not listened to. 

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Consider these recent news headlines:

(1) "NYC Turns Back to Gas Buses After Finding Out the Hard Way That the Electric Versions Have Big Problems,"

(2) "As a Former Head of MI6 it's Clear That Britain's Climate Policy is Leaving Us Dangerously Exposed to Our Enemies," and

(3) "Spain: 74% of sex-crime suspects are foreigners in Basque Country."

 

They come from three different Western nations and involve three dissimilar subjects - public transportation, national security, and violent crime - yet each news story exposes the real-world consequences of government failure:

(1) In order to pursue "Net Zero" carbon goals, New York dumped a ton of money into electric buses that are too expensive and entirely unreliable for the city's needs.

(2) Britain's former top spy is finally ready to admit publicly that his country's delusional obsession with "climate change" has devastated the United Kingdom's capacity for industrial and energy self-sufficiency, rendering the former superpower dependent on foreign adversaries for future survival.

(3) Even though foreigners make up only 10% of the Basque region's population, they account for 74% of rape arrests, 73% of homicide arrests, 95% of drunk-driving arrests, 80% of theft arrests, and 78% of violent robberies.

What's so striking about these news stories is their "well, duh!" factor. An ordinary, rational person would have no problem predicting the failures of a citywide electric bus fleet, the offshoring of a nation's critical industries, or open border policies that invite foreign invasion. Yet mayors, governors, and prime ministers have pursued these catastrophic programs anyway, while heads of espionage agencies and millions of government bureaucrats either support their harmful decisions or shamefully stay silent.

The middle article links to the transcript of a speech that Sir Richard Dearlove delivered to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London last week. It was a good speech concerning an important subject, and Dearlove deserves some credit for articulating a point of view that goes against the powerful flow of "politically correct" Western orthodoxy. But he gave this speech from the comfortable perch of quasi-retirement with little to lose aside from a few honorary board positions. Where was his voice when he was in a position to actually do something about the U.K.'s suicidal energy policies?

In his speech, Dearlove explained how his Cold War experiences taught him "that the country's war-fighting potential resided in its industry, that our most vulnerable link was the fuel chain...and that our industrial base could be rebuilt and repaired." Now, however, there is "very little industry left to protect, and we cannot rebuild non-existent industries which lie in foreign jurisdictions beyond our reach." Dearlove concluded that the U.K. must "rebuild the strategic industries we require to ensure that we can defend our island fortress and be a reliable ally to friendly democracies around the world."

These are absolutely true statements. Blue-collar workers throughout the West have been making these arguments for fifty years. Had an ordinary Brit with few credentials been in charge of MI6, that person would have been screaming profanities and ringing alarm bells long before the U.K. closed its last coal mines and steel factories. Shouldn't that embarrass Britain's "ruling elites"? And if it doesn't, shouldn't "ruling elites" be considered a danger to the public's prosperity and security?

Long-overdue, post-career wake-up calls bring to my mind President Eisenhower's 1961 Farewell Address during which he warned Americans against the growing dangers from an emerging "military-industrial complex."

Although his turn of phrase continues to be used sixty-five years later, it would have been nice if the former Supreme Allied Commander and five-star general had used his two terms as president of the United States to tackle that problem before it got completely out of hand. Eisenhower certainly had the expertise to see its destructive potential more clearly than most, but he chose to outline the threat on his way out the door and leave it for others to solve. Some historians believe that parts of the MIC had a hand in President Kennedy's assassination, and if that is true, then Eisenhower's failure to promptly act had extraordinarily far-reaching consequences that included the death of his successor.

The generations of Americans who were born after Eisenhower's tenure have given him much credit for recognizing that the symbiotic relationship between Big Government and Big Business was evolving into an unconstitutional and anti-American oligarchy that we know today as the "permanent bureaucracy," the "ruling class," or the "Deep State."

Perhaps if the American general-turned-president had neutralized the Deep State in the first decade after WWII, we would not have endured some of the worst chapters in recent American history, including the Vietnam War, the debasement of the U.S. dollar, the FBI's soft coup d'état against President Nixon, fifty years of "global warming" con games, sixty years of mass immigration from third-world nations, NAFTA's industry-killing bloodbath, China's entry into the WTO, the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks, the Global War on Terrorism, Obamacare's government takeover of medicine, the Russia Collusion Hoax, the COVID information war against the Bill of Rights, numerous rigged elections decided by unlawful voters and mail-in-ballot fraud, multiple assassination attempts on President Trump, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, leftist-inspired violence against conservatives, and the Democrats' manufactured AI fearmongering going on today.

Diagnosing problems without taking concrete steps to solve those problems produces a perverse phenomenon:

The worse unsolved problems become, the more prescient the person warning about them appears.

Toward the end of Dearlove's speech, Britain's former top spy argued that the government of which he was an integral part had monumentally failed:

"The first responsibility of government is the safety of the nation. However, successive governments have forgotten this, and Britain is now caught in an energy trap of its own making. As with rebuilding our armed forces, it will take a significant national effort to extract us and bring us back to a position of safety. The task is urgent."

This is certainly true.

The question is why so many successive governments in the U.K. and across the West have betrayed their own citizens and made their nations much less safe.

Because normal citizens would never have offshored their own industrial and manufacturing jobs to adversarial nations such as communist China.

Normal citizens would not have conspired with transnational human trafficking gangs to import tens of millions of unassimilable illegal aliens.

Normal citizens would not have imposed "green energy" regulations that make it harder for farmers to grow food and for businesses to pay their bills.

Normal citizens would not mandate that unreliable electric vehicles replace internal combustion engines while power grids crash due to insufficient supplies of wind and solar energies.

These kinds of policies are so obviously foolish and suicidal that only our credentialed "ruling class" could justify them.

Does that tell us that our bureaucrats are too stupid to keep our nations safe, as Dearlove rightly recognizes as the first responsibility of government? Or are these self-destructive national policies proof that Western bureaucracies are waging war against Western citizens?

Certainly Western governments are guilty of failing their peoples. The only question remaining is whether their failures stem from a combination of incompetence and hubris or treason and malice.

As Western citizens ponder that question, they are quickly taking matters into their own hands.

Spaniards in Ceuta are destroying government shelters built for foreign invaders.

A British village has voted to secede from the U.K. after the government announced plans to house an army of foreign immigrants next door.

The price of government betrayal might soon be the fall of a Western capital.

Recognizing problems is not good enough. Governments that cause more problems than they fix do not deserve to survive.

Greenland Mining Company Plans To Double Size Of Rare-Earth Mine As US Signs Agreement

    Don't get fooled, Greenland is the noise, the real battle of the 21st Century is over resources. Not just oil which powers everything or almost, but all resources: Land, water, air, minerals, metals, fertilizers and especially the most complex to acquire; rare earths.

   We have already entered a period of penury so what we will see over the coming years is not a steady rise of prices but a tumultuous dance between production constraints and demand destruction resulting in very sharp and violent rises followed by drastic falls when demand falter. This is unavoidable and already what we are witnessing. 

   Governments are not panicking yet. They are wrong. They should. Later is always too late. It takes a decade to build a mine and upstream constraints can easily wreak havoc with an unprepared economy which is currently the case everywhere, both in the West and where factories run on lean supply chains. 

   And then of course there are rare earth metals which are hard, difficult and expensive to produce and also happen to be indispensable to high tech industries. I suspect that one of the main reasons why the US cannot increase easily its military production of advanced weapons is due to the new export limits from China. (But this being strategic to the highest degree, you probably won't hear much about it in the media.)

   Finally, the unmistakable rise of tensions all over the world is also intimately linked to resources and as they dwindle and by nature become more difficult to produce (the law of declining return on investment which guaranty that we extract the cheapest ore and resource first), wars are bound to break out both in likely and less probable places, again as we are seeing right now. Buckle up, the roller coaster has reached the top.      

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

Days after President Donald Trump announced a security agreement with Greenland and Denmark, Greenland Mines applied on Sept. 21 to double the size of its rare earth mine to supply magnet metals needed for electric vehicles, wind turbines, and defense systems on the island.

The North Carolina-based company's Sarfartoq rare earth district in southwest Greenland would expand from 74 square miles to about 175 square miles if approved.

"This application is about building Sarfartoq at district scale," said Bo Moller Stensgaard, president of Greenland Mines in a statement.

Greenland Mines is developing a rare earth neodymium and praseodymium project that could reduce the Western Hemisphere's dependence on China for the magnet rare earth minerals. China-based processors control at least 75 percent of the global market for all rare earth elements.

The Greenland Mines project is expected to produce about one-third of the world's neodymium-praseodymium oxide refined outside of China, serving as a key source of the rare earth ingredients needed for energy, transportation, and defense technologies.

China's export restrictions on rare earths have driven prices up in the past year. The Trump administration has focused on supporting and investing in domestic rare earth operations, but a supply of ore is still needed, according to Greenland Mines.

With the signing of the security agreement, Trump said no U.S. adversary could "make sensitive investments [in Greenland] without our express written approval."

"Greenland hosts some of the largest known undeveloped rare earth deposits in the Western world, and a framework that screens adversary capital out of the island makes those deposits more clearly available to allied supply chains," the company stated Tuesday.

Greenland Mines' project includes an open pit and underground mining operation at the site. Initial assessment of the materials at the mine estimate the value at about $2.05 billion, according to the company.

The project would produce rare earth elements used in high-performance permanent magnets.

Critical metals stocks surged Monday on news of the deal, and Greenland-linked market shares rallied when the markets opened.

Greenland Energy, a privately owned Texas company, has an agreement to drill on the Jameson oil and gas project in the Jameson Land Basin on the eastern coast of Greenland. The company, founded in 2025, began shipping drilling equipment to Greenland in late July.

Greenland Mines’ expanding Sarfartoq rare earth district in southwest Greenland. The existing exploration license, outlined in yellow, hosts the Sarfartoq Carbonatite Complex, the ST1 neodymium-praseodymium deposit and several known but less-developed rare earth zones. The new eastern exploration license application is shown in red. Greenland Mines LTD

Critical Metals Corp. is developing the Tanbreez Rare Earth Project in southern Greenland - one of the world's largest deposits with a high concentration of heavy rare-earth elements.

The company's Romanian refinery is also expected to process about 28,000 tons per year of rare earth and critical metal products, including 26,000 tons of high-purity silicon dioxide powder, or silica, used in food, pharmaceuticals, paints, plastics, rubber, ceramics, tech, and electronics.