Today’s piece is one of the largest free newsletters I’ve ever written, and pulls together the last six months of my work.

And it all starts with a question: how much do you trust Sam Altman? The stock market and (to some extent) the global economy rests on your answer.

You see, OpenAI has become one of the largest liabilities in recent economic history. You can argue that OpenAI’s no longer the focal point of the AI bubble — you can talk all you want about open source models or Anthropic or any number of other elements — but without OpenAI, the AI industry doesn’t exist, and the justification for trillions of dollars of capex evaporates.

The AI bubble isn’t a result of any actual return on investment — whether that be in purely monetary terms, like revenue or profitability , productivity gains, or anything tangible or measurable. Rather, it’s an episode of cult-like psychosis that infected the brains of some of the most powerful and wealthy individuals and institutions, where the powerful mythology of a company inspired — and been used to inspire — the greatest capital misallocation in history.

As much as this’ll piss some people off, I fully believe that the only reason this has kept going so long is that OpenAI has yet to collapse. Its failure would be a watershed moment — the Lehman Brothers of the AI bubble, and an event that would define the end of one epoch, the start of another, and that would shake the afflicted out of that psychosis. Absent this wake-up call, NVIDIA has continued to sell GPUs, the coffers of the semiconductor industry have continued to swell, and more and more spending commitments have been made.

Look. OpenAI intends to burn over $852 billion by the end of 2030. It accounts for $748 billion of the remaining performance obligations of Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle, on top of at least another $70 billion of RPOs across Cerebras, CoreWeave, Nebius, IREN, Lambda, and Nscale (per Kakashii), and plans to spend indeterminate billions’-worth of Broadcom “Jalapeno” chips. It intends to spend $50 billion or more on compute this year, which I estimate is more than 50% of all global AI compute spend (with OpenAI taking up 50%+ of all AI compute infrastructure).

OpenAI can only afford to pay that as a result of its latest (assuming it fully closes) $122 billion funding round, of which it has received at least $50 billion, with $20 billion from SoftBank (of $30 billion, with the third tranche due October 1, 2026). NVIDIA mentioned in its latest quarterly earnings report that it “estimate[d] that one AI research and deployment company contributed to a meaningful amount of [its] revenue by purchasing cloud services from [its] customers in the first quarter of fiscal year 2027,” referring, of course, to OpenAI.

The AI Bubble Is An OpenAI Bubble — To A Mortal End

OpenAI is the reason anyone cares about AI. In March 2019 (per JustDario), NVIDIA bought a company called Mellanox that made the high-speed networking tech necessary to create AI GPU clusters, and four months after that, Microsoft invested a billion dollars in OpenAI and started buying AI GPUs and building AI infrastructure for it. By March 2020, NVIDIA would ship its A100 GPU, and in May 2020, Microsoft would announce it had built a supercomputer just for OpenAI with “more than 285,000 CPU cores [and] 10,000 GPUs.”

The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 came at the perfect time for a tech industry that had run out of ideas and was flirting with a prolonged depression. The IPO market had collapsed, interest hikes killed the Zero Interest Free era dead, pandemic era overhiring began to unwind with some of the worst layoffs in the history of the industry, global venture funding dwindled after historic overinvestment in 2021, and tech stocks took a massive beating.

For the first time, the tech industry was forced to cut its cloth in accordance with its means — something which it has historically been loath to do. Big tech was unpopular, both with investors and the general public. The excesses of the past decade — combined with the growing frustration with, for lack of a better word, “tech exceptionalism,” where it believed that the rules which governed the rest of the world didn’t apply to Silicon Valley — had tested the patience of both regulators and lawmakers. And, in the absence of “one more thing” — a big, splashy, game-changing product category — it no longer had an excuse for its prodigal spending, or its regular breaking of the rules, both written and unwritten, that govern society.

The existence of OpenAI justified an era of mania and opulence. Hyperscalers, bereft of new hypergrowth ideas, were able to point at the fact that ChatGPT had “the fastest growing userbase of all time” and the Microsoft “supercomputer” that built it and tell their investors that if they didn’t invest, they’d be left behind, with Amazon, Meta, and Google announcing their own nebulous “supercomputers” in 2023.

By the end of 2023, NVIDIA had sold 500,000 A100 GPUs, and the only reason it did so was because of ChatGPT’s rapid growth. Sam Altman’s brief ouster only sought to inflate the AI bubble by adding a layer of dull palace intrigue to a tech industry bereft of whimsy or character — and helped further entrench Microsoft’s role as the paternalistic benefactor of OpenAI, which made sure that Altman returned to the helm.

To be clear, when I say “rapid growth,” I mean that OpenAI hit 100 million weekly active users by the end of 2023 and had about $108 million in monthly revenue. Microsoft would invest $10 billion more that year, with the majority of that funding coming in the form of credits to be used on Microsoft Azure.

OpenAI is also the reason that Anthropic exists — not just because multiple founders came from the company, but because both Google and Amazon both agreed to give it a total of $6 billion in 2023 as a means of “competing” with Microsoft’s new obsession, which allowed both to justify spending further hundreds of billions of dollars “to make sure they didn’t miss out on AI.”

When you remove the term “AI” from the equation, this all seems a little ludicrous. $16 billion in equity investment on top of what was, by the end of 2023, over $150 billion in capital expenditures, all of which was pretty much justified by the fact that a single website had been very popular.

And the only reason either of these companies were able to grow was because of hyperscalers bankrolling their entire infrastructure.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, global venture capital funding had dropped to its lowest levels since the third quarter of 2016, with American startups taking up $183.6 billion of the year’s investments. Venture capital alone couldn’t have — and wouldn’t have — actually backed OpenAI or Anthropic at the scale that was necessary to build their infrastructure, nor would there have been any of the hunger from hyperscalers or those providing debt for data centers without hyperscalers inflating both of these companies, almost entirely because of the success of OpenAI.

Remove OpenAI from the years 2020 through 2024 and the AI bubble wouldn’t have inflated at all. No other major AI companies showed any sign of life — not those peddled by hyperscalers, funded by venture capitalists, or those launched by other tech firms.

The only reason that any hyperscaler AI efforts have any revenue — and outside OpenAI and Anthropic it’s pretty meager! — is because they knew they could just sit there and keep saying “AI is the future” until their customers eventually gave in and tried it…largely because everybody was talking about ChatGPT.

Anthropic was considered an also-ran until early 2025, and only continued to get funded because people wanted to invest in the next OpenAI, and Anthropic’s initial funding rounds and infrastructure buildout were only justified in terms of competing with OpenAI.

Those $178.5 billion in US-based data center debt deals in 2025? Pretty much entirely justified by the growth of OpenAI and its rapacious hunger for compute, because outside of OpenAI (and eventually Anthropic), nobody else was using massive clusters of tens of thousands of GPUs, nor does a market for compute at that scale appeared to have popped up in the months and years since.

The largest consumers of compute remain Microsoft (for OpenAI), Google (for Anthropic), Amazon (for OpenAI and Anthropic), CoreWeave (for OpenAI and Anthropic), Meta (which is copying what the other hyperscalers are doing), and Oracle (for OpenAI). Otherwise, there’s very little evidence — and boy, have I looked — that there’s more than a few billion in demand for AI compute, and that’s being generous.

All of those investments — both in AI startups and data centers — existed to fund either the next OpenAI or become the next OpenAI’s landlord.

The assumption — because nobody ever thinks things through — was that because one OpenAI existed, many OpenAIs would bloom. That because one large customer of compute existed, the template had been built for future compute-intensive startups…and, again, because nobody ever thinks about anything, nobody ever stopped to realize that the reason there isn’t another OpenAI is because OpenAI and Anthropic are financial psy-ops by the largest software companies in the world.

OpenAI and Anthropic Are Hyperscaler Psy-Ops Built For The Monoculture of Silicon Valley

The grim truth is that you can’t venture fund an AI lab. While OpenAI and Anthropic have raised nearly $300 billion in the last few years, their actual infrastructure costs — the GPUs and the data centers to power their services — were entirely funded by hyperscalers, likely costing another $250 billion in the process, given that Microsoft has said it spent $100 billion on its OpenAI relationship as of early 2026.

Yet the real cost wasn’t just financial, but the experience and industrial know-how to actually execute on a massive infrastructure bailout. Other than Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, nobody else has the scale or experience to build the kind of AI clusters that OpenAI (and eventually Anthropic) needed.

We know that for a couple of reasons. First, because prior to 2023, there were few — if any — companies actually building AI computing clusters at the kind of scale demanded by OpenAI or Anthropic. The closest thing that one could point to were crypto-mining firms, and it’s telling that many of the neoclouds today (most famously Coreweave) started life running warehouses full of ASICs to mine Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Second, because, based on conversations with people in the data center industry, the whole Overton window of what is considered to be a “big” facility has shifted. Previously, a 50MW data center would have been considered a significant (even noteworthy) development. These were the exception, and not the rule, with most data centers being vastly more modest affairs. The only companies which had any experience building at that scale were, for the most part, hyperscalers.

By treating OpenAI as a “venture backed startup,” hyperscalers created the illusion that this was the next type of big company that would in turn create the next great demand center in cloud computing, except the only reason that these companies existed was because of the hyperscalers themselves willing them into existence, funding them with incredible sums, and allowing them to burn as much money as they’d like.

This is why the idea that OpenAI will continue to grow infinitely is central to the mythology of the AI bubble. The existence of one OpenAI allows others to — no matter how illogical — imagine the existence of more OpenAIs, which in turn means that those OpenAIs will need just as much compute as OpenAI.

The dimwitted investor who believes this tripe can justify it through any number of different buy-side analysts or captured members of the media that talk about the “insatiable demand for compute,” pointing to capacity constraints (caused by slow data center construction and — hah! — OpenAI and Anthropic taking up much of the world’s compute) and increasing GPU prices as proof that actually, there’s tons of demand, all without ever really thinking too hard.

The greatest trick that hyperscalers played was never backing down. By sinking more than a trillion dollars into AI capex without ever showing a single dollar of profit, they justified literally anyone investing in AI data centers under the logic that “the largest companies in the world couldn’t be wrong,” even if the reason they were doing so was to expand capacity for OpenAI and Anthropic, who the hyperscalers themselves incubated.

It is fundamentally illogical and insane for hyperscalers to have spent so much money on AI infrastructure, and the reason that few people will say so is because it was, until recently, considered radical to suggest that this was a waste of money, almost entirely because of the existence and continued growth of OpenAI.

Sidenote: while I realize Anthropic has taken up a lot of attention and grown rapidly in the last year, it’s only been able to do so A) because of the mythology of OpenAI and B) because it too was incubated and allowed to run at a massive loss too.

Whatever utility you may or may not get out of LLMs is irrelevant because it has not, for the most part, been what actually underpins data center investment. While accelerating gains in code generation (itself something that could have only happened without vast subsidies) might have helped grow Anthropic, the vast majority of data center capex has been built chasing the dragon of what AI could be rather than any connection to the revenues or economics of the companies at large — outside, of course, their compute spend.

This is the underlying greed that has driven this wasteful, reckless and destructive era — the belief that there will be another OpenAI and, as I’ve said, the chance to become the next OpenAI’s landlord. And because the media and analysts very rarely have original ideas, everybody justified (and justifies) the waste through the same tired mantras, saying it was “just like Uber (nope!)” or “just like Amazon Web Services (between 2003 and 2015, Amazon spent $29.7 billion on capex, normalized for inflation).”

And like any great investment bubble, the more money that piled in, the greater the fear of missing out, the more dollars that can be justified in turn, and the more-complex and deranged the mythology becomes, which is why you have noted venture capitalists claiming that AI labs have “90%+ inference margins,” a completely unproven statement that AI boosters cling to and repeat often enough that it’s taken as gospel, likely to avoid thinking about the fact that you can burn $14,000 in tokens on a $200-a-month ChatGPT subscription.

This kind of mythology only grows in an environment deliberately deprived of good information. The fact that we’re four years into this horrible bubble and still don’t have consistently-held consensus around the actual costs of large language models is a testament to an industry-wide effort to suppress them.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have done everything in their power — based on discussions with sources familiar with their infrastructure — to obfuscate the actual underlying costs of their operations, and Silicon Valley, an industry of alleged free thinkers and individuals, is more than willing to accept whatever convenient myths might sustain their dreams.

And in the end, they all became useful idiots for hyperscalers. Their obsessive attachment to OpenAI — and by extension Anthropic — seems like a decision made under the auspices of “democratizing powerful AI,” all as effectively every dollar flows to either Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or Oracle, who in turn feed that money to NVIDIA or Broadcom, who in turn feeds that money to TSMC, SK Hynix, Samsung, or Micron.

Invest in an AI startup? They’re gonna be paying one of the AI labs, who will in turn pay a hyperscaler. Invest in an AI infrastructure company? That money will flow to NVIDIA, and then upstream to semiconductor companies. In the end, whether they die or get acquired (as none of them are going public), all of the value will end up in the hands of one of the hyperscalers who created this imaginary era, then helped inflate it into something very, very dangerous.

Why The AI Bubble Can’t Survive Without OpenAI

Yet the problem is that this industry cannot, under any circumstances, survive without OpenAI.

When people discuss OpenAI’s potential collapse, they act with pure cowardice either saying “it won’t be that bad” or say something vague about it “being too big to fail.”

If OpenAI — the company with the most money and the most infrastructure and the most attention and the most talent in AI — collapses, it will likely do so after AI data center debt and venture capital funding has been almost entirely exhausted.

You see, Goldman Sachs’ Jeffrey Papai recently noted that it will be “very difficult” to replicate the hundreds of billions of dollars that hyperscalers have raised in the last four years — $244 billion in 2026 alone if you include NVIDIA and SpaceX — which is a problem considering that they can no longer fund their data center capex using their cashflows as of Q3 2026.

And to be clear, hyperscaler capex doesn’t have to stop for NVIDIA to stumble. It just has to slow down meaningfully enough that Jensen Huang can no longer give investors 60%+ year-over-year revenue bumps, because the AI bubble is built on vibes, and it can only survive so long as those vibes don’t become sour.

Yes, yes, I realize there are other customers, but the vast majority of NVIDIA’s demand comes from hyperscalers, who are (for the most part) either building out their operations for OpenAI and Anthropic or simply copying what the other hyperscalers are doing (see: Meta and SpaceX).

Once hyperscalers stop spending money, banks that are afraid of “choking” on data center debt will see that a vast amount of capital is leaving the market and underwrite (or not, as the case may be) deals as such.

This will mean, at some point, that both OpenAI and Anthropic will be walking around with their hands out saying “money please!” at precisely the moment that everybody will be cutting back. While NVIDIA might get a little desperate and throw some extra cash their way, if revenues start collapsing, so too will its interest in further inflating the bubble as investors begin to ask whether any of this was real or one large circular financing scam.

While this is absolutely a problem for Anthropic — especially after its $35 billion debt deal with Broadcom — it’s much, much worse for OpenAI, which has (as mentioned) made $748 billion in compute commitments to some of the largest and well-lawyered companies in the world. OpenAI’s continued marketing efforts involve constantly refreshing rate limits around the launches of its most-expensive models, giving away millions of dollars of tokens to startups, and generally running the “grow as fast as possible and work out a business later” model into the ground at speed, all fueled and funded by Clammy Sammy Altman’s nasty habit of overpromising and underdelivering.

Clamuel’s biggest mistake was leaving the pearly gates of the hyperscalers and dancing with the mortals of Oracle, Cerebras, and CoreWeave. While Microsoft or Amazon might be willing to extend payment terms as a means of saving face and prolonging the inevitable, Oracle — a law firm with a software company attached — is more than capable of loud and aggressive litigation under any contractual breach.

Then there’s the fact that Apple is suing OpenAI after poaching multiple engineers for its hardware efforts and allegedly both coaching and coercing them into stealing trade secrets, which is all but certain to destroy any chance of OpenAI releasing a device in the next few years…and potentially the company itself. These are extremely serious allegations, with Apple also accusing OpenAI of trying to coerce trusted partners into revealing manufacturing techniques for iPhones — the kind of thing that can (and will) lead to brutal discovery and potentially criminal charges.

OpenAI also, as I’ve mentioned, needs to keep growing to keep up with those bills, and at some point will run out of real dollars to pay people, likely at exactly the time that it’s hardest to find more of them. While there might be billions of dollars left to be raised, to pay any of its bills, OpenAI needs tens of billions of dollars multiple times a year. Based on my own reporting on its audited financials from 2024 and 2025, OpenAI will need to raise funding at least three more times in the next decade.

To make matters worse, its free users have become a massive liability. While The Information reported that OpenAI expected to generate $2.4 billion in ad revenue in 2026, and $102 billion in 2030, it turns out that reality is a little harsher, with analyst eMarketer projects that the entire AI chatbot ad industry combined will only make $1 billion this year, with the entire market making $5.41 billion by 2030.

This means that the 900 million weekly active users of ChatGPT will remain a massive drain on the company’s finances, with only 5% or so of them opting to pay, and a projected 80% of its $20-a-month users expected to churn in 2026.

At some point, OpenAI will simply run out of money. It’s nearly exhausted every available source of capital, and now that it’s likely delaying its IPO to 2027 — largely in part because it couldn’t list at a $1 trillion valuation — it will have to raise again, potentially at a down-round valuation or at a modest increase which will, in turn, make it much more difficult for investors to see a return in an IPO.

Investors will likely ask questions like “why couldn’t you go public?” and “what is it that bankers didn’t like?” as Sam Altman looks at them like this:

You see, OpenAI is awesome at selling mythology and hype, but crumbles the second that its numbers have to face the cold, harsh light of day.

While it’s been able to skate by in situations like Altman’s ouster and its conversion to a for-profit, these were strictly legal situations that could be dealt with by lawyers and cheered on by the press. OpenAI has never faced a problem like “not being able to pay its bills” or “breaching a contract with a major company,” and I think these are an inevitability in its future.

Sidenote: Yes, yes, you’re going to say “buhhh, bailout (nope!),” but even if Trump were to funnel another $42 billion to OpenAI, it wouldn’t cover a year’s worth of compute in 2027, the year that I imagine the Hellmouth opens and swallows it whole. If your argument is that OpenAI is going to get nationalized or “the military funds it indefinitely,” you are catastrophizing as a means of pretending you have control over the future in a way that feels intellectually satisfying, all without any of the messy work of interacting with the horrors of reality.

In the end, OpenAI’s collapse will be a dramatic narration of the boring, horrifying economics of the AI bubble.

Let me explain:

• OpenAI’s collapse will be a direct result of its loss-laden economics — its doomed, loss-making subscriptions, its pathetic advertising revenue, and API costs that became a “huge issue” for its enterprise customers — and the fact that outside of the hype, AI lacks measurable ROI.

• When OpenAI eventually leaves CoreWeave, Cerebras, and Oracle in the lurch, there won’t be anyone else to pick up that compute.These are all debt-laden companies, and without meaningful revenues, they’ll struggle to service their obligations.

• When OpenAI dies — likely folding into Microsoft in the process — it will massively pull back on any and all compute demands, with the likely end of and free ChatGPT and a massive price bump across the board.

• OpenAI’s demise would also naturally call into question the rationality of investing in any AI startup. If the largest, best-funded, best-resourced company in the entire industry backed by the world’s largest software companies couldn’t make it, why would you believe somebody else would do so?

• The collapse of the largest company in the ecosystem would also seize up any and all AI data center debt (if any exists at that point), because the literal largest consumer of AI compute would be dead.

The AI bubble is inflated based on hype and hopium rather than tangible proof or substantial revenues driven to anyone outside of the semiconductor industry, and without NVIDIA’s massive returns, I don’t think anybody would’ve taken it seriously past 2024. Any and all achievements of the AI industry are a direct result of market psychosis, a broken media ecosystem, and a trillion dollars that could’ve been sunk into literally anything else, and must be evaluated as such.

The double-edge sword of a mythology-inflated bubble is that it’s much harder to sustain when said mythology dies. The AI bubble was able to grow to such a horrendous size because the markets and the media were willing to accept basically anything that Sam Altman or the greater AI industry said.

By waving away any economic problems as growing pains and dismiss those who would scrutinize it as haters or cynics, reporters and analysts provided investors with the justification to invest again and again in these companies without them ever having to make a real business, which means that, well…they don’t have real businesses, which is a problem when you need to actually pay somebody money that wasn’t given to you by a venture capitalist.

This will leave the AI industry short-changed in its most-desperate times.

The media is important for many, many reasons, but one of the biggest ones is that scrutiny is what keeps capital in check, for the benefit of humanity and at times the companies themselves. By choosing to pull their punches, ignore glaring economic problems and accept every projection with blind faith, the media empowers grifting and suffocates good businesses as a result, encouraging bad behavior and helping them raise unbelievable amounts of money at ridiculous valuations without worrying about having to make a good business. In some cases, the media even encourages them to do so, saying that “all startups lose money at first” instead of thinking about things for a fucking second.

When companies know they won’t face that scrutiny, they engineer themselves as such, putting off ever finding a real business model in favor of whatever will make them buzzy enough to get coverage and raise funding as a result. In a vacuum of skepticism, bubbles inflate, monsters get rich, and regular people always get left holding the bag. As a result, if companies ever bother to become a real business, they only do so at the very last minute, endangering anyone who has backed them and every counterparty in the event they’re incorrect.

When OpenAI dies, it will be after a prolonged period of desperate reorganization and attempts to appeal to investors and the media that it can, in fact, become a real business. These attempts — price increases, price cuts, selling off IP, nebulous circular deals, and so on — will all fail, and by the end, Sam Altman will have run through every single trick imaginable to keep the party going.

And when those fail, what do you think Perplexity does? How about Harvey? Cursor got the last chopper out of ‘Nam with the SpaceX acquisition (assuming it actually happens), but what, exactly, is Cognition, or Glean, or Sierra, or really any AI startup meant to say to compel investors to believe in them once OpenAI dies? That they’re different? That they’re gonna work it out after the company that got given basically everything it needed failed?

The entire AI industry’s sales pitch is that OpenAI opened the world’s eyes to the power of AI, and that giving the AI industry as much money as possible would end in economic abundance the likes of which we’ve never seen. Instead, we’ve got two AI labs that both lose billions of dollars, and the latest model from one of them randomly deletes people’s stuff.

It’s not like any of this was sold on actual ROI or real businesses or returns or productivity or any actual measurable thing other than physical infrastructure erected in its honor.

There are simply no compelling stories about the AI industry that can be told in the present tense. Everything is always based on the theoretical multiplicative power of just waiting a few more years, which becomes much harder to believe if the company with the Mandate of Heaven gets sent to Cocytus.

This will have massive downstream effects on basically everything and everyone connected to the AI industry. You won’t be able to raise money for a startup to spend money on compute, nor will you be able to convince somebody that your LLM wrapper will change the world, nor will you be able to justify a massive valuation. Venture capitalists fancy themselves as brave soldiers of the economy, but are really cowardly lemmings that will sprint for cover the second that things get rough.

Why Anthropic Is In A Very Similar Situation To OpenAI

I also keep hearing from people that Anthropic is magically safe from the AI bubble’s clutches, or insulated from its rotten economics. The amount of pure mythology and misinformation I read about this company on Twitter is genuinely offensive, and the fact that journalists have categorically failed to push back against it is proof that too few people give a shit about anything other than which boot they get to lick next.

Anthropic faces the same economic realities as OpenAI. It burns billions of dollars on training, it hides inference costs in sales and marketing, and the only real differences are that it focused more on coding and made fewer ridiculous infrastructure commitments…right up until this year, when it committed $200 billion in compute and hardware commitments to Google, raised $35 billion in debt from Apollo to buy Google TPUs, signed a $15 billion a year compute deal with SpaceX, and agreed to a 20-year-long, $19 billion lease with TeraWulf.

Much like OpenAI, Anthropic is also doing way, way too much. There’s Claude for Life Sciences, Claude for Legal, Claude for Small Business, Claude Design, and even, for whatever reason, reports that Anthropic intends to develop its own drugs — and instead of saying “hey man, what the fuck are you doing?” the media falls over itself to repeat and celebrate every single one as if they’re all viable or useful products. Anthropic is as messy, disorderly and unfocused as OpenAI, but has done a better job of convincing people that it’s somehow “ethical” as it fucks over its partners and farts out 200 new products a month.

This is a company that lacks focus or vision other than “more” and “bigger.” The only thing that differentiates OpenAI from Anthropic at this point is the nebulous promises of “AI code” and Dario Amodei’s Doom Trolling and safety theater.

The fact that the majority of the media made no efforts to push back against its shenanigan-rich “profitability” narrative is why we’re in this fucking mess.

Anthropic is an AI lab just like OpenAI. It uses GPUs, TPUs and Trainium chips. It trains models in much the same way to do much the same things, and builds quasi-functional plugins on top of them, just like OpenAI does. It makes big compute commitments, it had its infrastructure built out for it by hyperscalers, its CEO is annoying and beloved by cretins, and its value is largely determined by 1000 people on “X The Everything App” experiencing varying levels of AI psychosis.

Attempts to claim otherwise are tacit admissions that OpenAI is unsustainable.

The Victims and Consequences of the OpenAI Bubble

Please note that when I say “victims,” I don’t always mean “people you should feel sorry for.” In some cases I’ll be talking about real people who are facing the horrible consequences of the OpenAI bubble bursting, and for whom you should feel a degree of sympathy, and in others, I’m referring to various Patagonia gargoyles’ financial woes. I assume you’ll be able to differentiate between them.

Consumers, The Victims of A Great Memory Crisis That Sam Altman and OpenAI Helped Start

My last premium newsletter was the massive Hater’s Guide To The Memory Crisis, or the twisted tale of how three companies — Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron — have diverted meaningful amounts of manufacturing supply away from making the RAM you find in laptops and smartphones toward making the high-bandwidth memory that powers GPUs, jacking up the price of consumer electronics in the process.

To explain:

An AI data center is full of servers, which are in turn full of (for the most part) NVIDIA GPUs. Each NVIDIA GB300 has two B300 GPUs, the two of which have 576GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM, or HBM3e to be specific), and a CPU, which has 480GB of lower-power LPDDR5X RAM (the kind usually used in cellphones and other mobile devices). These systems tend to be sold in an NVL72 rack with 18 compute trays, bringing us to 36 GB300s, for a total of 20.7 terabytes of HBM and 17 terabytes of LPDDR5X RAM, and that’s before you get to the RAM associated with the high-speed networking gear and other associated components.

Because HBM takes up more space on a wafer — the slice of semiconductor material that is etched using photolithography (read: molten tin) and then cut into separate dies (individual chips) — and generally has much higher margins (the actual product its more expensive to make, but thanks to the triopoly of Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron, they can charge whatever they like, predominantly to NVIDIA), memory manufacturers are dedicating more space on their manufacturing lines to it than to regular consumer RAM, which allows (thanks to said triopoly) said manufacturers to charge effectively whatever they want for consumer RAM.

To simplify, the AI GPUs in AI data centers require hundreds of gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory, the CPUs attached to them require the same RAM as your smartphone, and the companies making all of this RAM are making huge profits by jacking up the price because of supply chain constraints that they themselves have created. That’s why Micron had 84.9% gross margins in the last quarter. The RAM triopoly controls more than 90% of the world’s memory, and can set prices at whatever rate they want.

These three companies were all fined over $100 million by the Department of justice back in 2002 for price-fixing, with Micron avoiding the fine by turning in its co-conspirators. Five years later in 2007, a Supreme Court judgment and resulting precedent (Bell Atlantic V. Twombly) drastically raised the bar for not simply winning an antitrust case, but even getting one to trial:

The Twombly Test/Rule was designed to raise the bar to civil legislation, so that defendants aren’t forced to comply with discovery in frivolous cases, which can be incredibly expensive.

While this seems reasonable at first glance, it makes it significantly harder to litigate any kind of antitrust action, because the market signals — whether they be pricing, or difficulties in new competitors bringing their products to market — tend to be the starting pistol on any action. The damning evidence — loose-lipped executives talking about their nefarious plans — tends to be something that shows up once the trial has progressed to the discovery stages.

This precedent would kill a 2019 class action case against SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron that alleged they had colluded to tighten the supply of the world’s DRAM, because despite statements from company representatives made at public events, their collective participation in certain industry groups, and observable pricing trends, the precedent set by Twombly meant that the plaintiffs required more than circumstantial evidence to bring something to trial.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that while I am not accusing Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron of price-fixing, a recent lawsuit is accusing them of exactly that:

The suit claims the alleged anti-consumer behavior started in 2022, when the companies began shifting production from SDRAM to HBM — something that, at that point, they made “no economic sense” except as a means to hike prices.

“This plan has thus far succeeded, as consumer purchasers of conventional DRAM and devices incorporating it have paid supracompetitive prices and have otherwise suffered the impacts of a distorted market crippled by the behavior of DRAM oligopolists,” the filing states.

So, what does this have to do with OpenAI?

Well, back on October 1, 2025, OpenAI, Samsung and SK Hynix announced a “strategic partnership” that would involve OpenAI buying 900,000 wafers of DRAM a month (around 40% of the world’s supply at the time) for Stargate data centers — something that never actually happened (it was a memorandum of understanding, and OpenAI also had nowhere to put them), but both SK Hynix and Samsung’s stocks immediately rallied, and Samsung happened to hike prices by 60% a month later, which could be a coincidence, or could have been the company saying “yeah, wow, we’re gonna run out of RAM I guess, better buy now at whatever price we have it!”

Another clue that this might not all have been above board was that Samsung was reportedly doing another deal with OpenAI in March 2026, “...to supply up to 800 ⁠million gigabits (Gb) of 12-layer HBM4 chips to OpenAI in ​the second half of this year” per Reuters, for use with Broadcom’s custom “Jalapeno” chip. Though it’s hard to calculate exactly how much that would be wafer-wise, from what I understand we’re talking in terms of less than 100,000 wafers total after OpenAI, Samsung, and SK Hynix said they’d be taking up 900,000 a month.

Regardless of whether OpenAI ever takes a single wafer of silicon, these deals existed to put the squeeze on any company that uses memory in their products — including NVIDIA, AMD and Broadcom — which in turn led to the most aggressive price increases in the history of consumer electronics. As I said last Friday:

The net result is pretty simple: every single consumer electronic of any kind is getting more expensive. Valve’s Steam Machine console debuted at a 30% higher price point than planned, Apple hiked the prices of its MacBooks and iPads and will likely have to do the same for its next iPhone. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony increased the cost of their consoles, and the PS5 and Xbox Series now cost more today than they did when they first retailed, almost six years ago.

And yes, OpenAI is responsible, both in its naked collusion with memory manufacturers to push an announcement that never resulted in anything other than price increases and its siren song that made every dimwit with debt desperate to build AI data centers.

Every single consumer suffers as a result. RAM is in everything, and it’s unclear when new manufacturing capacity will actually come online, as fabs are expensive and complex construction efforts and require tons of specialist talent, raw materials, permitting, land and power. SK Hynix Chairman Chey Tae-won said in March that the memory shortage would last until 2030, and he may be right, as a Bank of America report just said that SK Hynix may only be able to add a sixth of its planned capacity by 2028.

This means that the price of consumer electronics will be inflated for the foreseeable future, even if the AI bubble bursts. While capex pullbacks will eventually happen and by extension eventually lead to supply constraints easing, Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix had sold out their entire 2026 supply by the second week of January, and noted that they’d only be able to handle 60% of “medium-term” customer memory orders, which suggests to me that 2027 might be even worse, with a subtle clue being that SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung recently told Reuters that 2027 would be “the worst year in the industry’s history from a supply perspective.”

While the memory triopoly has every incentive to make things seem bleak to drum up business and sustain their margins, behind the scenes reports suggest they’re turning the screws on everybody.

Speaking with Steve Burke of GamersNexus for my podcast Better Offline (out next week!), I learned that consumer electronics companies have told him in private that they’ve never seen anything like this — and that the average purchasing experience for buying RAM now involves being told a price that you either accept or never get to do business with the RAM companies again.

This is a graphic example of companies with massive amounts of leverage using it to fuck over both their customers and their customers’ customers.

Who gave them that leverage? The AI industry and Sam fucking Altman.

Retail Investors, And How OpenAI and Sam Altman Helped Enshittify The Stock Market With The AI Trade

Hey, remember when I just said that (it seems, but I cannot confirm that) OpenAI helped SK Hynix and Samsung manufacture a supply chain crisis last year using a phoney announcement for a project that would never happen?

That happened three other fucking times in the same three week period, and modern journalism doesn’t seem to give much of a shit!

Let’s review what happened, per my year-ending Enshittifinancial Crisis newsletter:

• On September 22, 2025, NVIDIA announced a “strategic partnership” to invest “up to $100 billion” and build 10GW of data centers with OpenAI, with the first gigawatt to be deployed in the second half of 2026. Where would the data centers go? How would OpenAI afford to build them? How would OpenAI build a gigawatt in less than a year? Don’t ask questions, pig!

• NVIDIA’s stock bumped from from $175.30 to $181 in the space of a day. The media wrote about the story as if the deal was done, with CNBC claiming that “the initial $10 billion tranche [was] expected to close within a month or so once the transaction has been finalized.” I read at least ten stories that said that “NVIDIA had invested $100 billion.”

  • This deal never happened. Three months later, the Wall Street Journal said that it was “on ice,” and two months after that, NVIDIA pledged to invest $30 billion in the company, and though NVIDIA mentioned investing $18.6 billion in “private companies and infrastructure funds…[including] AI model makers that may indirectly purchase or use our products in the cloud,” it’s unclear how much made it to OpenAI.

• On October 5, 2025, AMD announced that it had entered a “multi-year, multi-generation agreement” with OpenAI to build 6 GW of data centers, with “the first 1GW deployment set to begin in the second half of 2026,” calling the agreement “definitive” with terms that allowed OpenAI to buy up to 10% of AMD’s stock, vesting over “specific milestones” that started with the first gigawatt of data center development. Said data centers would also use AMD’s yet-to-be-released MI450 GPUs. The deal would, per Reuters, bring in “tens of billions of dollars of revenue.”

• AMD’s shares surged by 34%, with analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush saying that this was a “major valuation moment” for AMD.

  • I can find no tangible evidence that OpenAI has bought a single AMD GPU. While its most-recent 10K references a “product purchase agreement with OpenAI OpCo LLC,” and while you can sort of blame the rumoured delays of the MI450 GPUs OpenAI is supposedly buying, it’s weird that AMD hasn’t loudly mentioned this on every earnings call. It’s also weird that in February 2026, Meta and AMD signed a near-identical agreement.

• On October 13, 2025, Broadcom announced a 10 gigawatt deal with OpenAI, claiming that it would deploy 10GW of OpenAI-designed chips, with the first racks to deploy the second half of 2026 and the entire deployment completed by end of 2029. Broadcom’s stock popped by 9% on the news about the 10GW deal, with CNBC adding that “the companies have been working together for 18 months. [emphasis mine, for a reason that will soon become obvious]”

  • On May 7, 2026, The Information reported that Broadcom and OpenAI had yet to work out how to finance the initial purchase of its specialist chips. On June 24 2026, OpenAI and Broadcom would announce the chip had been “developed from design to production in nine months,” the kind of blatant lie that you tell when you know nobody in the media is watching.

• On December 11, 2025, The Walt Disney Company announced that it had reached a “landmark agreement” with OpenAI to bring its characters to Sora, adding that it would invest $1 billion in the company. The same day, Disney CEO Bob Iger and Sam Altman went on CNBC, with Iger adding that Disney “[wanted] to participate in what Sam is creating, what his team is creating,” and added that Disney “thought this is a good investment for the company.” It would also buy ChatGPT for the entire company.

  • On March 24, 2026, OpenAI announced Sora was dead, the deal was dead, and it’s unclear whether anything actually happened.

All four of these companies’ stocks rallied on deals that land somewhere between misleading and fictional, with basically anyone who invested in them being underwater within two months, though all three have recovered thanks to similarly-questionable announcements and deals made by companies with the sole intention of boosting their stocks.

Sidenote: I didn’t even bring up what happened with the entirely-fictional $500 billion “Stargate” Project with Oracle and OpenAI, because I’d write another 200,000 words about how everyone who helped pump it should feel ashamed of themselves.

The same goes for every single analyst who reacted to Oracle’s OpenAI-driven remaining performance obligations like a horny teenager seeing his first boob. The capacity never existed, this deal will never happen, and you all know it and are either hopelessly ignorant or craven beyond words.

Why else would Sam Altman go on CNBC with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on the day of an announcement of a project that was only ever a letter of understanding? Why else would Sam Altman jump on TV with Bob Iger to talk about a Disney deal that clearly never went anywhere?

Spare me any explanations around the “fast-paced dealmaking of AI” or “how deals are complex.” CNBC reported the day after the NVIDIA deal was announced that the first $10 billion tranche would “close within a month or once the transaction had finalized” via a source! It’s blatantly obvious that the intention was to create the appearance that a deal existed that never actually existed at all!

The AI trade is the natural endpoint of an increasingly-enshittified stock market where many analysts and journalists exist only to repeat narratives to influence stock prices. Outside of semiconductors, the AI trade has never, ever been about the actual underlying economics or the actual economic potential of Large Language Models, but projecting shadows on the wall to resemble something that looks like the next generation of technology.

That’s because the AI trade is entirely symbolic and driven by stock prices. When NVIDIA and the rest of the Magnificent Seven (sans Apple) does well, AI is the greatest thing on Earth. When the Magnificent Seven stumbles, everybody worries that they might be overspending on AI. The AI trade exists only to manipulate stock prices through spurious news and smoke signals on social media, and to drag gullible retail investors (who account for 20% of US equity trading volumes, the highest it’s been since 2021) and the rest of the market away from caring about things like “fundamentals” or “reality” toward whatever keys are currently jingling.

My evidence is fairly simple: Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon don’t actually tell you their AI revenues, other than when Microsoft and Amazon have chosen to define it in terms of undefined “run rates.” And why would they? Reporters have been saying that their AI bets have paid off for years without the companies ever having to show it paying off other than their stocks running.

Here’s another example: CoreWeave, a time bomb/AI compute company that only really exists as a revenue source for NVIDIA (per Jensen Huang, if [NVIDIA] didn’t help CoreWeave exist, they would not exist”) by signing contracts with companies for unbuilt capacity that it then takes to banks and uses to raise more money to buy GPUs. NVIDIA knows that analysts and reporters don’t give a shit about the blatant self-dealing and circular financing, all because these deals help the stock price go up, which apparently is the only metric that modern journalism evaluates. That’s why when NVIDIA invested $2 billion in CoreWeave in January 2026 — a warning sign that the company had liquidity problems! — led to endless positive coverage after “the stock popped on the news,” per CNBC.

That’s because the AI trade exists only to extract value and con investors. It is not a trade related to the actual fundamentals of whether AI works or not, whether AI actually makes anyone money, or really anything about AI at all outside of whether mentioning AI or an AI-related company makes a stock number go up or down.

I’ll be blunt: modern journalism has failed the retail investor and directly helped the wallet inspector regulate the stock market. By empowering Sam Altman and the rest of the AI industry’s deliberate attempts to obfuscate the actual economics of generative AI and setting the terms of AI’s success as “how stocks are doing and whether the companies are growing in general,” they have defaulted on their responsibility to the general public and helped the already-rich get richer.

None of this would be possible if business journalism actually saw themselves as having a responsibility to give their audience good information. While one could argue that if you had blindly invested in the AI trade you might have made money, the ability to make money in the AI trade was directly driven by modern journalism’s inability or unwillingness to push back on any corporate narrative. Every major outlet ran a story on every one of the deals I mentioned, and not a single one seemed remotely upset or deterred by the fact they were misled, and in turn misled their audience.

And yes, investment funds can be just as easily manipulated as a retail investor, and will follow whatever trend seems likely to make them money, even if said trend is utterly disconnected from any fundamentals. Tech analysts help do so by creating vast models that give a veneer of respectability, even if their projections mostly amount to “number will always go up in the future.”

This is why Musk was able to dump SpaceX on the public markets. Why SK Hynix chose to list on the NASDAQ. When the entire world is captured by a childlike belief that “AI is good and will be the biggest thing ever,” you empower grifting and swindling at scale.

Well, that and underwriters like Goldman Sachs are so nakedly crooked that they’ll say they expect SpaceX’s AI revenue to grow 100x by 2030. Fuck off!

Yet the memory boom/bust/crisis is where the media has failed investors the most — a final insult before everything collapses.

You see (to quote myself), what makes this particular memory crisis so distinctly dangerous is that it isn’t a result of consumer demand so much as it is capital expenditures from very large companies making bets that don’t connect with reality.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta aren’t spending $765 billion in capex in 2026 because of rapid demand by consumers for AI services, but a desperation caused by a lack of hypergrowth ideas, circular financing with Anthropic and OpenAI, and a vague concern that if they stop spending that the other guy will do something as a result.

Anyone blathering on about a “memory supercycle” is intentionally obfuscating where that revenue and demand is coming from — high-bandwidth memory attached to AI GPUs, meaning that this boom cycle only exists as a symptom of a greater hype cycle, meaning that when companies stop buying GPUs, the demand for that (briefly) high-margin high-bandwidth memory goes with it.

To give you some context, a chart from ComputerBase.de showed that high-bandwidth memory demand grew from 681 million gigabits of HBM in 2022 to 29.3 billion gigabits on 2026 — a 40x increase over the course of four years that suggests that once GPU-related capital expenditures stop, high-bandwidth memory demand will effectively disappear.

As I mentioned previously, this isn’t even me being a hater. Hyperscalers are now joining the rest of the world in having to raise debt to buy more GPUs, which means that at some point they aren’t going to be able to afford to buy as much, which will in turn mean that NVIDIA — which accounts for around 65% of all HBM purchasing — won’t need as much.

I have not read a single fucking article that mentions that this is a possibility! Every article about the memory industry right now is about supply constraints and the increasing cost of memory, but none of them warn investors or the general public about what will happen when capex slows, and certainly not the many, many articles in major business publications about SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron’s revenues. In fact, Reuters said that SK Hynix’s “scarcity premium looks built to last.”

The cynical (and boring) response here is that “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” but saying that distracts from the larger point of how said irrationality was manufactured by the media.

Sidenote: There’s plenty of evidence that AI has a pathetic effect on revenues. For example, it took Salesforce three years to get to $1 billion in AI ARR (read: $83 million a month for a company with revenues of $40 billion+ a year), a pathetic amount that should have had people running for the hills…except journalists were saying its AI bet had “paid off” months beforehand. It would be easy — and responsible! — to call this out.

I am not sure what the majority of the media sees as its purpose or responsibility to its readers, so I will speak plainly: the responsibility is to tell them the cold, hard truth, rather than going along with whatever hype cycle is happening out of fear of being wrong or missing out. Skepticism is not doomerism! Being critical is not being negative! These companies are some of the largest and richest enterprises in the world — they should be scrutinized!

And no, scrutiny is not publishing everything they say and then making a vague comment about “whether or not that bet will pay off.” Too often, journalism conflates objectivity with passivity, seeing critiques as “negative” or “biased” when, in fact, repeating everything that corporations say to their benefits is about as biased as it gets.

In the end, the victims are anybody who doesn’t exit the AI trade in time.

Sidenote: It seems increasingly likely that “anybody” will be retail investors, with Citadel Securities noting earlier this week that “retail remains the strongest structural buyer of US equities,” and that it hasn’t seen a single day in the month of July where retail investors were net sellers of stocks, rather than buyers.

Things are similarly bleak in South Korea — where retail investors aren’t just some of the biggest buyers of equities, but they’re doing so on margin.

By the way, there’s no Hell hot enough, by the way, for the people that will read this and smugly say “heh, well, I made money,” or who point to anyone’s returns as evidence that the AI trade is anything other than manufactured consent. The fact that anyone made money on this trade is a sign that the stock market is inherently manipulated to benefit the wealthy at the cost of the many — and when the bubble bursts, the people that will suffer will have suffered because of the media’s participation by helping Sam Altman and the rest of the AI industry obfuscate and twist reality to pump stocks.

Which leads us neatly to our next victim!

SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, and Japanese Retail Investors

In my Hater’s Guide To SoftBank, I told the story of CEO Masayoshi Son, a degenerate gambler who has steered his company through boom and bust cycles only through the grace of whatever God he believes in and sheer luck.

SoftBank Group — the holding company, and not to be confused with Softbank Corp, which runs a bunch of telcos and media companies in Japan — makes money only through either investing in or buying companies, then taking them public or selling them to someone else, and otherwise needs debt for liquidity.

Masayoshi Son makes terrible bet after terrible bet, but his luck always seems to work out for him. His $20 million stake in Alibaba turned into $50 billion at IPO. He bought a 70% stake in Sprint that turned into a 24% holding in T-Mobile. In the early 2000s, Softbank took a 23% stake in Betfair that eventually became part of the $17.7 billion Flutter Entertainment. And then there’s its most-recent and arguably most-impressive (after Alibaba at least) investment, ARM, which it acquired for $32 billion in 2016 and then took it public in 2023 at a valuation of $54.5 billion, and currently sits at around a $300 billion market cap.

Sidenote: SoftBank Group is “valued” based on the “net asset value” of its holdings (which you can see here), and whenever you’ve seen it have “losses,” that’s because the underlying value of its assets (many of which are privately-held companies as part of its disastrous Vision Funds 1 and 2) is what gives it is “returns.”

This is why SoftBank was able to book a yearly gain of $46 billion for its Vision Fund 2 thanks to its investments in OpenAI, despite losses from DiDi Global, Coupang, and Klarna.

Yet his problem has always been his dalliances with whimsical white boys. SoftBank sunk $1.5 billion into dodgy financial services firm Greensill Capital before its collapse, and in the aftermath, it was revealed that Masayoshi Son and CEO Lex Greensill talked on the phone every day, to the point that (per Greensill himself) SoftBank managers felt “threatened” by Greensill’s relationship with Son. It only took Masayoshi Son 28 minutes of conversation with WeWork’s Adam Neumann before he drew up the terms for a $4.4 billion investment on his iPad and signing the deal in the back of a cab, with Son saying that “the last person he felt this with was [Alibaba CEO] Jack Ma.”

And no white boy has ever been more whimsical than Sam Altman.

In 2019, Altman turned down $10 billion from Masayoshi Son (which, ironically, would’ve been an incredible investment at the time), going instead with $1 billion (and full infrastructure support) from Microsoft, and I believe this moment drove Son into a level of madness that will potentially wreck the company.

You see, up until fairly recently, SoftBank had been dragged down by the declining value of its atrocious investments via its two venture capital funds — Vision Fund 1 and 2, the latter of which was self-funded and has mostly gone toward funding OpenAI. Up until recently, SoftBank had quarter after quarter of losses as investment after investment saw its NAV drop because, well, they were overvalued and SoftBank never should’ve invested in them in the first place.

To survive, SoftBank moved into “defense mode” in 2020, slowing investments and selling the vast majority of its Alibaba stock by April 2023, with the ARM IPO and billions of dollars of bond sales helping slow the bleed.

Yet Masayoshi Son knew he was destined for greater things, as he told CNBC in June 2024:

“SoftBank was founded for what purpose? For what purpose was Masa Son born? It may sound strange, but I think I was born to realize ASI. I am super serious about it,” Son said.

OpenAI — and the larger AI trade — had given Masayoshi Son a certain kind of greed-driven mania, where he believed that AI would make SoftBank (as he said recently) “the goose that laid golden eggs,” an eternal money-printer that ostensibly started with the biggest cash-burning machine in history.

Altman, like Neumann, like Greensill, told Masayoshi Son exactly what he wanted to hear: that this would be the biggest thing ever, and that Son would capture all of the value both through his investment in OpenAI and further investments in data centers and other AI infrastructure.

And so began his most vulgar investment yet — OpenAI, sinking $2 billion into the company from Vision Fund 2 in November 2024 — only for Altman to turn around and demand he fund $30 billion of a $40 billion round that would get announced four months later in March 2025.

Masayoshi Son was an emphatic “yes,” except for one little problem: he didn’t have the money, and could only afford the first $7.5 billion (due in April 2025) by taking out a $15 billion, year-long bridge loan, with the rest of it going toward his eventual purchase of Ampere computing.

To fund the remaining $22.5 billion, SoftBank was forced to take out further margin loans on its ARM stock, and sell large chunks of its T-Mobile stock, as well as its entire $5.83 billion stake in NVIDIA.

Yet as soon as the check cleared, Sam Altman was blowing up his phone demanding more money as part of a $110 billion funding round in February 2026 (that eventually became $122 billion in late March).

Masayoshi Son was once again an emphatic yes, except by this point he’d exhausted basically every useful thing left in his coffers outside of around $118 billion in ARM shares that make up around 40% of SoftBank’s net asset value, meaning that selling or using further ARM shares as collateral would directly tank its value — both through the obvious “they have less of a valuable thing” and sales/collateralization of further ARM shares affecting its share price.

So, what did Masayoshi Son do? More debt, baby! More risky debt! You can always refinance it, right?

To pay for its share of OpenAI’s 2026 funding round, SoftBank took out a $40 billion bridge loan (maturing in March 2027), bringing its investment in the company to over $40 billion, with its payments to $10 billion tranches of OpenAI funding due in April, July and October 2026.

A few months later, it tried to raise a $10 billion margin loan using its entire OpenAI investment as collateral, cut the amount it was raising to $6 billion, and when banks remained hesitant to give it the money anyway offered to “guarantee repayment of the loan to address lender concerns,” effectively backing the loan with its own balance sheet (called a recourse loan) because, despite being worth over $100 billion on paper, its lenders had doubts that its OpenAI stake was actually worth that much.

If you’re wondering why it didn’t simply take out more debt, it’s because (as a result of its continuing investments in OpenAI) S&P Global revised SoftBank’s outlook to negative, emphasis theirs:

The liquidity of SoftBank Group’s investment portfolio will worsen because OpenAI now accounts for a bigger share of it. OpenAI Group PBC is a privately held U.S.-based AI research and development startup company. SoftBank Group’s additional investment amount will be $30 billion (about ¥4.5 trillion).

The creditworthiness of the company’s investment assets will also likely deteriorate. We see OpenAI as one of its investments with the weakest credit quality. The company’s investments in AI, including OpenAI, mostly involve fledgling startups and private companies that we believe are exposed to significant AI innovation risk and fierce competition.

This has had a knock-on effect on the rating of the telecoms-focused Softbank Corp (as a reminder, Softbank Group is the holding company that owns stock in other companies, Softbank Corp is the energy/telecoms company that actually makes stuff), which is now rated BBB, or the lowest-possible rung of investment-grade financing in the S&P system.

To make matters worse, if SoftBank continues to hold a loan-to-value ratio of above 30% for much longer, it runs the risk of its debt getting downgraded even further, which would slam the door shut on its ability to raise money via bonds, which is…well, basically how SoftBank has functioned for the last 10 or 20 years.

And this is all happening as Japan is determinedly inching away from the era of persistently low interest rates — making debt far more expensive to service.

SoftBank needs OpenAI to IPO so that it can turn that on-paper gain into actual liquid stocks that can be dumped into the market or used for real-life margin loans. SoftBank has jettisoned the vast majority of its heaviest-weight investments, leaving it largely dependent on the continued value of ARM’s stock to keep its seat at the table, and if OpenAI can’t go public, it’ll end up sitting on illiquid stock in a company that will see its value tank as a result.

Yet even if OpenAI does go public, any attempts to get a margin loan will likely be dangerous, as I bet that it will be one of the single-most shorted and volatile stocks in history, which will also be a problem for SoftBank’s underlying net-asset value, which will ebb and flow based on whatever bullshit Altman cooks up every three months.

Masayoshi Son is both a victim of the manufactured consent of the AI trade and an enabler of its worst excesses, empowering and enriching Sam Altman at a time when any kind of financial prudence might have curbed OpenAI’s greed or killed it before it caused further damage.

SoftBank tanking will fuck over anyone invested in the Japanese stock market, where it currently sits as the third-largest company by market cap behind KIOXIA (a memory company booming thanks to the AI trade) and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial (a bank with heavy ties to the AI industry and data center infrastructure). While I severely doubt it’ll die — it’s likely MUFJ and SMBC Bank would extend whatever credit necessary to keep the doors open — OpenAI and the greater AI trade has become a load-bearing toothpick holding up the trillion-ton ass of the world’s most well-funded gambler.

For SoftBank to survive in its current form, OpenAI must go public, become a thriving and profitable business, and have its stock price stay elevated for the foreseeable future. Additionally, ARM must also retain or exceed its current stock price.

Hey, while we’re on the subject of “companies betting the entire future on OpenAI that recently got downgraded by S&P Global…”

Oracle, And Larry Ellison’s Fortune

Hey! You in the back! Stop laughing! Stop laughing at Larry Ellison! He’s now only the world’s 8th-most-richest guy!

Just kidding, fuck Larry Ellison. What I’m about to tell you might make you laugh, probably because it’s really funny.

Oracle is currently spending over $340 billion to build out over 7.1GW of data center capacity for OpenAI, as part of its $300 billion, five-year-long cloud compute contract that began, at least in theory, on June 1, 2026 at the beginning of its Fiscal Year 2027, though much of the capacity is yet to be built. To fund the buildout, Oracle has had to raise over $50 billion via stock sales and debt, spent $55.7 billion in its last fiscal year, and expects to spend at least $90 billion more in FY2027.

As a result of that, S&P Global downgraded Oracle’s credit rating to BBB/A-2, the literal lowest level before it’ll become junk-grade, meaning that one more downgrade (though it would have to be from two ratings agencies) from here would risk Oracle becoming a “fallen angel,” with investment funds (that can’t hold junk grade debt) having to jettison its debt from indexes, as happened to Ford in March 2020, leading to over $35 billion in debt being dumped and its borrowing costs skyrocketing to between 8.5% and 9.625% when it raised in April 2020. For some context, Ford reported an average interest rate of 5.2% on its long term debt in its 2019 annual report.

You’ll never guess why S&P Global downgraded Oracle! And, once again, the emphasis is theirs:

OpenAI remains a key credit risk. We estimate that OpenAI makes up roughly half of the $638 billion in RPO. OpenAI’s ability to meet its contractual obligations and raise external financing will be contingent upon AI tailwinds continuing and its models being market leaders. If OpenAI were unable to pay Oracle, we believe Oracle could be left with massive data center leases that it might be unable to exit or have to re-lease to new tenants under less-favorable terms. As a proxy for OpenAI’s future prospects, we’re tracking OpenAI’s financial commitments to data center operators and chip makers to gauge its overall financial exposure and its market share among enterprise and consumers.

That’s a load-bearing if, brother!

Anyway, you know who else is trying to warn you about Oracle’s exposure to OpenAI?

Oracle! Per Bloomberg:

Oracle has a new warning for investors: All of the spending on data centers might not pay off.

The disclosures were part of the company’s annual financial report, where Oracle detailed plans to spend big on AI infrastructure for customers like OpenAI. And it noted all of the ways that expensive bet could blow up. Construction of data centers may end up costing more or taking longer than expected, Oracle warned. This could happen due to supply chain hiccups, government restrictions on data center development, or the failure of third parties to complete projects on schedule.

And once the sites are done, major customers might not pay their bills, or opt not to renew their contracts, Oracle said. In this case, the company could be stuck with some very expensive assets, which it “may be unable to re-lease, repurpose or assign such capacity on acceptable terms, if at all.”

As a reminder, the only way that OpenAI will be able to afford to pay its $300 billion cloud compute contract with Oracle will be if it continues to hit revenue projections (per The Information) that have it making $113 billion in 2028, $184 billion in 2029, and $284 billion in 2030, a year when it will magically become profitable, and no, I don’t know how that happens:

Based on my own analysis, assuming that Oracle can successfully build capacity for OpenAI to pay for (a load-bearing assumption), it would have to pay around $75 billion to rent that 7.1GW of capacity. Stargate Abilene, an 8-building, 1.2GW project that broke ground in July 2024, has (per sources familiar with the matter) only built and operationalized three buildings, despite the project having meant to be fully operational by the end of 2025 (per landowner Lancium), or energized by the middle of 2026, it isn’t really clear, and I can’t get a straight answer from anyone about whether the power even exists on site to turn any of it on.

Anyway, for Oracle to make all the rest of that money, it will have to build five more Stargate Abilenes. If you’re wondering how that’s going, Stargate Shackelford only broke ground in December 2025, Stargate Wisconsin appeared to have a single steam beam in March, Stargate Michigan only got its first steel beams two months ago, and Stargate New Mexico is still waiting for permitting to begin construction.

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The rich and famous who filed into the Kennedy Center’s opera house in December were there to enjoy one of the nation’s most exclusive celebrations of the performing arts: the center’s annual honors gala.

The black-tie event, hosted by President Donald Trump, prioritized tickets to people who donated more than $75,000 to the center. This year, it feted Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, the legendary glam rock band Kiss and the Grammy Award-winning disco pioneer Gloria Gaynor.

Among the attendees that evening were two lower-profile government officials whose regulatory decisions had been crucial to the future of the gala’s broadcast sponsor, CBS, and its parent company, Paramount.

Five months earlier, Federal Communications Commissioner Olivia Trusty cast a decisive vote approving Paramount’s historic $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. Now, the commissioner and a guest enjoyed the star-studded celebration thanks to tickets gifted to her by Paramount worth more than $12,000, according to ethics disclosure records obtained by ProPublica.

The other commissioner who approved the merger watched from a prized perch. FCC Chair Brendan Carr and his wife sat in a private skybox with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.

It’s unclear if Paramount gifted Carr the premium seats because the FCC has yet to make public his financial disclosure for last year.

However, past disclosures show Carr and Trusty are among seven FCC commissioners who have accepted Kennedy gala tickets from CBS or its parent company over the last decade. Ethics experts told ProPublica this poses a blatant conflict of interest since the commission regulates the network. Carr’s previous financial statements show he has accepted tickets at least seven times since his 2017 appointment, totaling over $63,000 in gifts.

Last December’s ceremony attended by Trusty and Carr took place as Paramount was launching a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would later result in a merger agreement that requires FCC approval.

Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by or seeks official action from their agency.

Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the premium tickets Trusty and Carr compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on the merger.

“There’s no way that any top federal regulator should ever, ever accept a gift from a regulated company with interests their work will foreseeably affect,” said Walter Shaub, who led the federal Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017. “The appearance of taking gifts like that is terrible. What’s at stake is nothing less than the public’s trust in government.”

Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House, Treasury Department, and Securities and Exchange Commission during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said the commissioners who accepted tickets cannot participate in this matter without damaging the integrity of the government’s decision-making process.

“This is shocking. Pretty disturbing, that’s what I would say. I just don’t understand what they were thinking,” said Canter, who now works as chief counsel for ethics and corruption at the nonpartisan government watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund.

The FCC’s review of the merger is one of the final hurdles facing a historic $110 billion consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks, and digital platforms.

The new megacorporation, which could reshape how millions will access news, movies, sports and video games, faces fierce opposition from inside and outside Hollywood. More than 5,000 actors, producers and entertainment workers — including stars such as Robert De Niro, Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix and Glenn Close — signed an open letter decrying how the consolidation would eliminate jobs and compromise “the integrity, independence, and diversity of our industry.”

On Monday, California, New York and 10 other Democratic states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state anti-monopoly laws.

American and international regulators are evaluating the deal for its potential national security implications and impacts to consumers worldwide. Last week, the British government signaled it planned to investigate whether the new entertainment titan that would emerge from the union would unfairly stifle competition. The FCC’s ongoing review includes examining the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds backing the deal, including from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

The FCC usually has five commissioners — all appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve five-year terms — but the agency currently has only three. Any vote by the full commission would likely be decided by Republicans Carr and Trusty over Democrat Anna Gomez. Gomez was not at the December 2025 show but has accepted tickets from Paramount in the past. Because the FCC requires a three-commissioner quorum for a vote, any recusal could leave the panel unable to decide on the merger. Carr could decide to ask staff to approve the deal rather than bring it to a commission vote, but the ethics experts said he should recuse himself from any decisions affecting the Paramount merger.

The experts warned the commissioners’ gifts might become central in legal challenges and said the Justice Department should investigate potential violations of federal rules or laws.

Neither Carr nor Trusty responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Gomez said in a statement that she followed agency advice when she attended the event in 2023 and 2024. Her statement did not elaborate or otherwise address why taking gifts from Paramount did not pose a conflict of interest.

An FCC spokesperson said agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioner appearances, finding it consistent with ethics law.

“FCC Chairs and officials have attended the same event, in the same ways, consistently from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration to the Obama Administration,” the FCC said in a statement. “There has been no change in recent years.”

Shaub called the justification outrageous.

“It’s no excuse to say that you took the gift because everyone else was doing it or that your agency has had a bad habit of indulging in gift taking for a long time,” Shaub said. “That kind of explanation doesn’t work for school children, and it sure as hell doesn’t work for government officials who are supposed to have better judgment than a fifth grader.”

Despite their oversight role, FCC members have long enjoyed a night out at the Kennedy Center courtesy of CBS or its parent company. Seven of the 10 commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000, according to a ProPublica analysis of ethics disclosures.

Carr’s predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, who was appointed FCC chair by President Joe Biden and stepped down in January 2025, attended regularly.

Rosenworcel and several other former commissioners who accepted the tickets did not respond to requests for comment. The one commissioner who didn’t accept a single gift, Nathan Simington, said he received the Kennedy Center invites from CBS and Paramount but turned them down because it “wasn’t my cup of tea.”

A review of 10 years of disclosures shows commissioners accepted paid trips from various sponsors to appear at banquets and speak at conferences. Some of those gifts came from other media companies regulated by the FCC. NBCUniversal, ABC-Disney and Fox News, for instance, paid for commissioners to attend White House Correspondents’ Association dinners, records show. The total value of the combined gifts topped $308,000. But the vast majority came from CBS and its parent company.

Melissa Zukerman, Paramount’s chief communications officer, said it was a decades-long “CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties” to the Kennedy Center show. She didn’t address why the practice continued after new ownership took over last year, the purpose of the gifts or whether the tickets posed a conflict of interest.

Carr, who joined the FCC as a staffer in 2012 and rose to become the agency’s general counsel, was appointed to serve as a commissioner by Trump during his first term. Since then, Carr has accepted tickets annually, except when the 2020 event was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to his public disclosures.

Carr did not respond to an email request from ProPublica for his latest ethics report, which would indicate whether Paramount also paid for him to attend last December’s gala. The FCC referred us to the Office of Government Ethics, which told us that the FCC had not yet provided the disclosure. The FCC did not respond to our subsequent requests for the record.

A 2009 Office of Government Ethics memo gave federal employees the right to attend Kennedy Center events but explicitly said officials cannot accept free attendance “offered by persons other than the Kennedy Center and its trustees, officers and employees.” In 2016, the ethics office tightened its gift requirements, warning officials to avoid any appearance “of loss of impartiality.”

There is an exemption to the gift rules that allows free entry to gatherings that are widely attended and paid for by third parties, but only if certain conditions are met.

The event must “further agency programs or operations,” and the agency’s interest in an official attending must outweigh “concern that the employee may be, or may appear to be, improperly influenced in the performance of official duties,” according to the federal rules.

As an example, the Office of Government Ethics said an industry-wide seminar attended by more than 100 people could be allowed if the employee’s participation would be in the agency’s interest. But those attending should “represent a range of persons interested in a given matter” and the event must provide a “structured opportunity” to exchange ideas and views among invitees.

The office clarified in a 2007 memo that performing arts presentations would not count even if they, like the honors gala, have a reception before or afterward at which officials can mingle with other attendees.

Canter, the former White House ethics lawyer, said it would be a “stretch” for the FCC to argue the exemptions apply to the Kennedy Center’s annual show, where famous musicians perform and celebrities laud those who are being honored. “It’s not what we would consider a widely attended gathering,” she said.

Kedric Payne, general counsel and senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, noted that federal rules also require agencies to weigh the market value of the attendance, its relevance to the agency, any sensitive pending matters involving the donor and whether accepting free tickets creates an appearance of preferential treatment.

“The ethics rules are designed to prevent this exact situation,” he said, adding that it is an “obvious conflict of interest” for an official to “accept expensive gifts from anyone with decisions pending before the agency. This matters because it makes the public question whether official decisions are free from the improper influence of wealthy special interests.”

An FCC official familiar with the legal guidance given to the commissioners said they were told the event met the criteria for the “widely attended gathering” exception. (The source was not authorized to talk publicly about agency legal discussions.)

Shaub, the former Office of Government Ethics head, disagreed, saying it would be “hard to understand what compelling interest the FCC could think it had in letting its commissioners” attend the gala.

“What possible reason could have outweighed the obvious ethics concerns?” he asked.

Federal rules require written authorization for an official to accept free entry to a widely attended gathering. The FCC did not respond to our requests to provide the authorizations for the Paramount tickets or say who authorized them. Two senior ethics officials at the agency, Kathleen Fulp and Lauren Northrop, did not respond to requests for comment.

While December’s event came at a particularly sensitive time for Paramount and the FCC, it wasn’t the first.

More than a year earlier, in September 2024, Paramount had filed paperwork seeking the commission’s approval for its merger with Skydance Media. A month later, the FCC launched an investigation of CBS after a conservative group complained about a “60 Minutes” interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Trump later filed a lawsuit alleging the network deceptively edited the interview — an accusation CBS denied.

Then in November, less than two weeks after his election victory, Trump declared he would appoint Carr as FCC chair. Almost immediately, Carr accused CBS of biased election coverage and said it would be an obstacle to approving the Paramount-Skydance merger.

That December, Carr and three other commissioners — Rosenworcel, Gomez and Geoffrey Starks — accepted Kennedy Center gala tickets from Paramount worth a combined $48,156.

On Jan. 16, 2025, just days before Rosenworcel stepped down from the commission, she announced the agency was dismissing the election complaint against CBS. She and Gomez called the outcome a victory for the First Amendment.

But days later, Carr, the incoming FCC chair, reopened the investigation.

To resolve Trump’s lawsuit, CBS agreed to pay the president $16 million, a decision criticized by legal experts who decried Trump’s claims as baseless.

Two days after Trump posted on social media that he had received the settlement money, the FCC took up the Paramount-Skydance merger. To meet Carr’s demands, Paramount agreed to appoint an independent ombudsperson who would evaluate claims of bias. The company also pledged to eliminate its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

By then, Starks and Simington had unexpectedly stepped down from the commission. Trusty, a Trump appointee, had been confirmed by the Senate the previous month.

Trusty and Carr voted in favor of the merger. Gomez voted against, blasting the approval for requiring “never-before-seen forms of government control over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment.”

Experts said that while Trusty had no conflict yet, Carr and Gomez did. The fact that Gomez voted against Paramount did not mean she didn’t face a conflict under the rules, Shaub said.

Federal rules only require those who accept improper gifts to make a prompt reimbursement, but Shaub and the other experts said Carr and Gomez should have abstained from the vote.

“If you repay the face value of the ticket, the gift rules don’t require you to recuse — though common sense and any kind of conscience might lead you to recuse voluntarily for the good of the country,” Shaub said. “But if you refuse to repay the donor, I don’t see how anything short of recusal could remotely remediate the problem.”

With the Paramount-Skydance merger greenlit by the FCC, Ellison, the new company’s CEO, then set his sights on acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery.

Warner at first rebuffed Paramount’s overtures and on Dec. 5 — two days before the Kennedy Center gala — accepted a bid from Netflix to buy its studio and streaming assets. Ellison responded by making numerous calls to administration officials and had a long talk with Trump, according to The Wall Street Journal.

On the night of the gala, Trump told reporters the Netflix deal “could be a problem” and that he planned to get directly involved with the regulatory approval. Inside the Kennedy Center, Carr and his wife sat with Ellison in an exclusive skybox, Bloomberg reported. (Gomez said in her statement to ProPublica that she declined Paramount’s “invitation because of serious concerns about press independence connected to conditions Paramount agreed to as part of its merger transaction before the FCC.”)

Hours after the gala ended, Paramount announced it was launching its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery.

About three months later, Carr publicly endorsed Paramount over Netflix on CNBC, promising swift approval.

If one or more commissioners choose to abstain from a merger vote because of ethical concerns, what would happen next is unclear. Under federal conflict of interest rules, an agency designee could theoretically permit commissioners to vote after considering several factors, including “the difficulty of reassigning the matter,” the nature of the relationship between the commissioners and Paramount, and the “effect that resolution of the matter would have upon the financial interests” of the firm.

Carr could bypass a full commission vote entirely, as he did with the recent acquisition of Tegna by Nexstar Media Group. In that case, Carr delegated authority to FCC staff to approve the takeover.

But any decision on the Paramount deal — whether by the full commission or by staff at the direction of the chair — is likely to be challenged.

Richard Painter, a former White House ethics attorney in the administration of George W. Bush, said while courts often defer to the government’s judgment, they also can become skeptical if a regulatory agency is shown to have violated ethics rules.

“A judge may very well say that the merger decision of the FCC isn’t worth jack because the process was corrupted,” he said.

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By Angie Orellana Hernandez and Hamed Ahmadi, NOTUS

The Pentagon will begin annually testing service members 30 and over for testosterone deficiencies, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday.

Hegseth said in a video posted to social media that the new screening would become part of the Defense Department’s periodic health assessment for military personnel. The health exam has been mandatory since 2016 and is used to measure medical condition, behavioral health, mental health and readiness to deploy.

Service members who are recommended for treatment will have the choice to receive testosterone replacement therapy, Hegseth said. Personnel under 30 can volunteer for an examination.

Hegseth’s post referred to “High-T,” a social media fad pushed by influencers that encourages men to seek higher levels of testosterone to maintain their strength and masculinity. Discussions around masculinity have seeped into culture wars and national politics. In May, James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, defended his masculinity after personal attacks from conservatives about his physical appearance.

“This initiative — it’s not about artificial enhancement; it’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities, protecting your longevity, and ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight,” Hegseth said in the video. “We owe our warriors the absolute best medical care in the world, and this program delivers on that obligation.”

Testosterone levels in males decline about 1% a year after the age of 30 or 40, according to the Mayo Clinic. It is considered a typical sign of aging.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not approve testosterone replacement therapy for males without specific forms of hypogonadism, a medical condition associated with a malfunction of the organs that produce testosterone. Testosterone replacement therapy consists of injections, pellets, patches or gels that release hormones into the body.

Some medical groups, such as the Endocrine Society and the American Urological Association “recommend against routine screening” for hypogonadism in the general male population, according to Helen Bernie, a urologist and director of male sexual and reproductive medicine at Indiana University.

Bernie said testing could still be valuable in some military populations with symptoms or certain risk factors, but warned that a single low testosterone result should not lead directly to a diagnosis or treatment. Instead, testosterone levels should be measured twice in the early morning and considered alongside symptoms and possible underlying causes.

“Screening should open the door to a thoughtful medical evaluation, not automatically to a prescription,” Bernie told NOTUS.

Sleep deprivation, intense physical training, weight changes, illness and certain medications can temporarily lower testosterone, Bernie said. Doctors should evaluate those factors before determining that a service member has a testosterone deficiency.

Bernie said testosterone therapy is generally safe for appropriately selected and monitored patients, but it can “impair their sperm production or impair their fertility,” especially in young men.

She said service members should be counseled about fertility and other risks before beginning therapy and monitored throughout treatment.

“If the Pentagon moves forward with a screening program, I do think it’s important that there’s clear evidence-based guidelines in place so that every service member is evaluated consistently and safely.”

“The goal should be appropriate diagnosis, appropriate treatment, not simply increasing the number of men receiving testosterone,” she said.

The Defense Department declined to comment further on Hegseth’s video. It did not answer questions regarding the FDA’s guidance on testosterone replacement therapy.

The FDA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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By Cat Zakrzewski, The washington post

President Donald Trump’s holding company took a $2 million payment last year from a top investor in a South Korean aluminum firm as the company was fighting a trade case before Trump’s Commerce Department, highlighting the president’s business ties to companies with business before his administration.

The payment from Base Co. LTD was part of a “letter of intent” and a “nonrefundable development fee,” according to the president’s latest financial disclosure. The New York Times first reported the transaction.

Base Group is a key shareholder in Korea Aluminium, one of several companies that the Commerce Department has accused of circumventing duties imposed on Chinese aluminum. The company has also had a years-long business relationship with the Trump family business, selling Trump-branded wine in South Korea.

The White House says the probe has been governed by a “transparent, quasi-judicial process that is laid out in statute” and denied that the payment amounted to a conflict of interest.

“Further, all of the President’s assets are held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. “There are no conflicts of interest, and the only special interest guiding the Trump administration’s decision-making is the best interest of the American people.”

The Commerce Department on Monday issued a preliminary finding that would subject Korea Aluminium’s exports to a 105 percent tax, nearly four times the current rate.

The Trump Organization, the Commerce Department, Base and Korea Aluminium did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Trump Organization told the New York Times that the payment is part of a golf course project that has not yet been announced.

No evidence has emerged that Trump or his family intervened in the investigation on behalf of Base or Korea Aluminium. But Trump’s expansive portfolio and family business’s deals with companies around the world have no other parallel in modern American industry, opening new ethical quagmires.

Presidents traditionally have divested from companies that could pose a conflict of interest in office. Trump meanwhile has maintained extensive holdings in crypto and real estate ventures, amassing unprecedented wealth in office. His 2025 income soared to more than $2.2 billion, fueled primarily by cryptocurrency-related ventures.

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By Judd Legum. Popular information

Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider the nomination of Todd Blanche to be the next U.S. Attorney General. Blanche, President Trump’s former personal attorney who has been serving in an acting capacity since April, faces a number of obstacles to his confirmation.

One of the biggest is Jeffrey Epstein.

Blanche stands accused of failing to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the public disclosure of most Department of Justice (DOJ) files associated with the late sex criminal. On April 27, journalist Katie Phang sued Blanche in federal court, alleging he had “either retracted, or failed to produce entirely, documents that should have been produced” under the law.

The most explosive of Phang’s allegations is that Blanche has “withheld notes from FBI interviews with a victim who has alleged that in the 1980s, when she was about 13 years old, Epstein introduced her to Trump, who in turn assaulted her.”

In March, the DOJ belatedly released redacted typed summaries of three interviews with the woman discussing her interactions with Trump, including the alleged sexual assault. Those summaries were initially excluded from the DOJ’s primary release of Epstein files in January and disclosed only after their exclusion received media attention.

Phang sued to force Blanche to release the FBI’s handwritten notes from the interviews with the woman, which were also referenced in the Maxwell case. According to Phang, the disclosure of these notes was required under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

In response to Phang, Blanche did not address the substance of Phang’s argument. Instead, he argued that the Epstein Files Transparency Act did not create a private right of action and, therefore, Phang did not have standing to sue. He also argued that, even if Phang had standing, she did not suffer any injury from his refusal to disclose the interview notes and other documents.

Judge Emmet Sullivan rejected all of Blanche’s arguments. He ruled that Phang did have standing and that Blanche’s failure to fully disclose the Epstein files created real harm to Phang as a journalist. Sullivan also found that, in not addressing the substance of Phang’s arguments, Blanche “conceded that he is in violation of the Act.” Sullivan ordered Blanche to produce the documents Phang was seeking by July 2 or “show cause” as to why they should not be produced.

Blanche did not produce the documents sought by Phang on July 2. Instead he filed a response to Sullivan’s order to show cause. Blanche said he had cause not to release the interview notes “because, by their nature, the underlying notes are substantially similar to the ultimate reports, and have accordingly been deemed duplicative.” Blanche also said the fact that the notes were handwritten “further complicates the redaction process and increases the risk of inadvertent disclosure” of the victim’s identity.

In a response to Blanche filed July 13, Phang said that Blanche was openly defying the court and the law. Blanche “makes clear that whatever the federal statute requires him to do, he will not comply,” Phang argues.

Phang notes that Blanche claims “that FBI handwritten interview notes are similar to subsequent FD-302s [interview summaries] as a general matter.” But “he has not argued—let alone provided any evidence—that the specific handwritten notes at issue here are substantially similar to the FD-302s that have been produced.” Further, “[t]he Epstein Act does not exempt from production documents that are ‘substantially similar’ to those that have been produced.” This amounts to an attempt by Blanche “to write exceptions into the Epstein Act that don’t exist.”

Phang is now asking the court to fine Blanche $1,000 per day until he complies with the judge’s order.

Blanche has until July 20 to respond to Phang. But he will almost certainly have to address his handling of the Epstein files during today’s committee hearing.

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Other documents Blanche refuses to release

Along with the interview notes, Phang has highlighted four other categories of information she says Blanche has illegally withheld. Sullivan sided with Phang in each instance.

First, Phang notes that Blanche has redacted the identity of the senders or recipients of at least eight damning emails. These messages, some of which were sent to Epstein, include “Thank you for a fun night… Your littlest girl was a little naughty” and “the key are the 14 to 15 year old girls—i am a sexual pervert because i say they are now of a reproductive age?” In his latest filing, Blanche claims that the senders of some of these messages are “victims.” But even in two instances where Blanche concedes the sender is not a victim, Blanche has refused to unredact the emails, citing generalized concerns about “personal privacy.”

Second, Phang seeks to unredact the identity of four names listed as “co-conspirators” on two documents. Blanche argues that three of the four individuals are also “victims.” The fourth is Lesley Groff, Epstein’s former assistant who has not “asserted victim status.”

Third, Phang notes that Blanche has not released any material in the files that was written in a language other than English. Blanche’s response is that a review of documents written in other languages is “not practical.” In this case, the court order did not give Blanche the option to “show cause” in lieu of complying with the order. Blanche decided not to take action anyway. Phang argues Blanche has “obviously and arrogantly ignored this Court’s order here.”

Finally, Phang seeks a log of all redactions from the Epstein files, along with an accompanying justification, as required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Blanche acknowledges the DOJ has not produced such a log but claims there is no deadline for the DOJ to do so. This directly contradicts both Sullivan’s order and any reasonable interpretation of the law.

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By James LaPorta, Margaret Brennan, Jennifer Jacobs and Eleanor Watson, CBS News

Washington — As the U.S.-Iran war restarts following the collapse of the weeks-long ceasefire, senior Pentagon officials are also quietly eyeing another flashpoint much closer to home: Cuba.

Military planners have in recent weeks examined a range of options for possible action against the island, including an Army-led air assault involving thousands of U.S. soldiers to be carried out by the 101st Airborne Division, the only unit trained for such a task, according to multiple U.S. officials with knowledge of the discussions.

The officials, who spoke to CBS News under condition of anonymity to discuss national security matters, stressed that the briefings are not an indication that President Trump or the Pentagon have decided to carry out an operation.

Any operation against Cuba would confront the Pentagon with a significant problem because much of the U.S. military’s attention and some of its most valuable offensive capabilities are already committed elsewhere. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has emphasized that the U.S. prefers a diplomatic option for a transition to a new government led by technocrats and willing to make economic reforms. That process has stalled, despite tightening financial pressure around the Cuban military and its conglomerate GAESA, the sprawling, military-controlled holding company which the United States refers to as an $18 billion trust fund. In a July 11 statement, Rubio said that so far, the regime and its “corrupt elites” continue to refuse reform, instead “perpetuating their total control” and adherence to a “morally bankrupt Marxist ideology.”

The State Department announced that it has also tightened the financial vice around Cuba’s state-owned entities that “funnel revenue to the regime and paramilitary forces” that repress the Cuban people, including rapid response brigades.

Late last month, the U.S. military held a concept-of-operations briefing to discuss early-stage military planning options for select missions that could be carried out, the officials said. Such briefings are routinely developed by the Defense Department and combatant commands for a range of contingencies that examine mission objectives, the number of troops needed, the sequence of events, logistical considerations and associated risks.

The Pentagon has shifted aircraft, intelligence assets and other resources from other geographical regions to the Middle East to sustain operations against Iran. Officials who spoke to CBS News said that shifting the focus toward Cuba isn’t likely at the moment, given the restart of military operations against Iran last week.

Behind the scenes, the war with Iran has exposed some friction between President Trump and Hegseth, an Army veteran and former Fox News host, according to sources familiar with the matter. While Mr. Trump has at times praised Hegseth and various military operations during his second term, he has privately expressed frustration with the progress of Operation Epic Fury, believing the administration missed an opportunity to avert a dragged-out conflict earlier this year by rejecting an Iranian proposal to limit its nuclear program, the officials said.

Two U.S. officials told CBS News that Hegseth urged a more confrontational approach to Iran, despite reservations voiced by Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, leaving the president increasingly dissatisfied as the military campaign has become more protracted and complicated than originally anticipated when the war began back in February.

Over the course of the U.S.-Israel-led war against Iran, Mr. Trump has been irritated by both Hegseth and Caine when they raised the limitations of military operations. Some in the Defense Department and on the interagency team have also expressed frustration with Navy Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of U.S. Central Command, grumbling that he oversold what the military could accomplish against Iran, one of the sources said.

Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said the president “has been extraordinarily proud” of Hegseth and Cooper’s leadership “throughout Operation Epic Fury, which completely destroyed Iran’s ballistic missiles, production facilities, navy, air defenses, and more.” She added that the recent U.S. strikes against Iran prove the U.S. “can attack anywhere, anytime, and Iran can do nothing about it.”

Acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez said, “We do not comment on hypothetical military operations,” and added that the department also wouldn’t comment on Hegseth’s private conversations with Mr. Trump.

Cuba has presented new security challenges. CBS News previously reported that Cuba had acquired attack drones of unknown origin. During a June 10 visit to the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Hegseth indirectly acknowledged the possibility of a threat to that installation.

“It would be unwise for the government of Cuba to try to procure or get access to the types of weapons that could reach this base or the American homeland. They would be inviting the kind of confrontation not only do they not want, but they could not stand,” he vowed.

Cuba and the U.S. have a longstanding dispute over the facility — after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro refused to cash the checks, claiming the lease, signed in 1903, is invalid.

Hegseth acknowledged the U.S. was presenting military options to Mr. Trump, but offered the possibility of a more peaceful relationship, saying the U.S. hopes to soon be “a friend of the leadership of the government of Cuba.”

CBS News reported in May that U.S. intelligence officials have been assessing how Cuba would respond to possible U.S. military action, as the Trump administration accused Havana of strengthening ties with Russia, China and Iran. The intelligence community’s 2026 annual threat assessment largely portrays Cuba as an enabling environment for larger geopolitical competitors, rather than as an independent strategic threat. Notably, the March assessment doesn’t identify Cuba itself as possessing military capabilities that materially threaten the U.S. or describe Havana as an independent driver of instability.

In May, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana for a rare meeting with senior Cuban officials, using the visit to deliver a message that the U.S. was prepared to expand economic and security engagement with Cuba if Havana “makes fundamental changes.”

But Ratcliffe also brought along one of the operators who was involved in the U.S. mission to capture then-Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January, making a point of introducing the paramilitary leader to the Cubans as the one who had killed their people in Venezuela, several people familiar with the trip told CBS News.

Days after the visit, the Justice Department indicted 95-year-old former leader Raul Castro and five others on charges dating back to the 1996 shootdown of two U.S. planes. That indictment has led to speculation that Castro would be arrested in an operation similar to the snatch and grab of Maduro. Multiple sources told CBS News that the preference would be for the Castro family to depart the island of their own accord, and nodded to the Trump administration’s meetings with Castro’s grandnephew Raulito.

The administration’s confrontation with Cuba did not emerge overnight. Over the past 18 months, the White House has steadily dismantled the limited engagement pursued under former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama and replaced it with a campaign of economic, diplomatic and legal pressure that has isolated Havana and deprived its security apparatus of revenue in an effort to force political change.

Cuba policy since Trump’s return to office

Hours after returning to office in January 2025, Mr. Trump reversed one of Biden’s final foreign policy decisions by restoring Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, a move that again restricted Cuba’s access to international finance and signaled a return to the “maximum pressure” strategy of Mr. Trump’s first term.

The Trump administration expanded that approach when Rubio reinstated restrictions on business transactions with Cuba’s military-controlled conglomerate, GAESA, arguing that the armed forces—not Cuba’s private sector—control much of the island’s hard-currency economy. Weeks later, the State Department broadened visa restrictions targeting Cuba’s overseas medical missions, accusing Havana of exploiting doctors and nurses through a state-run labor export system that Cuban officials insist is voluntary.

Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio told The Associated Press in June that the Trump administration was trying to discredit thousands of Cuban doctors working around the world while also cutting off a critical source of income to the island country.

Despite rising tensions, limited cooperation continued, including Cuba’s acceptance of U.S. deportation flights under existing migration agreements. By mid-2025, the Trump administration formalized its approach through a new National Security Presidential Memorandum that expanded restrictions on travel, remittances and financial transactions, while strengthening enforcement of the embargo.

The campaign escalated further earlier this year when Mr. Trump declared Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” and extended sanctions to foreign governments and companies supplying the island with oil. Additional actions included sanctions on senior Cuban officials, and penalties targeting Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel and other top figures.

These measures coincided with a worsening economic crisis in Cuba, marked by fuel shortages, blackouts and protests. Cuban officials blamed U.S. sanctions, while the Trump administration pointed to internal mismanagement.

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ByVeronika Kyrylenko, New American

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has granted Reflect Orbital authority to deploy and operate a satellite designed to redirect sunlight onto Earth after dark.

For now, the approval covers one experimental spacecraft, not the enormous constellation the company hopes to build. Yet it gives Reflect its first federal foothold.

The FCC, one of many constitutionally dubious federal agencies, also drew a convenient boundary around its authority. Although it reviewed radio frequencies, collision risks, and orbital debris, it declined to decide whether a private company with powerful political and corporate connections should illuminate the night sky in the first place. Meanwhile, the company’s ambitions, and several of the uses it envisions for the technology, give its promise of “sunlight on demand” a distinctly dystopian cast.

Eärendil-1

Reflect Orbital announced the decision with undisguised enthusiasm.

“This ruling is hugely validating for our company and reflects America’s leadership in testing innovative space technology,” it said on X.

The company also stressed restraint, saying it had built “safeguards” into the satellite and would collect real-world data before expanding.

The FCC approval covers Reflect’s first demonstration satellite, called Eärendil-1. The name comes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s half-elven mariner, who sails the heavens carrying a radiant jewel that appears as both the Morning and the Evening Star.

According to the FCC, Eärendil-1 will fly about 625 kilometers, or 388 miles, above Earth. It will carry a deployable reflector made from highly reflective thin film. The mirror will measure about 18 meters, or nearly 60 feet, on each side.

The FCC described the reflector as “motorized and steerable.”

The license covers only one satellite, and lasts two years after Reflect places it into orbit. The company expects roughly one year of active operations, followed by less than one year of deorbiting. Eärendil-1 will carry propulsion for collision avoidance.

The FCC called the spacecraft a limited test of an emerging technology. Reflect views it as the first step toward something far larger.

“The Future of Sunlight”

Reflect bills its services as “the future of sunlight,” and says its technology will redirect sunlight from orbit “to any precise location on Earth.” It claims customers could switch the beam off, adjust its brightness, and direct it precisely without installing infrastructure on the ground.

The company promises “precise, uniform delivery,” and describes the system as “sustainable” and “responsibly deployed.” In effect, Reflect presents sunlight as a commodity available at a chosen place, intensity, and hour.

The website’s interactive “Explore” feature makes that vision more concrete. A user can move a broad beam of light across a map and direct it toward a selected location. The image resembles a powerful aerial searchlight sweeping the ground at night.

Though meant to convey convenience, the demonstration also reveals the reach of this technology.

The company envisions applications ranging from disaster response, industrial work, and agriculture, to public events, urban lighting, and military operations. In the wrong hands, however, the same capability could enable surveillance, expose people or facilities that depend on darkness, intimidate communities, or support unlawful police and military activity.

Co-founder Tristan Semmelhack placed the project inside a much larger energy argument. He said the world must “produce vastly more energy than ever before, at global scale, quickly enough to make a difference — all while keeping it clean. ”

The pitch is ambitious. But it effectively turns one of nature’s basic rhythms into something that can be ordered, redirected, brightened, and switched off. The unresolved questions are who controls the light, who authorizes its use, and what recourse people below would have.

A Grand Promise, Written in the Sky

In a nutshell, Reflect proposes to extend the “useful” hours of solar energy. Its satellites would direct sunlight to Earth after sunset or before sunrise.

The company stresses the responsibility, transparency, and meticulous care that such an undertaking requires.

“Reflect Orbital is earning the right to operate and to scale,” Semmelhack wrote. He said the company must prove that reflected sunlight can be controlled precisely, limited in brightness and duration, and used only in appropriate locations. He also promised coordination with affected communities and scientific institutions.

At the same time, he framed the risks of the project against a much larger — and familiar — moral emergency:

If the world fails to create abundant clean energy, the consequences will be measured in poverty, instability, preventable disease, lost opportunity, continued fossil-fuel dependence, and unnecessary human suffering.

The language is meant to reassure. It is also meant to place opposition on the defensive. Anyone who questions orbital mirrors may appear to oppose clean energy, human progress, or even the prevention of suffering.

That framing should not end the inquiry. State-favored corporations often promise careful stewardship and life-saving benefits. Big Pharma, Big Tech, and other politically connected industries have relied on the same vocabulary of responsibility, urgency, and grand public good. Yet the public is often left absorbing the consequences, sometimes with deadly results.

Reflect may prove more conscientious. But trust should follow verifiable evidence, not precede it. It should be stressed that decisions about whether, when, and where the night sky may be artificially illuminated should rest with the affected communities at the local level, not with a distant federal agency.

That point is especially relevant considering the company’s ambition. The plan is to grow its satellite fleet from two in 2026 to 36 in 2027. It then projects more than 1,000 in 2028, more than 5,000 in 2030, and more than 50,000 by 2035.

The Criticism

Astronomers and dark-sky advocates opposed the application.

For instance, the American Astronomical Society filed a petition asking the FCC to deny it, writing:

Considering the severe harm that Reflect Orbital’s [non-geostationary orbit satellite] is expected to create for professional and amateur astronomy, as well as the potential for light trespass and significant negative effects on human and environmental health, we assert that the satellite, as proposed, fails to meet the public interest standard required for Commission licensure.

The commission also received more than 1,800 individual letters echoing these and related concerns.

DarkSky International stated last December that even the test could become several times brighter than a full moon inside its illuminated area. The Arizona-based advocacy organization argued that darkness supports ecosystems, public health, cultural heritage, and science. The Hill reported that DarkSky “stated last week that it was evaluating any legal options to prevent the satellite from being launched and used.”

The FCC largely sidestepped the raised issues. It said the operation of the solar reflector, including its effects on optical astronomy and nighttime illumination, fell outside its review of the satellite’s radio communications. It also dismissed objections based on a future constellation as speculative because Reflect had applied for only one satellite.

That approach may fit the agency’s rules. It does not settle the public unease.

The Techno-political Orbit

Managing sunlight was once the province of nature. Now, some of the world’s most powerful technology billionaires increasingly treat it as an engineering problem.

Infamously, Bill Gates has funded research into solar geoengineering, including methods that would reflect a share of sunlight away from Earth, effectively dimming the sun. The concept provoked particular bewilderment and alarm on the political “Right.”

Harvard ultimately canceled its proposed SCoPEx field experiment before researchers released any reflective material. But the idea lived on.

It resurfaced last November, when the “Right’s” new darling, SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk, proposed that

a large solar-powered AI satellite constellation would be able to prevent global warming by making tiny adjustments in how much solar energy reached Earth.

Not surprisingly, Reflect Orbit has direct connections to Musk’s business network. Reflect’s co-founder and chief executive, Ben Nowack, previously worked as an engineer at SpaceX.

Further, the investment link runs through Shaun Maguire, a Sequoia Capital partner and Reflect director. Sequoia backed Reflect in 2024 and describes it as the firm’s first space investment since SpaceX. The firm identifies Maguire as its partner for both companies.

Maguire also has direct ties to President Donald Trump’s political circle. He announced a $300,000 donation supporting Trump after his May 2024 criminal conviction, and after the election joined the venture capitalists and Big Tech figures who spent time at Mar-a-Lago as Trump assembled his administration.

The political links later acquired an official dimension. This May, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appointed Maguire to the Pentagon’s Science, Technology and Innovation Board.

Reflect, meanwhile, received a $1.25 million Air Force research contract in 2025. The project focuses on using its satellite-reflector technology to provide energy resilience and responsive lighting for military operations.

All in all, the political optics have changed — but the underlying impulse has not. Whether the proposed intervention would dim the sun or redirect its light, a small technocratic elite still claims the authority to redesign the sky for everyone else.

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By Christopher Cook, The Freedom Scale

In “The Day Government Stole My Dream Property,” I told the story of how the perfect piece of (seemingly) pristine land—something I have wanted to buy since I was five years old—turned out to be downslope from a toxic waste dump … courtesy of the county government.

In “The Fallacy of ‘Argument from the Brochure’,’” we discussed the fact that not only does government do a poor job of protecting us from social ills, it is also frequently the worst source of those ills.

In this piece, we will look at a few examples in the area of pollution.

I. Government as Direct Polluter

State-run enterprises

Governments frequently own productive enterprises. This is more likely to be the case in socialist economies, but it is by no means limited to them.

Here are a few examples:

• oil and gas companies

• mining operations and steel mills

• factories and heavy industry

• rail, shipping, aviation, and other transportation systems

• agriculture and forestry

Typical harms include water and air pollution, spills, toxic waste, deforestation, soil degradation, and tailings contamination.

One can argue that these are productive and necessary functions—tasks that the private sector would likely perform if the government did not. And there is truth to that. However, as we will touch on later in this piece,

1. Governments are far less likely to be held accountable for environmental damage, and

2. The bigger the government, the dumber their ideas and the less they care about the damage done.

The massive industrial pollution in the Eastern Bloc is a representative example of utter disregard for environmental standards. The East Germans burned lignite coal and contaminated rivers. Some of the environmental ruin of Cold War-era Central Europe could be seen from space.

And speaking of the Cold War … The Chornobyl disaster was made possible by substandard technology (a pervasive problem in the USSR), perverse political incentives, and secrecy. The aftermath was compounded by political delays, more technological problems, and more secrecy. Totalitarian regimes are excellent at secrecy, incompetence, and perverse political incentives. Caring for the environment … not so much.

I was in the USSR for a month in 1991. There were no toilet seats in the men’s bathrooms in Kalinin (Tver) University—they had all been taken home by students to burn for heat. When people are poor—and in socialism, everyone is poor except party leaders—they don’t think about the environment. They think about survival. We would do the very same. (And anyone who thinks they’d somehow be nobler than that is a peculiar combination of ignorant and arrogant.)

Government’s operational footprint

The state, as an institution, has a massive environmental impact simply as a result of its normal operations.

Examples include

• government offices

• schools

• courthouses, law enforcement, prisons

• travel fleets

• procurement chains

Governments have multiple divisions (central, state, regional, local, etc.), each with its own footprint. Government facilities, personnel, and transportation use energy, emit air pollution, consume water, generate waste, encroach on habitat, and more.

If you believe that government is a necessary evil, then the issue will be one of scale: how can we ensure that governments cause as little environmental damage as possible?

If you believe that private agencies and smaller polities can provide all the legitimate services of government (security, justice, and roads) and do so far more efficiently and accountably, then government is just a giant rights-violating, consent-violating, environmental-destruction machine.

Military and national security

This one’s a doozy.

Let us set aside, for the time being, the environmental destruction caused by actual fighting. The environmental footprint of the world’s standing military forces, even in so-called peacetime, is enormous:

• fuel consumption

• overseas travel and operations

• development of WMDs

• infrastructure

• air and naval operations

• training, war games, and weapons testing

• munitions contamination

• burn pits

• land mines

• unexploded ordnance

• contaminated bases

• abandoned equipment

Nuclear weapons testing requires separate treatment, as it produces a broad range of environmental harms far beyond the immediate blast zones:

• radioactive contamination (air, soil, groundwater, and oceans);

• long-lived radionuclides (cesium-137, strontium-90, plutonium, and iodine-131) entering the environment and food chains;

• radioactive fallout dispersed globally;

• lasting human and animal health risks linked to contaminated environments (e.g., increases in thyroid cancers)

• contamination associated with mining, processing, refining, and storage of nuclear materials;

• and much more.

And then there’s the devastation of war and conflict:

• WMD

  • chemical

  • nuclear

  • biological

• battlefield damage

  • fire

  • trenching

  • bombing

  • habitat damage

  • scorched earth

• chemical pollution

  • fuel spills

  • spent ammunition

  • explosives residues

  • heavy metals

  • depleted uranium

  • solvents

  • industrial toxins

• defoliation

• sabotage

• ecological manipulation

• destruction of infrastructure (including secondary effects)

• water issues

  • naval warfare

  • sunken ships

  • oil spills

  • mines and explosives

  • harbor destruction

  • dam destruction/intentional flooding

This list could easily continue. One item that deserves special mention is biological weapons. Who but governments have the resources and perverse incentives required to research, test, store, and deploy biological agents that could kill … everyone on the planet?

Remind me again what government is protecting us from?

Public infrastructure

Governments tax (directly or through inflation) and then provide certain infrastructural systems, such as

• waste management

  • sewers and wastewater systems

  • landfills

  • incinerators

• roads, highways, and travel infrastructure

• public power generation

• etc.

Typical damage includes sewage discharges, chemical releases, leaks from aging infrastructure, leachate, air pollution, and more. Government is always described as the necessary solution to externalities (a.k.a. neighborhood effects, e.g., pollution, noise, etc.), but in all these cases, government is the externality.

As above, though some of these are necessary infrastructure services, private companies would provide them more efficiently and cheaply, and would be far easier to hold accountable for damage. And they would do it without the consent-violating coercive force of government.

Mega-projects and land transformation

Big government—with their unlimited supply of taxpayer and printed money—loves big projects:

• dams

• canals

• reservoirs

• irrigation systems

• eminent-domain development

• wetlands draining

• flood-control projects

Typical damage:

• habitat destruction

• river disruption

• species collapse

• sediment changes

• population displacement

• salinization

• subsidence

Here too, while some of these mega-projects can be helpful, central planners lack knowledge, price feedback, and normal incentives. Governments have captive populations whom they can tax at will. Governments are run by ambitious bureaucrats, myopic ideologues, and politically motivated operatives. And because they are playing with other people’s money, there is no end to the foolish projects they can undertake or the harm they can cause.

In the 1960s, the Soviet government diverted the rivers feeding the Aral Sea to support centrally planned cotton production. The result was one of the greatest ecological catastrophes in recorded history. The sea lost 90 percent of its volume. An entire ecosystem (and all the human activity that depended upon it) was wiped out. Dust from the exposed seabed created the toxic Aralkum desert.

This was not caused by market incentives; it was caused by government agricultural quotas enforced from the top down. The hubris is staggering.

Not to be outdone, the Chinese communists diverted rivers (causing them to dry up completely); attacked birds (creating plagues of insects); and tried to farm rice on hillsides instead of in paddies—all of which caused tens of millions to starve to death. Their brilliant idea to put a steel furnace in every backyard caused massive deforestation.

Again, being a government, they had only political incentives and no price signals. Being a psychotic communist government, they had plenty of fear. As a result, no one dared speak up to let them know that they were devastating the environment. Because no one dared speak up.

II. Government as Indirect Polluter

The brochure fallacy asks, “Without government, who will protect us from pollution?” with the underlying assumption that governments are actually doing that. This fallacious premise not only ignores the fact that government is the biggest polluter, it also ignores the fact that it abets pollution by others.

Crony Capitalism

Defenders of the state argue that we have government bureaus and accountable elected officials whose role is to protect the public. This argument from the brochure ignores the reality of the iron triangle: the incestuous, mutually reinforcing relationship among government agencies, politicians, and private industries.

In a phenomenon known as regulatory capture, the committees and agencies that are supposed to be keeping tabs on private interests end up being captured by those same interests.

In the brochure version, industries lobby the government. In the actual version, private industries end up writing the rules by which they will be governed.

In the process, they gain

• exemptions, selective enforcement, or delayed intervention

• weakened permitting standards

• liability shields or indemnification

• suppression or minimization of evidence

• favoritism in contracting

• special grants, loans, or status

The politicians, for their part, gain campaign support, the goodwill of powerful private players, and pork for their constituents.

The bureaucrats in the oversight agencies never solve anything, so they gain a permanent raison d’être, ongoing funding, and the job security that follows.

A revolving door also forms whereby all these players rotate from private to public and back again, writing their own rules and scratching each other’s backs along the way. Naturally, the taxpayers have no real seat at the table.

The end result is that the government is more responsive to entrenched private interests than to the general public or to the living things of planet Earth. It does not punish polluters nearly as often as it protects and assists them.

Bad policies and incentives

Nearly all politicians have a disease. It is called the do-something disease.

Constituents clamor that “There oughta be a law.” Special interests lobby for favors and preferential treatment. And there is nothing stopping politicians from giving them what they want.

The laws they pass do not need to comport with common sense or natural law. They just need to get out of committee and onto the floor for a favorable vote.

In the real world, there are market signals. Prices. Competitive pressure. Bottom lines. Politicians have none of this. The result is an endless stream of legislation that doesn’t actually need to work in the real world—it just needs to satisfy the political incentives of the moment.

Subsidies. Tax policy designed to steer activities. Mandates that sound good in a campaign speech. Production targets or limits.

The result is a market distorted by politics. One mode of transportation, one crop, one industry is favored over another. Private players—who cannot simply tax their way to prosperity—must adjust accordingly. And sometimes, these adjustments prove worse for the environment than if politicians had simply left things alone.

But they won’t ever leave things alone, because the system is set up to reward them for doing something, even if that something is bad.

The tragedy of the commons

Here is a quick example to serve as an explanation for the phenomenon known as the tragedy of the commons:

If no one owns a plot of pasture land (if it is considered the commons or ‘owned’ by everyone), then the incentive is for all the farmers to try to graze their animals there before the other guy does. If one farmer owns it, his incentive is to use the land wisely, to preserve its capital stock for the future.

In fact, public land is frequently overgrazed for this very reason, just as fishing grounds are overfished.

Socialist countries have been a study in the tragedy of the commons, but even in the mixed-market economies of the West, the problem is still the same; there is just somewhat less of it.

Governments can manage resources well, but they face greater obstacles, including short time horizons, misallocation of funds driven by political or budgetary considerations, and unclear accountability.

By way of example, public forest lands in the United States frequently fall victim to a peculiar set of tragedies:

1. Laws are in place that allow environmental organizations to sue the government on the taxpayers’ dime.

2. Because certain lands are “public,” these organizations feel they have the right to have a say in how they are managed.

3. They sue the government to prevent the needed thinning of smaller trees.

4. Fire loads become so large that wildfires become catastrophic crown fires (rather than merely burning the grass while leaving the larger trees mostly untouched).

5. Thus, forests that are supposedly ‘yours’—you’re paying for them, after all—are turned into ashen wastes, all at your expense.

Bottom line:

Private ownership works better than public ownership. Always.

Market incentives work better than political incentives. Always.

III. Governments are not accountable

The government causes pollution. The pollution harms people in a way that is (or ought to be) actionable.

Now what do we do?

We sue the government.

Where?

In government courts, staffed by people paid by the government.

Held accountable by whom?

Other government agencies, staffed by other people paid by the government.

Do such lawsuits work? Sometimes. But the hurdles are high. Statistically, private businesses are far more likely to be held accountable than governments are.

None of these people have market or ownership incentives. They all have political incentives. And there are other obstacles to holding governments accountable for pollution.

• Government officials may have sovereign immunity.

• Officials can hide behind bureaucracies; specific individuals are rarely accountable.

• Governments can statutorily grant themselves exemptions or reduced liability.

• Governments can put any activity they like behind a shield of “national security” or “emergency.”

Governments are a monopoly. They lack the pressures of competition. This means they don’t have to perform well, since they have no peers who can hold them accountable.

You are a captive of your government. They can pollute all they want and continue to tax you. You cannot opt out. Thus, they have no pressure of losing ‘customers.’

Oh, and they can externalize the costs of all of this to you. The damage. The cleanup. The court costs (whether they win or lose). The economic dislocations.

You pay for all of it. Government officials have zero skin in the game. They are playing with the house’s money, and the house is YOU.

We are being played.

We are being polluted.

We are being gaslit into believing that the world’s biggest polluters are protecting us from pollution.

Please don’t do them any favors by making their arguments for them.

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Etienne Note: Check out our monograph: Solving Covid - The Covid 19 Eugenics, Vaccine/Drug Scam Timeline at and its companion article: The Covid 19 Suspects and Their Ties to Eugenics and Population Control/Reduction to understand who is behind "The Covid"

By Ed Dowd, Beyond the Narrative

Over the last several years I have been posting nonstop on X about the same nightmares we’ve been living through…the COVID psyop, the experimental mRNA shots, the mandates that destroyed lives, the injuries, the excess deaths, and the relentless propaganda machine that tried to silence anyone who noticed the bodies piling up. I have watched it all in real time: the fear porn, the goalpost moving, the “safe and effective” lies repeated like gospel while real-world data told a different story.

Now we have fresh, documented revelations that should have blown the lid off of everything. Instead? Crickets from the media and, more disappointingly, from the current administration that promised accountability.

Senator Ron Johnson dropped another devastating report and hearing in late April 2026: “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals.” Internal records show FDA officials knew their VAERS monitoring was inadequate to say least. They had better data-mining tools ready to flag clear safety signals: cardiac deaths, strokes, pulmonary issues, Bell’s palsy but they chose not to use them. Why? To avoid “vaccine hesitancy.”

This was not screw-up territory. It was deliberate. Vaccine-injured people sat across from Peter Marks and other top FDA brass begging for acknowledgment. They got stonewalled. Johnson rightly calls this one of the biggest scandals in his decades in public service. Then in early June he held another hearing exposing potential cancer links to the mRNA shots and the systematic suppression of critical studies. Same playbook: inconvenient science gets buried or attacked.

Around the same time, Tulsi Gabbard, in one of her final moves as DNI, declassified documents laying out Fauci’s role in funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan, the lab-leak cover-up, the intelligence manipulation, and the retaliation against truth-tellers. Millions of taxpayer dollars funneled into risky biolabs, followed by the full narrative-control machine kicking in to blame nature instead of the obvious.

These are not anonymous X threads. This is a sitting Senator with subpoena power and the former Director of National Intelligence dropping official records.

So where is the firestorm? Where are the front-page exposés, the prime-time specials, the demands for real hearings and prosecutions? In 1976 the swine flu vaccine was pulled after 25 deaths and 500 cases of Guillain Barre Syndrome. In the covid shot era we have approximately 39,000 deaths reported to VAERS following the shot. Apparently lives got cheaper over the last 50 years. The legacy media has mostly ignored it, downplayed it, or run the usual “right-wing conspiracy” dismissals. Paid to lie… and crickets on recent FDA COVID vax revelations. Their complicity is not an understatement, rather it was essential to the entire psyop.

Even more frustrating is the relative silence from the current Trump administration. After years of vowing to expose the lies and drain the swamp on the pandemic response, these revelations land and… not much follow-through. No aggressive push for accountability. No sustained public reckoning for the officials who covered up safety signals or manipulated the origins story. That silence hits hard. Additionally the vaccines are still on the market and this administration is now complicit. What an epic failure!

A lot of us did not need Johnson’s reports or Gabbard’s declassifications to see the fraud. Back in 2022 and 2023, my team at Phinance Technologies was already digging into the data and uncovering the real narrative through our Humanity Projects. We analyzed excess deaths, disability surges, absence rates, and the human and economic costs of mass inoculations when almost no one else wanted to touch it. Check out the full body of work here: Humanity Projects

What we found through cold, hard numbers lined up with what the bodies on the ground were showing. We weren’t surprised by the latest revelations from Senator Johnson. We had been sounding the alarm years earlier, while getting labeled conspiracy theorists for it.

We watched the institutionally well-established benefits of natural immunity get summarily dismissed and memory holed. We saw “two weeks to flatten the curve” turn into endless boosters for the compliant and job losses for the unvaccinated. We saw friends and family injured or worse, then told it was “rare,” “coincidence,” or “misinformation.” Those of us who protested the mandates and the experimental mRNA shots were labeled Russian disinformation, dangerous spreaders, even domestic terrorists. It did not stick, but they tried.

For those who saw through the propaganda early, resisted it, and watched peers fall for it our worldview has forever changed. The greatest cover-up ever. But despite the MSM blackout, word has gotten out through underground channels, thanks in no small part to Senator Ron Johnson and others who refused to let subject die.

The betrayal runs deep. These new revelations do not surprise us but rather they confirm what the data and our own eyes showed years ago. They lied. They knew they were lying. They censored, gaslit, and destroyed lives to protect the narrative. Many institutions including public health, intelligence, media, Big Pharma were all in on it and still propagating the lies today.

That loss of trust is profound and permanent for millions of us. We no longer default to believing official statements. We demand primary data. We assume self-preservation and narrative control from authorities until proven otherwise. The COVID era did not just damage credibility on one issue instead it shattered how an entire group of people view government, “experts,” and authority. “Doing your own research” proved to be a critical lifesaver.

The people in authority still defending the garbage jab or pretending none of this matters can keep taking their 12 boosters (dirty little secret… they are not). The rest of us are done. We are profoundly changed. More skeptical. More data driven. Less willing to comply. Team Humanity was born out of this mess.

The window for real accountability is slamming shut. Even if these official revelations get memory-holed, the lesson is clear: they never planned to come clean. They want us to forget and move on to the next crisis.

I am not forgetting. And from what I see every day, millions are not either. As time rolls forward and the cognitive dissonance of those who took the vaccine wears off…our numbers will continue to grow.

“For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.” — Luke 8:17

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By Dr. Joseph Mercola, Mercola

Long before artificial tears filled pharmacy shelves, people used honey to treat wounds, burns, and infections because of its strong antimicrobial and tissue-repair properties. Now, researchers in Madrid have brought that ancient remedy into modern ophthalmology, testing whether Manuka honey eye drops could outperform the standard treatment given to patients recovering from cataract surgery.¹

Dry eye disease affects a large share of adults worldwide and an even greater proportion of older populations. Cataract surgery, despite its reputation for restoring crisp vision, frequently leaves patients with burning, gritty, watery eyes that struggle with reading, screens, and bright light. For a meaningful portion of patients, that discomfort lingers for months.

Standard care typically relies on lubricating drops, steroids, and anti-inflammatory medications. These add moisture but do little to repair the damaged ocular surface driving the irritation in the first place. That’s where Manuka honey appears to behave differently.

Rather than simply wetting the eye, it seems to address the underlying problem, calming inflammation, supporting tissue repair, and protecting vulnerable tissue from microbial stress all at once. The Spanish trial put that idea to a direct test, and the results were notable enough to help explain why this old folk remedy is suddenly drawing serious scientific attention.

Natural Eye Relief Showed Stronger Results Than Standard Drops in This Study

Cataract surgery temporarily disrupts the eye’s surface barrier, leaving tissue more vulnerable to irritation and microbial stress. Manuka honey has long been used in wound care because it blocks the growth of harmful microbes while supporting tissue regeneration. Published in Frontiers in Ophthalmology, the 2026 study followed 53 adults recovering from cataract surgery.

Researchers compared two groups: one used Manuka honey eye drops, while the other used standard sodium hyaluronate artificial tears.² Every participant used their assigned drops four times daily for one month after surgery alongside standard postoperative medications. The researchers tracked symptom severity, redness, tear stability, and visual function at multiple time points to see which intervention provided stronger relief.

•People using Manuka honey started with worse symptoms but finished with better results — At the beginning of the study, the Manuka group had significantly worse dry eye scores than the control group. Yet by the one-month mark, the situation completely reversed. Patients using Manuka honey reported lower symptom scores than those using conventional lubricating drops.

Researchers described the improvement as statistically significant even after adjusting for differences like sex and baseline symptom severity. Participants using Manuka honey improved their Ocular Surface Disease Index, or OSDI, score by an average of 27.3 points, while the sodium hyaluronate group improved 4.3 points. OSDI is a questionnaire doctors use to measure how badly dry eye interferes with everyday life.*

It covers problems like blurry vision, eye discomfort, light sensitivity, and trouble reading or using screens. A larger drop means symptoms became less disruptive. For many people, that level of change means the difference between constantly noticing eye irritation and barely thinking about it at all.

•Visible inflammation also dropped in the Manuka group — Researchers measured redness in the whites of the eyes (called conjunctival redness), which is caused by irritation and inflammation. Patients using Manuka honey actually reduced redness below their starting levels, while the control group experienced increased redness after surgery.*

•The timing of the improvements mattered — Cataract surgery frequently triggers a surge of dry eye symptoms during the first several days after the procedure. In many patients, irritation lingers for months. Yet the Manuka group showed progressive improvement across the study period instead of worsening symptoms.

At one month, the difference between groups became more pronounced. If your eyes feel scratchy, watery, or exhausted after surgery, that shorter recovery window becomes extremely important because it affects reading, driving, sleep, and screen use every single day.

•Not every measurement improved equally — Researchers also timed how long tears stayed evenly spread across the eye before drying, a measure called tear break-up time. Your tear film has three layers: a watery middle, a mucin base that helps it stick to your eye, and an oily top layer that prevents evaporation.

The Manuka group showed better numbers overall, but the differences didn’t reach statistical significance. Even so, the direction of change still favored Manuka honey. Tear stability improved slightly in the honey group while it worsened in the control group. That pattern suggests the eye surface itself became calmer and healthier over time.

•Researchers suggest Manuka honey may work by targeting inflammation and tissue repair at the same time — Unlike standard lubricating eye drops that mainly add moisture, Manuka honey contains natural antimicrobial compounds and unusually high levels of polyphenols, which are plant chemicals with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects.

According to the researchers, Manuka honey may reduce inflammatory molecules that rise during ocular irritation. Those inflammatory chemicals damage tissue and keep the eye surface in a cycle of redness and discomfort.

•The honey also appears to support physical healing of the eye’s surface — Researchers noted that Manuka honey may promote the growth of fibroblasts and epithelial cells, which are the repair cells that rebuild damaged tissue after injury or surgery. Think of fibroblasts as the body’s construction crew. They help rebuild and stabilize tissue after stress.

Epithelial cells form the protective outer layer covering the eye. Faster repair means fewer exposed nerve endings, less irritation, and a more stable tear film.

Calm the Inflammation That Dries Out Your Eyes

Dry eye after cataract surgery starts when the eye’s surface becomes inflamed and unstable. Your tears evaporate too quickly, tiny nerve endings become exposed, and your eyes stay trapped in a cycle of burning, redness, and blurry vision. The goal is not simply adding moisture; it’s calming the irritation damaging the surface of the eye while supporting repair of the tear film itself.

That’s exactly why the Manuka honey study stood out — it addressed inflammation, tissue healing, and microbial stress all at once.

1.Use medical-grade Manuka honey eye products to support the surface of your eyes — The study found that Manuka honey eye drops reduced dry eye symptom scores more effectively than standard sodium hyaluronate drops. Patients using the honey formula reported larger improvements in irritation, redness, and visual comfort within one month. Unlike conventional drops that mainly lubricate, Manuka honey, research suggests, may actively support healing.

Medical-grade Manuka honey contains antimicrobial compounds and high levels of polyphenols that may reduce inflammatory chemicals irritating the eye surface. It also supports fibroblasts and epithelial cells, the repair cells that rebuild damaged tissue after surgery. That means your eyes are not just wetter; they may become healthier and more stable over time.

If your eyes burn or sting after surgery, use products specifically designed for ophthalmic use rather than raw kitchen honey. Even high-quality table honey can contain bacterial and fungal spores that cause serious infection on the delicate eye surface. Use only sterile, ophthalmic-grade Manuka honey products formulated and tested for direct contact with the eye.

2.Lower the environmental stress that evaporates your tears — Dry indoor air, constant screen use, and airflow from fans or vents can disrupt tear stability quickly. If you stare at screens for long periods without blinking fully, your tears stop spreading evenly across the eye. The surface may dry out and irritation may escalate.

Use the 20-20-20 rule: every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for at least 20 seconds, and blink fully several times. This habit may help prevent the slow tear evaporation that builds throughout a workday.

Also reduce your time watching screens as much as possible, and place humidifiers in the rooms where you spend the most time, especially during winter. If air blows directly toward your face while you sleep, redirect it. Small environmental changes often create meaningful improvements because your tear film finally gets a chance to stabilize.

3.Support healthy oil production in your tear film — Your tears contain an oily layer that prevents rapid evaporation. Inflammation damages those oil-producing glands, especially after surgery. Seed oils and ultraprocessed foods worsen that inflammation throughout the body, including the tissues surrounding your eyes.

I recommend replacing processed fats, including seed oils, with more stable options like grass fed butter, ghee, and tallow. Many people also notice improvement when they stop eating restaurant foods and packaged snack products loaded with seed oils. Stable fats support healthier cellular membranes and reduce the inflammatory stress disrupting your tear film every day.

4.Use warm compresses to open blocked oil glands naturally — Many dry eye cases involve sluggish meibomian glands, which are the tiny oil glands lining your eyelids. When those glands thicken or clog, tears evaporate rapidly and your eyes feel gritty and irritated.

Apply a comfortably warm compress over closed eyes for several minutes once or twice daily. Gentle warmth softens hardened oils and improves flow from the glands. Afterward, lightly massage your eyelids with clean fingertips to help release trapped oil. This simple routine may improve tear stability and may reduce the constant “sand in the eyes” sensation many people struggle with after surgery.

5.Increase your cellular energy so your eyes repair faster — Your eyes require enormous amounts of energy to maintain a stable tear film and repair microscopic surface damage. Poor sleep, chronic stress, excessive artificial light at night, and unhealthy diet all interfere with that repair process. Morning sunlight exposure helps regulate circadian rhythm and supports mitochondrial energy production inside the cells covering your eyes.

If your sleep improves, your eye recovery often improves alongside it. Adequate protein intake — about 0.8 grams per pound (or 1.76 grams per kilogram) of lean body mass — also matters because your body needs amino acids to rebuild damaged tissue. About one-third of your daily protein intake should come from collagen-rich foods because collagen provides structural support for connective tissues throughout the body, including delicate tissues surrounding the eyes.

6.Support your eye health to reduce cataract risk — Your eyes are extremely vulnerable to metabolic damage, especially from chronically elevated blood sugar and insulin resistance. Over time, excess glucose may damage the proteins inside the lens of your eye, contributing to stiffening and clouding. That process may increase your risk of cataracts, glaucoma, and long-term vision loss.

Stable blood sugar from regular movement, balanced meals, and strong cellular energy production may help protect the lens before that degeneration accelerates.

Also focus heavily on antioxidant-rich foods because your eyes face constant oxidative stress from light exposure, inflammation, and aging. Leafy greens and deeply colored fruits and vegetables supply protective compounds like lutein, zeaxanthin, astaxanthin, and vitamin C that help preserve clearer vision and healthier eye tissue.

Some people also use natural compounds such as N-acetylcarnosine (NAC) eye drops and N-acetylcysteine amide (NACA) eye drops to support lens health and reduce oxidative damage directly inside the eye.³ Preventing cataracts from developing or worsening protects you from the cycle of surgery, inflammation, and chronic dry eye recovery altogether.

*These findings are primarily from a small clinical study conducted in a postoperative setting. Results may not apply to all individuals or clinical situations.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Consult a qualified healthcare provider before making changes to your health regimen.

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By Katherine Li, Business Insider

Flock Safety is hitting a rough patch with one of its biggest customers.

The Los Angeles Police Department let its deal with the surveillance company expire over the past weekend, a spokesperson of the department told Business Insider on Monday.

“We wanted to address some of the civil liberty and civil rights concerns and ensure that there is clarity over the terms regarding privacy, data ownership, and security,” the LAPD spokesperson said.

The LAPD is among Flock’s largest government customers. The Atlanta-based company operates a nationwide network of more than 80,000 cameras that scan license plates to help law enforcement agencies trace vehicles.

An LAPD audit report released earlier in July said the department had a three-year agreement with Flock, which operated 138 pole-mounted cameras across Los Angeles since July 2023. LAPD’s audit cited concerns that federal agencies could have access to data collected by Flock and that federal immigration enforcement could seek access to it.

The data-sharing arrangement was first reported in October 2025 by the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights, which said that Flock had implemented an information-sharing pilot program that allowed federal agencies to access license plate data collected by local law enforcement agencies without those agencies’ knowledge or consent.

The LAPD isn’t alone in rethinking its association with Flock

A growing number of police jurisdictions have walked away from Flock since 2025, including Mountain View, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara County, South Pasadena, Flagstaff, and Hillsborough, North Carolina.

In some places, breaking up with Flock has proven harder than signing up. In Dayton, Ohio, city workers recently covered the company’s cameras with trash bags after an internal review found what officials described as “egregious violations” of city policy, including thousands of immigration-related searches. In Evanston, Illinois, officials said Flock reinstalled cameras after the city had moved to remove them, prompting a cease-and-desist letter before the devices were ultimately taken down months later.

Business Insider’s Nicole Einbinder previously reported that mistakes made by Flock’s automated license plate readers have led to innocent drivers being stopped at gunpoint, mauled by police dogs, or jailed after their vehicles were incorrectly flagged. One man in Toledo was arrested and suffered serious injuries after Flock’s camera misread the “7” on his plate for a “2” and flagged the vehicle to the police as stolen.

The setbacks come after years of rapid expansion for Flock, which has become a dominant player in the automated license plate reader market since its launch in 2017.

Earlier in 2026, Amazon’s Ring also canceled a planned partnership with Flock days after a Ring advertisement aired during the Super Bowl sparked widespread backlash.

In a separate incident, US Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg announced federal charges against a Texas man on Monday for allegedly leaving antisemitic and homophobic threats in Flock’s company voicemail inbox. The voice message also accused the company of “breaking the Constitution.”

Flock Safety’s spokesperson told Business Insider that the company will have ongoing discussions with LAPD to address “misconceptions” that led to the “disappointing pause” and that it hopes to resume its “successful partnership” with LAPD soon.

“While this latest development comes as a surprise,” the Flock spokesperson said, “We remain committed to continuing our active and ongoing conversations with LAPD to find a path forward.”

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Etienne Note: I thought one of his more important comments was that the only Primary Dealers were the Federal Reserve Governors who are buying the majority of treasury issuances. The organized crime banks and Fed propping up the crooked monetary system.. Smells like they are going to collapse it all and try to hang on to the TRILLIONS in assets they stole through FRB while we fight in the streets. I don’t think Singer sent all 115 analysts as the summary of his remarks implies.

By Carm1ne (@carm1nee), X

Legendary hedge fund manager Paul Singer commissioned [some of his]115 analysts to dig through Bank of America’s balance sheet — and what they uncovered paints a terrifying picture of just how opaque the modern banking system really is. Against $150 billion in equity and $2 trillion in on-balance-sheet assets, the analysts found $75 trillion in derivatives, an imbalance so extreme that Singer says it makes the bank’s true financial condition impossible for anyone to fully grasp. He put the challenge bluntly, daring anyone — inside the industry or out — to explain what that kind of exposure actually looks like in practice.

Singer draws a direct line to the 2008 financial crisis, when top executives at firms like Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Citigroup — Stan O’Neal, Dick Fuld, and Chuck Prince — had no real understanding of the risk buried in their own books, packed with what turned out to be worthless AAA-rated assets. His warning: today’s numbers are even bigger, regulators and investors are just as blind, and the next crisis could dwarf the last one.

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By Hakeem Anwar, Above

United States, July 13th, 2026 — Above, an independent and conscious technology company, has released the AI Data Center Map, alongside their AI Data Center Ecology Report (aidatacentermap.org).

The map gives residents, policymakers, and journalists the ability to browse 4,000+ U.S. data centers. With a single click, users can calculate the projected electricity and water consumption of nearby facilities. By making the data and methodology publicly accessible, Above aims to generate informed dialogue about the risks of rapid nationwide AI-data center expansion.

Highlights from the data indicate that if all planned U.S. AI data centers are completed by 2030, they could consume 200GW of electricity — over 40% of today’s total U.S. power demands.

Zooming into the local level, the interactive map enables individuals to see estimated megawatt demand, gallons of water used per day, number of homes displaced, and the heat-island effects from nearby data centers. Additional map layers add context on major U.S. aquifers, high-voltage transmission lines, and water-stressed areas, illustrating the relationships between AI data centers and our natural resources.

Instead of following the tech industry’s AI hype, Above’s CEO Hakeem Anwar is taking a real look at the risks. “We can’t ignore this issue,” Anwar says. “Data center developers are saving billions in federal, state, and local tax programs while consumers are being crushed under the weight of overwhelmed public utilities.”

This issue is alive in the hearts of Americans; 60 U.S. counties have already enacted moratoriums on new data-center development. According to Anwar, “The fight is only beginning. From now till 2030, the United States is building more data-center capacity than consumers could ever dream of using. This buildout may be the final nail in the coffin for American affordability and our nation’s environmental health.”

The AI Data Center Ecology Report maps the entire lifecycle of massive AI data-center projects, from site selection to permitting. It delivers actionable solutions by presenting case-studies of community victories and setbacks, along with a framework to identify proposed data centers before they go public. For those wanting to take a personal stand, it includes step-by-step instructions on minimizing AI functionality across phones, laptops, browsers, and more.

“Regulations have failed us,” Anwar adds. “Through conscious choices that minimize AI usage and non-violent resistance, it’s up to us to ensure that AI data centers don’t destabilize us further.”

Above (abovephone.com) is a conscious technology startup founded in 2021. They are creators of end-to-end solutions like the Above Phone, a de-googled privacy phone, and Above Book, an open-source Linux laptop. Their products and services mark a new era where technology protects the privacy of its users and empowers them to create, not consume.

Report & Map

Full report (PDF)

Report webinar

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Less than a week into the US-Iran conflict, specifically on March 3, we began to see the writing on the wall: Tehran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz would eventually erode. That would happen not only because the US military could systematically destroy IRGC’s radar sites, coastal missile batteries and drone launch sites along the maritime chokepoint, but also because Gulf states would eventually respond with a generational infrastructure buildout, from new pipelines to coastal ports, designed to entirely bypass Hormuz altogether.

The emerging theme gained momentum on Monday morning with a new Financial Times report stating that Dubai’s state-owned ports and logistics giant, DP World, is considering a massive new port and container terminal on the UAE’s east coast, in Fujairah, to bypass the Hormuz chokepoint.

Jebel Ali’s port, which handled 15.6 million 20-foot containers last year, is located southwest of central Dubai, toward Abu Dhabi, and was battered over the last several months when Iran closed the strait, sending containerized volume down nearly 95%. That shipping shock, according to an FT source, was enough for DP’s executives to begin looking for alternative routes.

Here’s more from the report:

DP World was now discussing a term sheet with government officials, with the new project’s structure and financing yet to be finalised, the people said. The new port could be completed as soon as within a year and a half, a senior company official said.

The Jebel Ali Port is DP’s crown jewel, the largest port and the anchor of the Jafza free zone, which hosts about 12,000 companies.

“Jebel Ali will continue to be Jebel Ali,” a senior DP official told the FT. “It will never be downsized.”

“We do have our own plan, and we’ve been very active in terms of looking at the eastern coast as far as DP World is concerned,” the senior official said. “It’s defensive in case things go wrong,” the senior DP official continued.

Shifting part of the port’s capacity outside Dubai is a seismic change but not surprising given that UAE’s Minister of Foreign Trade Thani Al Zeyoudi recently told Bloomberg in an exclusive interview, “We’re moving toward having zero Hormuz dependency and that’s regardless of whether it’s open or not. It’s going to open and we hope that will happen quickly, but we will not stop the new plan.”

The plan includes major investments in pipelines, rail, and road links from UAE ports in the Persian Gulf to Dibba, Fujairah, Khor Fakkan and at least one new harbor on the Gulf of Oman coast.

In the early months of the conflict, Saudi Arabia’s Hormuz-bypassing East-West pipeline was the prime example of being hedged for a Hormuz closure, able to shift 7 million barrels a day from Persian Gulf loading terminals to those at Yanbu on the Red Sea.

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By Steve Kirsch’s newsletter

Executive summary

They censored this paper as a danger to public safety. This means they know the paper is incorrect and can explain the observed data. But they are keeping their analysis a secret. From everyone, including the authors.

So Karl wrote the entire advisory board. Only ONE member bothered to respond with the reasoning. The rest ghosted him.

But the BIG problem is that the “reasoning” does not EXPLAIN what the study observed. At all. We are left clueless. If the vaccines didn’t increase the mortality, then what did? All we have is COMPLETE SILENCE.

In this article I’ll post what the Advisory Board member wrote and what I wrote back.

Please vote at the end of the article who you think is correct.

The paper in question... CAUTION: the paper is unverified

Available here: Increased Mortality Associated with 2-Month Old Infant Vaccinations

The response Karl got from an Advisory Board member

Dear Karl:

I am writing to you in my personal capacity, not as part of the advisory committee. I did not review this paper, but if I had, I would have rejected it too. Here are some reasons why.

The paper was likely withdrawn because its design and analysis cannot support the conclusions it makes about vaccination and infant mortality, owing to multiple fundamental methodological errors that invalidate causal interpretation. Most critically, the study conditions entirely on death by including only children who died before age three, which makes it impossible to estimate mortality risk or compare vaccinated and unvaccinated populations; the analysis therefore examines only the timing of death among decedents rather than whether vaccination increases the likelihood of death. This fatal selection bias is compounded by the absence of a living comparison group and a population denominator, rendering terms such as “mortality rate,” “increased risk,” and “more likely to die” incorrect and devoid of epidemiologic meaning. The study further introduces immortal time bias by defining vaccination exposure in a way that requires survival to a specific age window, thereby structurally excluding early deaths from the vaccinated group and inflating apparent post-vaccination risk. Odds ratios are calculated despite the data not arising from a valid cohort or case–control design, rendering the reported statistics uninterpretable. In addition, the analysis fails to adjust for confounding factors that strongly influence both vaccination timing and mortality, such as prematurity, congenital conditions, healthcare access, and underlying illness, and stratified analyses by race and sex merely reproduce these biases rather than reveal biological effects. Cause-of-death comparisons rely on very small numbers, making them numerically unstable and highly sensitive to minor reclassification, yet are presented as meaningful differences. Finally, the paper repeatedly uses causal and harm-implying language that is not justified by the study design, even at an exploratory level. Taken together, these issues represent foundational violations of epidemiologic and statistical principles rather than differences of interpretation, which is why the preprint was withdrawn and labeled scientifically inaccurate.

Preprints generally do not withdraw, so this must have been an obvious mistake on their part.

My response

Dear Professor xxxx,

I am a journalist with ~1M readers worldwide. I’ve written over 1,500 articles on vaccines.

You obviously spent an extraordinary amount of time carefully reviewing the Hooker paper to have written such a detailed review.

I was wondering if you would be willing to do a short interview lasting 5 -10 minutes about why this paper must be removed from public view?

All studies have limitations. This one is no exception.

But I have not found anyone who can IDENTIFY the confounder or methodological error that could possibly EXPLAIN the results that were presented in the paper (other than a causal result of the vaccine).



The results are directional the same way for every single vaccine. All six. No exceptions. No “well, this one vaccine showed a protective effect so maybe it’s noise.” Every jab, every subgroup, same direction. The consistency across vaccines, across racial groups, across sexes — that’s not a statistical artifact. Noise doesn’t line up that neatly.

What methodological error did Hooker make that can EXPLAIN such consistency across all 55 subgroups?

The key question I have is this:

If you (or any of your advisory board colleagues) cannot identify the error explaining the observed signal (WHICH YOU DID NOT DO in your email to Karl), then how can you be CERTAIN you are CORRECT in your support of REMOVAL of the paper rather than simply asking the authors to moderate their conclusions and note the limitations?

If you are wrong, then you have advocated for the suppression of a scientific study that could save lives.

In particular, you wrote:

In other words, you claim the study must answer the question: does vaccination increase the absolute probability of death in the population? Interesting question, but that would require a different dataset — a full birth cohort with survivors which the authors didn’t have.

But the important thing is that the study never claimed to answer YOUR question!



It claimed ONLY to find an association between 2-month vaccination and death in the 3rd month of life. Which it does.

You are essentially saying “this study can’t answer a question it wasn’t designed to answer, therefore it’s invalid.”

That’s not a critique of the study. That’s a critique of a straw man.

The question the study does answer is arguably more important: if vaccines are genuinely harmless, vaccination timing should have zero relationship to death timing.



The fact that it does — consistently, across all vaccines and 55 subgroups — is exactly the kind of signal you’d want to investigate further, wouldn’t you?

Calling this “impossible to interpret” seems unjustified.



I’d also like you to explain your reference to immortal time bias in your note as there is no immortal time bias in the study. Anywhere. Both groups had the exact same rules for the exposure and observation windows.

Please cc: the interested parties on your response. Thanks!

-steve

Note: I cc’ed RFK, Senator Johnson, Aaron Siri, Karl, Brian, Mary Holland, and more.

I also wrote the advisory board asking them to identify what could have caused an “error” of this magnitude and how they know for certain they are correct.

My email to the advisory board

Dear Preprints Advisory Board,

I am an independent journalist specializing in vaccine policy, with a global readership of nearly 1M. I have written over 1,500 articles on vaccine-related issues.

I am preparing a story regarding your January 2026 withdrawal of the study by Karl Jablonowski and Brian Hooker: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202512.1865

The paper performed 55 subgroup analyses, all of which showed a consistent signal of increased mortality in the 30-day window following vaccination.

If this signal is not caused by the vaccines, the advisory board must have identified a specific methodological error or confounder that explains why the data appears the way it does. I have summarized the causal dilemma presented by these data here:

I have spoken with multiple experts, and none have been able to identify a non-causal mechanism that explains the consistency of this signal across all vaccines, racial groups, and the dramatic sex disparity.

If the board concluded this paper was a danger to public safety, you must have definitively concluded that the findings are incorrect because there was a much more likely explanation than vaccine harm. Therefore, I am asking you to share the specific evidence or methodological error you identified that can explain these 55 consistent signals and satisfy the requirements enumerated in the image above.

If you are certain this is not a causal effect, you should be able to name the confounder.

If you keep the explanation a secret, you are advocating for the suppression of a scientific study without providing the public with the necessary evidence to justify that suppression.

Please cc: the interested parties on your response. Thanks!

- steve

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By Meryl Nass, Meryl’s CHAOS letter (Critical Health Analysis and OpinionS)

Blackstone is one of the world’s largest private equity firms. BlackRock split off from BlackStone in 1994. From Wikipedia:

Blackstone’s private equity business has been one of the largest investors in leveraged buyouts in the last three decades, while its real estate business has actively acquired commercial real estate across the globe. Blackstone is also active in credit, infrastructure, hedge funds, secondaries, growth equity, and insurance solutions. As of September 2025, Blackstone had $1.2 trillion in total assets under management, making it the world’s largest alternative investment firm.

Ayotte is a corporate product. She voted while in the Senate (2011-2017) in favor or low income housing projects paid by the federal government, while out of the Senate she supported Blackstone’s gouging rents. She now has an estimated net worth of over $10 million dollars. Hwo do you get there on a politiician’s salary? Serving wealthy corporate interests. No wonder she vetoed the On-Farm slaughter bill—because it serves farmers and consumers, not Big Ag. And her slick team of wordsmiths made it sound like despite her veto, she was going to help farmers, while specifying absolutely nothing she would do for them. The usual playbook at work.

Here’s what NH’s main newspaper has to say about her.

https://www.unionleader.com/news/politics/state/ayotte-serves-on-board-owns-stock-in-nations-largest-landlord/article_51df56be-567c-11ef-a5a9-4f39e56d7520.html

• Aug 13, 2024 Updated Sep 18, 2025

CONCORD — Leading Republican candidate for governor Kelly Ayotte serves on the board of and owns extensive stock in Blackstone, a private equity firm that critics say has a history of buying distressed properties, raising rents, evicting tenants and managing some apartment complexes with deplorable conditions.

The company’s vast holdings around the world, through subsidiary firms, include a large housing complex in South Nashua, apartments in Durham near the University of New Hampshire and a student housing project in Lebanon.

Since joining the board in 2019, Ayotte has been paid $150,000 a year.

According to a 2023 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure statement, she owns more than 16,500 shares of stock valued at $2.2 million, based on Tuesday’s closing price.

Ayotte, of Nashua, said suggestions that Blackstone has contributed to the rising price of rental property in the U.S. were “Democratic lies.”

Kelly Ayotte, a former U.S. senator and the leading candidate in the Republican primary for governor, sits on the board of Blackstone Group, a private equity firm that critics say has a history of practices that have unsettled the housing market, caused home and rent costs to skyrocket, and left tenants living in deplorable conditions.

Union Leader file: [Ayotte has learned her talking points well—Nass]

“First of all, I saw the Democratic lies pushed out about Blackstone and in fact a lot of those lies have been pushed by these left-wing groups across the nation, some of them funded by George Soros,” Ayotte said during an interview for this story.

“Each of these lies and myths have been debunked as well.”

Blackstone itself has pushed back hard on these attacks — specifically the claim that it has played a major part in rising rents and home prices — with a lengthy commentary posted on its website last April.

On rising rents, Blackstone said: “We own less than 1% of rental housing in the US and every market across the UK and Europe where we own assets. Given our ownership levels, we have virtually no ability to impact market rent trends.”

And on criticism that it drives up housing prices by buying up homes and renting them out: “Blackstone only owns approximately 0.06% of the 105 million single-family homes in the US, and in aggregate, institutions own only 0.5%. ... Across the top 18 markets where Blackstone acquired single-family rental homes in 2022, Blackstone’s acquisitions on average represented less than 1% of all housing sales. Therefore, it is virtually impossible for Blackstone to move the market.”

In March 2019, a few weeks before Ayotte joined the board, United Nations housing adviser Leilani Farha issued a critical report, accusing Blackstone and other equity firms of exploiting tenants and “wreaking havoc” in communities.

She said it was the company’s practice to massively inflate rents and impose an array of heavy fees and charges for ordinary repairs.

“Landlords have become faceless corporations wreaking havoc with tenants’ right to security and contributing to the global housing crisis,” she wrote.

Blackstone fired back. In a letter to the UN, Blackstone charged that the report contained “numerous false claims, significant factual errors and inaccurate conclusions.”

Ayotte blames inflation

Ayotte, a former U.S. senator and state attorney general, said New Hampshire’s housing crisis is caused by a lack of supply. She cited a chronic need to build single-family, rental and manufactured housing units across the state.

Corporate landlords “are not changing the market when it comes to New Hampshire; it’s a simple supply-and-demand problem,” she said.

If elected, Ayotte said, she would make the state permitting process more transparent with the goal of giving developers an answer on applications within 60 days.

“As I travel around the state talking to people in local communities, even trying to get a driveway permit can be difficult to do,” Ayotte said. “We are going to overhaul that whole process to make it more efficient.”

Ayotte said rising inflation is the reason rents and home prices are so high here.

“That’s very tough for a first-time homeowner. So I hope inflation goes down and that we get to a position where people can have a mortgage that’s reasonable in terms of interest rates,” Ayotte said.

In 2023, Realtor.com rated the Manchester-Nashua market the 10th-hottest in the nation, with a median home price of $550,000. New Hampshire housing costs have been rising significantly and consistently since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, even before consumer prices saw a sharp increase nationwide in 2021 and 2022.

In a January 2022 investor call, Blackstone executives said that the rents in the real estate portion of their portfolio grew by as much as two to three times the overall inflation rate.

Real estate juggernaut

As of 2023, Blackstone was the biggest landlord in America, with more than 12,400 real estate assets and 230 portfolio companies.

Their holdings include more than 300,000 apartments.

Blackstone has grown from a two-person shop with $400,000 in assets in 1985 to a dominant force, not just in real estate but in hedge funds, credit training, infrastructure investment and other businesses.

The company’s real estate investments have included everything from giant data centers and warehouses to apartments and single-family homes. Residential properties were mostly in the southern and western U.S.

In recent years, Blackstone has acquired hundreds of thousands of homes in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America.

The firm said private equity helped rebuild the rental market at a time when countries around the world were facing housing shortages.

Some of its business activities and practices pre-date Ayotte’s term on the board.

In 2013, Blackstone gobbled up massive numbers of foreclosed, single-family properties through a subsidiary, Invitation Homes. Six years later, it sold its remaining shares in that company for $1.7 billion.

Blackstone’s history

Blackstone owns many high-end properties across the world and in the U.S., but some of their projects have courted controversy.

• Tenants of a University of California property in San Diego purchased by Blackstone in 2021 complained of annual rent hikes of 8% to 9% despite continuing maintenance issues, including cockroach infestations.

• In February 2023, Business Insider reported that since July 2022 — less than eight months — Blackstone had filed more than 900 eviction notices against tenants in multiple states, including Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona.

• Home Partners America, a Blackstone-affiliated rent-to-own company, had fewer property sales than eviction filings in all three of its large metropolitan markets — Atlanta, Chicago and Tampa, Florida — according to a 10-year study by Business Insider and the McGraw Center for Business Journalism.

Blackstone said it is the “only major landlord” in America that didn’t evict a single resident for nonpayment during the two-plus years of the pandemic.

Before the pandemic, Blackstone’s eviction rate was less than half the historical national average, the company said.

A majority of its affordable housing properties in the U.S. have rent restrictions on them that will last, on average, another 18 years, Blackstone officials said.

They said customer satisfaction was well above the national average for residents of their Home Partners America properties.

According to public documents, Blackstone’s comparatively small real estate footprint in New Hampshire consists of:

• Royal Crest Estates in Nashua, a 904-unit apartment complex owned by Air Communities, which Blackstone announced earlier this year it was acquiring.

• Cottages of Durham, which is owned by American Campus Communities, a company Blackstone purchased in 2022.

• MAREK South student apartments in Lebanon, whose landlord, Greystar Properties, Blackstone has held a 95% stake in since 2018.

Ayotte’s Republican primary opponent, former Senate President Chuck Morse, R-Salem, was critical of Ayotte’s corporate ties.

“Voters deserve to know where Kelly Ayotte’s loyalty truly lies: in corporate boardrooms or with the families of New Hampshire,” Morse said in a statement.

“Her substantial investments in multinational corporations like Blackstone — one of the key contributors to the housing crisis plaguing communities across our nation — make it clear that corporate Kelly’s interests do not align with those of everyday Granite Staters. It’s plain and simple: you can’t trust Kelly Ayotte.”

Ayotte’s Senate record

Ayotte said she has extensive experience as a housing advocate during her U.S. Senate tenure from 2011 to 2017.

In 2016, Ayotte fought to get Congress to permanently extend the low-income housing tax credit program so builders could be sure the tax break would be there.

She co-wrote legislation to make it easier for that program to create and protect more than 1.3 million homes over the next decade.

Ayotte said another focus of hers was making the Department of Housing and Urban Development live up to its mission. In 2015, Ayotte called on HUD to move out more than 25,000 families who were allowed to stay in units despite earning well over allowed income limits.

She supported the Housing Opportunity through Modernization Act and HOME Investment Partnership programs, which made it easier for condo mortgages to be insured by the Federal Housing Administration and provided grants to states and communities to meet their affordable housing needs.

Ayotte co-sponsored a 2016 law that protected financing for manufactured housing. She helped secure $1.5 million for the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, which it used a few years ago to help residents of the Windsor Park Estates in Colebrook form a cooperative and buy their park.

“As governor I certainly would bring to this issue not only my experience as a U.S. senator but also my experience in the private sector. I can bring everyone to the table, which is something we need to do if we’re going to tackle this problem in a comprehensive way,” Ayotte said.

“Local decision making is a very important part of the New Hampshire way, and I don’t want the state telling the locals what to do. There is a state role to play, being a helpful partner, and I’m committed to doing that.”

klandrigan@unionleader.com

And here is the fluffy, worthless corporate-speak with which the Governor explained her veto of HB396.

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By Dr. Ferdinand Santos III, Scientism: The New Religion

“Using femtosecond lasers (a femtosecond is a quadrillionth of a second, and the lasers transmit bursts that last 30 to 270 femtoseconds), the team can make holograms that are safe to touch. The images are three-dimensional, with resolutions up to 200,000 dots per second. The voxels are light emitted by plasma that’s created when the laser’s focused energy ionizes the air.” (311 Institute)

“The object of the invention is the use of holographic technology in order to obtain dynamic camouflage or concealment systems for objects or persons. It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to develop a holographic camouflage, concealment and defense or optical shielding system... The first is to confuse the enemy in identifying the type of unit, making him believe that the unit is not what it really is, but that it is another type of different unit...” (European Patent (EP4300028B1) detailing the military application of holographic systems)

Cults who sell Sanctuary

The Scientistic cults, and there are many chapels in the religion of Science, hate religion except their own. The supernatural and miraculous are only allowed to exist within the religion of Scientism. Many of the Scientistic true believers are certain that aliens, arising from random chance over the ‘1 billion known galaxies’, have zoomed and zipped over to have a look at this planet, which you the Scientistic cult, will describe as an unimportant pebble tumbling in the inconceivable vastness of the cosmos, scripted to run 585 million miles per annum around the Sun, forever, in a static pattern which makes even science fiction pause.

Miraculously this alien life ‘evolved’, built technology, sorted out the power, flight, fuel, food, radiation, oxygen, battery issues, and found the proverbial planet-needle in the cosmos-haystack mountain, namely our planet. Everyone knows. There is no other explanation.

• Red orbs? Lights? Must be Hans or ET.

• The Black Triangle? No way the US military can make that.

• The hovering craft disappearing in an instant? Must be Darth.

• The loser-drug-addict-’abducted’ on the lonely forest road? Entirely trustworthy.

• Secret communications? Aliens converse in English of course (they are super smart after all).

• All near US Air Force Bases? Just a base-cidence.

• Roswell and the eggheads? Area 51 is a base where Black Ops projects are tested and actualised. Are we to believe that aliens somehow landed and became entangled in an area where US special operations projects already existed as opposed to say, the rest of the planet? More absurdity.

• A few Pilots claiming to see weird objects? As if the US military does not have dozens of BlackOps projects in avionics with a multitude of objects, sizes and shapes….

• All of this happening since WW2? We are more aware, rational, smarter….

• SETI eating through billions in funding without finding a single ‘ET’ radio signal? They will eventually, it takes time (keep sending money and ignore the incongruity of our claims that aliens are already here but we do not pick up signals….).

• JWST, the Hubble Telescope, large terrestrial scopes not finding a single example of an ‘alien encounter’, object, communications or visual? See above.

• 8 supposed ‘Moon missions’ without discovering any evidentiary data of an alien presence? They did and it is hidden on the ‘dark side’ in -250F temperatures which is why they can’t land there again..…(the Apollo films landed on the ‘light side’ in +250 F temps and there is zero evidence from the Apollo movie series that they ‘ventured to the dark side’ where they would have died in the -250F temps….).

• Youtube videos of strange objects? Unlike movies and films these must be true and objects can never be created, edited, inserted, added….sure if you say so.

Overwhelming. I guess we just have to believe ‘The Science’ and the media that we are infested by aliens. There can be no other rational, scientific, intelligent explanation. By the way, the CIA still claims that giants on Mars built canals and pyramids. Matt Damon is on the scene investigating.

Critical Thinking

For the critical of thinking we have expended a great deal of time exposing how the scientific establishment uses abstract equations and ‘mathematical shells’ to manipulate our understanding of reality on paper. But what happens when the manipulation moves off the chalkboard, out of geometry and models and directly into the sky?

The powers who control our view of reality regale the peasants with the Moon, ‘Moon missions’, SpaceX, Mars and the Stars. Distractions and misdirections. A more important endeavour has been underway terrestrially for 70 years. A highly sophisticated infrastructure has been erected to engineer and master the art of optical deception. Technology creating a matrix. Maybe this is more relevant than the latest inane ‘sci fi’ movie or alien-crocumentary.

Part of the alien-matrix-deployment is military-grade holographic technology. This technology is available and mostly undiscussed. Hologrammatic programming accounts for many of the supposed ‘UFO sightings’ since World War II.

Hologrammatic technology poses one of the most profound threats to human sovereignty.

No, it is not a ‘conspiracy theory’. Let’s have a look.

The Post-War Boom: ET in the Sky with diamonds

It is no coincidence that the global obsession with ‘aliens’ and ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’ (UFOs) exploded after the second World War. Back to critical thinking. What happened during WW2 and after? There was a massive funding in military R&D, including hologrammatic programming. During the 1950s, ‘scientists’ discovered that manipulating light, lasers, and atmospheric mediums could yield terrifyingly realistic visual results. But that was not the only vector of dissimulation and reality distortion.

Alongside the theatre of light, we have the mechanical reality of ‘anti-gravity machines’. The Canadians built the ‘Avro Arrow’ project in the 1950s, funded by the US military copying Nazi technology, to produce ‘anti-gravity’ machines, that we now call ‘drones’, that vertically took off and landed. This is denied by AI and the gatekeepers but it was demonstrated for the public in full view and then quietly shrouded and pushed into black ops. Many other firms were involved in anti-gravity military development - all of them went very quiet in the mid 1950s. It is not a leap to assume that the Black Ops efforts were both well funded and successful.

Below is a photo from Edwards Military base from the 1960s. Your standard UFO. The Nazi’s had built similar prototypes. The craft below is the Avro design, built in Canada, taken over by the US military.

The craft was described as an ‘Avrocar’. “The Avrocar was a good start, and the first step on a long road to discovering technology we use today,” states Jeff Underwood, National Museum of the U.S. Air Force historian. This object was built, used and would have been seen if it was tested outside of military bases. Of course the experts, geniuses, AI and information gatekeepers deny this.

The Avrocar was the result of the Canadian military’s desire to develop a supersonic fighter-bomber, capable of vertical takeoff and landing, in the early 1950s. In the history books they usually leave out ‘the vertical takeoff and landing’ part. The original design emanated from a British Aircraft designer, Jack Frost (yes, apparently his real name) and it was Frost’s design which was used by the Canadian aircraft firm, A.V. Roe which used the exhaust from turbojet engines to drive a circular rotor to produce thrust. By directing this thrust downward the turbo-rotor could create a cushion of air under the aircraft, allowing it to float a few feet off the ground, as well as accelerate to high speeds at higher altitudes.

The English invented Hover-craft developed these same principles. Hover-craft designs, using the same physics, pre-date the Avro project. The knowledge, technology and material therefore existed and could have been repurposed for aircraft. Many of these ‘hovering’ aircraft today quite likely employ nuclear power.

For the Avro project, the Canadian government provided the initial seed funding for the prototype, but dropped the project when it became too expensive. Avro offered the project to the U.S. government and military, who took over testing in 1955 and eventually moved the project to Edwards AFB and other locations in the US. Starting in the 1960s, ‘UFO sightings’ near US Air Force Bases started to increase.

Saucers and Triangles

We therefore know that UFO technology has existed for some time, and given the billions invested in flight technology, would have greatly improved in both volume, machine size and capability in the past 70 years. The current forever war in the Ukraine is history’s first major drone-war. Wouldn’t drones account for a large percentage of ‘UFO’ claims? Some drones are the size of small planes. Drone technology traces its antecedents back to WW2. SpaceX is also a part of this tradition with its vertically landing rocket (another ‘private firm’ gone public, which in reality is a part of the US Military-NASA complex). Hovering, ‘anti-gravity’ craft, based largely on drone designs, are the main generators of ‘UFO’ sightings along with holograms.

Consider the TR-3B. This aircraft is allegedly a top-secret, anti-gravity reconnaissance aircraft developed by the US military. It is a huge triangle shaped and very flat plane or remotely controlled drone. It is often observed at night, can silently loiter in the air and vanishes in a sudden state change. The visible bright pulsating lights change through modes giving this ‘UFO’ a supernatural look. Red lights, blue lights, bright flashing lights. These characteristics comport with most UFO sightings.

Fully Identifiable Objects

The National Institute of Discovery Science (NIDS) investigated the ‘black triangle sightings’. Over 150 separate reports from the US, Canada, and Europe were audited. All reports suggested the sighting of a large, low-flying triangle object. From the accounts of independent aircraft designers, the size, thrust, and payload approximations of the black triangle were estimated by NIDS and include a length of ~600 ft; a width of 300 ft; a height of 40 ft; a mass of 100 tonnes and a vertical thrust of 122 tonnes. These are enormous objects, unique in shape, propulsion and attributes, easily conflated with UFOs.

UFOs are therefore IFUMOs - Identified Flying US Military Objects. These black triangular-shaped objects, including the ‘Black Manta’, are massive, brightly lit, and apparently extremely silent. They are often sighted near water and are usually close to military bases. Their ability to quickly accelerate from a hovering position suggests the use of powerful nuclear-based technology, another aspect that is mostly overlooked by both critics and believers. The Black Manta may be designed to conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. It could be deployed to keep a population in a certain area under control.

Balloons are another issue. The photo below is NASA’s ‘flying saucer’ from 2014-15, which was being tested for the ‘(obviously) inevitable mission (film) to Mars. The inflatable balloon apparently ‘passed’ all of the tests to enter Mars’ atmosphere back in 2022. How many ‘UFO’ sightings are balloons, or test vehicles from NASA and the US military? Musk has said that the Mars missions will start in 2026 or 2029. He also promised in 2017 that the Moon bus would start service in 2018. The US military has various groups engaged in these projects producing sundry vehicles that the general public would not recognise nor expect, and when viewed would terrify them as a ‘UFO’.

Darth is not real

For decades, alternative historical analysts and dissenters have argued a compelling case: a vast percentage of unexplained aerial phenomena are not visitors from ‘deep space’, which is entirely dead and barren, but highly calibrated psychological operations conducted right here on this planet using both black operations planes and drones; along with holograms. The true believers in ‘Scientism’ will never understand ‘psyops’ of course and will never believe that their trusted agents - the government, the media, the experts, or the “the millions of people working in “_insert here agency_” - would ‘lie to us’. Surely they love us as much as you love them.

But maybe not. Anti-gravity and hologrammatic technology are in use, they are in production and their multi-faceted intent would include controlling populations, or forcing populations into accepting governmental control. You may have noticed that crisis after crisis has been generated. The use of ‘UFO’ technology is a part of that process. Only the government can save you.

Blueprint of Deception: What is the point of this tech? Obviously military applications are foremost. But also consider this fact. If governments can control what a population physically sees in the sky, they can control how they react on the ground. By using the atmosphere as a giant projection screen, the establishment has spent about 70 years perfecting the tools needed to stage the ultimate visual hoax, if and when that is needed (Bishop, 2005).

The Corona Plandemic was in planning for about 30 years including the creation of technology, patents, implementation patterns and information control processes. This fact is too much for the Fanboys of course. The Corona planning was built on the AIDS and ‘Spanish Flu’ templates. AIDS was and still is, an outrageous project of immorality, money, power and government evil.

Lucy in the Sky with chemicals and violent manipulations is not a theory. It exists. Once-maligned ‘fringe theories’ like ‘geo-engineering’ are now mainstream. Barium, strontium, sulphur and other radioactive toxins are sprayed into the skies across population centres on a scheduled cadence. Governments under FOI request will happily admit this citing of course, ‘Globaloney Boiling-from-plant-food’ as the casus belli. In the UK, atmospheric geo-engineering is coordinated through a project called SATAN (stratospheric aerosol transport and nucleation). Nice acronym. In effect they are poisoning you. The ‘sky is the limit’ when it comes to totalitarian state management, human culling, and remaking reality.

The basis of creating a hologram is to seed the atmosphere with chemicals…..go outside and look up one day and observe.

Holograms - How It Works

The military grade hologram technology has little in common with the primitive equivalent in consumer entertainment. Military-grade projection relies on advanced spatial dynamics (back to sciency stuff, Ochiai, et al, 2016):

• Three-Dimensional Plasma Generation: High-powered lasers to ionise nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the air, creating glowing, physical points of light in mid-air that can mimic rapid, non-inertial movement.

• Aerosol and Chemical Layering: Spraying specific particulate matters into the upper atmosphere to act as a highly reflective, invisible substrate capable of catching multi-angled laser projections.

• Audio-Kinetic Integration: Combining silent visual projections with highly directional, low-frequency sound waves to make the artificial anomaly feel dense, real, and physically present to observers (Altmann, 1999). This is easily achieved with existing technology and can be found in movies.

The above is documented, known, and proven. The distribution of these chemicals is in place. All of this is related to ‘geo engineering’, what your own lying eyes can see happening in the skies. Below is a Hologram light show in China. Fill in a few spaces and you have a more than credible looking and extremely massive object.

Global Threat to Humanity

This is a ‘vector’ threat that is truly global in scope. The end goal, as with the Corona Fraud, Globaloney-Whatevering, ‘Space exploration’, ‘Over population’ and other dogma is to distract, infantilise or terrorise.

1. Manufactured Global Crises

The most obvious danger is the staging of a synthetic cosmic event, a fake extra-terrestrial intervention or a manufactured ‘threat from the Death Star’. If the mass of uncritical thinkers amongst us genuinely believe that an unearthly force is entering our airspace, they will instantly surrender their sovereignty and constitutional rights to a centralised, global authority, baying and braying for ‘emergency management’.

Orson Welles and the invasion from Mars in hologrammatic real time. Orson staged his theatre for a reason and to prove a point - namely the gullibility of the mass. In the 1920s and 30s, the ‘science’ and fake news were convinced (consensus) that life existed on Mars and that Martian civilisation was far in advanced of ours. In the 1950s and 60s the same geniuses moved on to Venus. Both claims are of course assinine (at the end is a simulation of how Orson and his friends might pull off an invasion from Mars today).

2. Demise of Empirical Trust

It is well documented that when holographic projection achieves absolute fidelity, your own eyes become unreliable witnesses. There are ‘whistler blowers’ who have seen holograms up close and maintain that they could have ‘touched’ the hologram it was so real (see video below around 3 minutes). Hologrammatic technology is now so advanced, so you can indeed the feel the object, its texture and metallic shell.

Thousands of people in Phoenix Arizona in 1997 watched a hologram or a synchronous set of Black-Ops craft (at night) of a spaceship, 1 mile wide, move past them and almost every single observer was convinced it was real. Lives were changed they said. Large headed aliens must be real they intoned. I will never the same again they declared. Few if any applied any deep critical thinking to what they claim to have witnessed (search Richard Curtis Phoenix Lights original video which shows a fraction of what is claimed with few bothering to venture real, material causal factors).

I would guess that this was a test pilot, released by a nearby US Military base, most likely Yuma, famous for Black Ops testing.

If the establishment can project flawless, mid-air structural illusions 30 years ago, or deploy craft (balloons, black ops drones or planes) in a sychronous display, they could certainly fabricate airborne military threats, anomalous religious manifestations (will Christ reappear or more likely Buddha, Shiva, or mad Muhammad with his 20 sex slaves?), or terrifying aerial spectacles to manipulate geopolitical outcomes at will.

• The only questions are; why haven’t they done so yet, or, when will they attempt it?

• Probably the technology is currently too immature and insufficient to sustain a vast illusion over any length of time; and does not yet have regional, global (multi-nodal, synchronised) distribution capability.

• If hologrammatic and physical stealth craft technlogy were to be deployed to create the environment for a lockdown and subjugation, it would have to be a perfectly arranged, flawless implementation, on a global scale, or at minimum within a targeted region, aligned with coordinated propaganda.

• The Corona plandemic proved that the mis-information complex was in place. The rest is probably pending and in testing.

3. Psychological Subjugation

On this stack we cogently argue that much of ‘mainstream science’ is in fact rubbish and unproven. But take it further.

Creating Einsteinian fantasies in maths and models, or manufacturing the painfully obvious frauds of Apollo or Artemis II, is the child’s playroom of Scientistic ambition. Move over to the adult sitting room. Holographic manipulation is the ultimate tool of Scientism turned tangible. By dictating the visual reality of the sky, the institutional globalists, the ‘Scientistic elite’ wearing white jackets with concerned faces who will confirm that the hologrammatic Death Star ridden by Messiah Einstein and hovering over the Pentagon is a physical entity; this deranged cult allied with Satan; could alter public consensus instantaneously.

Hologrammatic programming represents a form of psychological captivity where humanity is forced to live inside a literal digital matrix projected across the troposphere (Friedman, 1998).

Bottom Line

Technology has never been neutral; it reflects the objectives of the structures that fund it. The same is true of maths, models and theories. We look critically at the abstract mathematics used to hide the physical universe. We need to apply the same absolute skepticism to the spectacles orchestrated in the aether of our planet.

They will persist. From Apollo to Artemis, from Mars to Venus, from SETI to the loser who maintains large headed freaks entered his bedroom and ‘abducted’ him. Back to Ockham, common sense and physical reality. The next time the Fake News and Fake Science promote a ‘supernatural extraterrestrial object or incursion’, or the White House releases yet more photos showing blinking ‘red lights’ which must be ET orbs; look for the projectors on the ground, or Black-Ops projects in the skies.

This is our reality: aliens no more exist than Einstein’s Relativity, or the bacteria through ‘survival of the fittest or sexiest’ became a bat, a badger or a budgie. All part of the psyops.

At some point in response to a plan, or an emergency event, the powers that run the world in the background and backrooms could refocus the space films from fake Moon-missions, back to our stratosphere and deploy the sky cartoons. I would sugget that you prepare yourself informationally, spiritually, mentally, physically, financially if and when they deploy holograms and Black-Ops drones and planes in widespread violence and anger. That day might well arrive. 30 years ago who really thought that a Corona Plandemic would be put into operation so successfully, easily, and embraced with such willing, enthusiastic, compliance and obeisance by the general population?

All hail.

==

Nota Bene.

How to do it - Orson Welles updated: Simulation, ‘Operation NWO’

Welles knew the population was gullible and will believe almost anything as long as it is broadcast on reputable channels with authority.

When to do the Welles-follow up?: Summertime is best, easiest to plan, most stable atmosphere and daylight, though Welles staged his on October 30th - autumn.

Time: 19:45-20:00, or dusk just before the sheeple earnestly graze on ‘Prime Time TV’ (Welles aired his show at 8 pm)

Where: Major Metropolitan Area most likely in the Excited States where Hollyweird is the national cult and most people believe that the idiot box is reality and truth

Phase 1: Prep for the cooking (Atmospheric Seeding)

Yes, geo-engineering is 100% real. When you cook, you prep. High-altitude aircraft deploy an invisible, reflective aerosol particulate layer (often metallic nanoparticles) into the troposphere.

• What you will see: A hazy, slightly iridescent sunset. Nothing immediately threatening, just a thin, unnatural cloud cover reflecting the fading light. The idiots will blame ‘Globaloney Boiling’. If anyone looks at the sky anymore they might notice it looks a little weird but will probably look back down at their phones and worry about ‘their team winning the big game’.

Phase 2: The Grid Lock (Laser Targeting)

Dusk turns into evening and darkness. Now the actors come on stage. Terrestrial military installations, naval vessels, and low-earth-orbit satellites synchronise their targeting systems. Back to Apollo and the Artemis II-Orion mini Van frauds.

These actors lock onto the specific coordinates of the aerosol cloud cover above the city.

• What you will see: Nothing yet. The lasers operate outside the visible light spectrum (infrared and ultraviolet). The ‘projectors’ are entirely hidden from the civilian populace.

Phase 3: Plasma Ignition (The Hologram cometh)

The intersecting lasers pulse at varying frequencies. Where the beams cross within the seeded atmosphere, they will hyper-excite the nitrogen and oxygen molecules, ionising them into glowing, three-dimensional plasma (Ochiai et al, 2016). Ah, but remember, plasma does not exist….Einstein say.

• What you will see: Now the magic arrives. Suddenly, a massive, luminescent, geometric shape materialises in the night sky. Because it is made of light and plasma, not physical mass, it can perform impossible physics.

• That is the key. It is not a physical object. It is distorted light.

• The object will move, dart, and meander across the sky at Mach 20, making impossible right-angle turns, and will likely hover silently without any visible propulsion or exhaust.

• Back to bad Hollyweird movies.

Phase 4: Audio-Kinetic Integration

More sciency stuff. Now they need to sell it. To prevent the anomaly from feeling like a mere light show, ground-based acoustic arrays deploy targeted infrasound (extremely low-frequency sound waves) (Altmann, 1999).

• What you will see and feel: The air around you will appear to vibrate. Cue the secular Jew Spielberg. You will feel a deep, physical rumble in your chest and stomach. Your brain immediately associates this deep vibration with massive physical weight and power, convincing your senses that the object in the sky is a colossal, metallic craft. You will convince yourself you can touch it.

Phase 5: The Narrative Overlay (Psychological Subjugation)

Within minutes of the manifestation, local power grids might be intentionally disrupted using electromagnetic pulses (EMP) to heighten the panic. EMPs have long existed and have been used to generate discord and confusion. The EMP ‘attack’ will be blamed on Darth Vader hovering in his scary Death Star above the Pentagon.

Fake News networks, fed pre-scripted talking points, break into emergency broadcasts:

• ‘Breaking Emergency news, an unprecedented contact and aerial threat. From the hovering Death Star above the Pentagon. ET has sent a message and our unknown sources inform us that he has stated the following: on his first reconnaissance here some 50 years ago, he maintains that he was subject to alienism, racism, and sexual abuse. He has returned with Darth Vader and is demanding justice and $ 1 Zillion in payments for his trauma. If these demands are not granted, Darth has threatened he will unleash an all out attack on the US with his white suited and helmeted troopers who cannot fight or shoot straight. President Kamlalalalarama is too inebriated to give a statement at this time but the White House is deeply, deeply concerned and is considering all options including laughing like hyenas. This is a live and fluid event, we will keep you informed’.

The Result: Total psychological capture.

Governments state that air defences, advanced technology and nuclear bombs are of no use against the invasion, which now constitutes hundreds of Death Stars, clearly visible across major cities. The sheeple panic. They are terrified, shooting off their guns or waving their spoons in the air in defiance. Children are herded into basements, shelters, safe areas, or the woods. Idiots called politicians demand martial law. Experts say that White racism and alien-phobia are to blame.

As usual 80% of the traumatised herd will howl for an immediate government response, a military intervention, lockdowns and more action to save the world. Civil liberties are exchanged for security in about 20 minutes. Constitutions, rights and laws meet their auto da fé. Within hours a ‘global council of free nations’ meets and declares the necessity for a One World Government and the abolition of nations and freedom – in the name of thriving democracy and ‘liberal’ values and in order to militarily counter the ET invasion.

Fantastical? The Corona plandemic provided some of the runbooks for this exercise. The rest might be in testing. Who knows. Maybe Orson was a little ahead of his time and technology.

All hail.

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Etienne Note: This article also appears in “Government”, Media and Academia Criminality Exposed, A digest of HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of articles exposing and suggesting inter-generational organized crime’s control of the “Government,” Media and Academia by the Art of Liberty Foundation. You can view the other articles or subscribe on Telegram: https://t.me/Government_Scams

By Svante Myrick, The Hill

President Trump told his followers he would “drain the swamp.” Instead, he became the biggest swamp monster ever. He has obliterated the line between public service and personal enrichment.

Trump’s recent financial disclosures revealed that he made $2.2 billion in the year since he returned to office. That is a breathtaking figure. It is more than 20 times the annual budget of the city of Ithaca, N.Y., where I served as mayor for 10 years.

In other words, Trump raked in, on average, more than $6 million a day, seven days a week. The presidency is more than a full-time job, but Trump’s side hustles were pulling down 15 times the president’s yearly salary of $400,000 — every single day!

Even the conservative Free Press recognized this, writing, “There is no modern parallel for the scale and shamelessness with which the president is enriching himself in office.”

“Earned” would be too generous a term for the way Trump promoted scams like his meme coin, structured so that he would make money no matter what happened to other investors. As Forbes has reported, Trump “asked his political supporters to become his business partners. Those who trusted him got hurt the worst.”

Forbes senior editor Dan Alexander looked at similar ventures by other members of the Trump family and told CNN’s Erin Burnett that “it’s a consistent pattern.” If you add them up, he said, the Trump family has cashed out about $1.9 billion and had its net worth lifted by about $3.1 billion. “Meanwhile, their supporters collectively are down, we estimate $7 billion,” he said.

Crooked crypto deals are just part of the Trump grift. We now know that Trump made 327 stock purchases on April 8, 2025. The next day, he posted “GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” before causing the market to jump by rolling back some of the tariffs he had just imposed.

Then there are billions of dollars in federal financing for mining deals that are profiting Trump’s sons and the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

And consider how Trump insiders diverted tens of millions of dollars from the bipartisan organization Congress had created to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and funneled it into Freedom 250, a newly created company run by Trump insiders.

The sparsely attended “Great American State Fair” was a bust by just about any traditional measure — one commentator called it “a crime against fun” — but as journalist Liz Dye noted, it was a “rousing success” as a grift.

“Trump was able to snatch congressionally allocated funds, commingle them with cash from corporations seeking favor from his administration, enrich his buddies, and throw himself two spectacular birthday parties,” she wrote.

Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee recently documented how the anniversary was hijacked and turned into a “hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment.” They have called for an investigation of possible criminal fraud over the diversion of funds that donors intended for the bipartisan America 250 into the Trump-controlled Freedom 250.

Unfortunately, there’s been no effort by the Justice Department to rein in Trump’s corruption. In fact, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, has advanced the corruption. He cut a deal to give Trump, his family members and their massive network of business operations immunity from IRS investigations or prosecutions. And he backed the creation of a massive slush fund Trump could use to funnel still more tax dollars to his supporters.

I am not a historian, but it is hard to imagine that there has ever been a more corrupt deal made by a U.S. attorney general. That is why the coming confirmation hearings for Blanche are so important. Senators must not reward Blanche’s brazen corruption of the Justice Department by confirming him as attorney general.

More than 1,200 former Department of Justice attorneys and officials have urged senators to reject Blanche’s nomination.

A letter sent last week references “the corruption and abuses that have defined the Justice Department under Todd Blanche’s leadership,” including “the vindictive prosecutions and investigations of the president’s foes; the deals designed to reward lawbreakers with taxpayer dollars; the erasure of accountability for January 6; the mishandling of the Epstein files; and the denigration of judges and repeated violations of their orders.”

The letter also slams Blanche’s “degradation” of the department’s career workforce through the firing of people for “declining to initiate vindictive prosecutions” or “refusing to lie in court.”

Trump has claimed that nobody cares about his corruption and conflicts of interest. That is not true, and saying so encourages more destructive cynicism about politics.

The upcoming confirmation hearings for Blanche will be an opportunity for Republican senators to put country over party. And the upcoming elections will be an opportunity for voters to elect representatives who are more willing to do their duty.

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By Jason Christoff

Battered woman’s syndrome (BWS) is a legal defense in some countries. BWS is when an abused woman breaks mentally and finally kills her abusive partner. Although the abused woman kills or severely injures her abusive partner, this legal defense of battered woman’s syndrome sits as way to justify the kill or injury. This legal defense I agree with.

In psychology, the mental break that a woman encounters, when she finally fights back and kills (or injures) her abusive partner, often happens in situations where the abuse eased up or slowed down. This allowed the woman to regain her mental footing and strength, to fully understand what was happening. Once the woman regains her mental and physical resilience, she quickly realizes that it’s necessary to fight back to save her own life.

Just so we’re clear, the most effective way to control another human being (as is documented through the characteristics of physical abuse and battered woman’s syndrome) isn’t constant abuse that never ends or abuse that is constantly escalating. The most effective abuse-based control protocols involve intense periods of abuse intermingled with periods of love bombing, apology and peaceful outreach (often referred to as the honeymoon stage)...as can be observed in this list.

Any decrease in the frequency of abuse or a honeymoon phase that’s too long, can often trigger an awakening and rebellion inside the abuse victim. The abuse victim is often activated to push back when the abuse doesn’t follow the appropriate ups and downs associated with maximum control. Although this seems counterintuitive, that a decrease in abuse often triggers the abuse victim to find their footing, this gives us great insight into why government and media act as they do....in regards to abusing and terrorizing the general public at regular intervals. It’s almost like we (as abuse victims) know that another terror-based attack is coming our way (from media and government), if we’re starting to find peace, tranquility and personal growth in our lives once again.

I think you know exactly what I’m talking about, this feeling of impending doom we get today, if things start feeling normal and peaceful again for too long a period. That’s when we start to intuitively feel that the corrupt government and inverted media will start at us once again, to give us the propaganda-based beat-down and terror infusion that they’re now famous for. They are a satanic duo, that’s for sure.

In short, to keep an abuse victim under control and slave like, the abuse must be consistent, given at intervals where the abuse victim can’t regain their mental or physical resilience. Keeping an abuse victim fully under your spell for long periods of time (or even in perpetuity) is a science onto itself, which the media and most world governments have mastered.

Again, this abusive psychology isn’t lost on the ruling groups of this world, in the way that humans are most efficiently farmed, exploited and controlled down here on planet mental asylum.

This is the exact reason as to why our mental and physical abuse is consistent and the honeymoon phase not excessively long, when it comes to the treatment we receive at the hands of our government and media abusers. The people ruling us from the shadows understand that they have no choice but to be consistent and cyclical with our abuse, or a mass public awakening and rebellion will commence.

Our abuse is constant but that just means it becomes normalized and harder to recognize. Do you remember some of the highlights of your ongoing abuse and terror over the decades, at the hands of our media and government abusers? Here’s some of their greatest fear campaigns below, which of course have to be intertwined with honeymoon phases....which in turn are essential for maximizing abuse victim control.

This list represents just a sliver of our ongoing terror and fear-based abuse......ISIS, IS, ISIL, terrorists, Al-Qaeda, Ebola, coronavirus, Zika, swine flu, measles, SARS, bird flu, Avian flu, Muslims, killer bees, HIV, AIDS, communism, the Soviet Union, Khmer Rouge, sunlight, the unvaccinated, the devil, Satan, sin, hell, sleeper cells, illegal immigrants, rape gangs, Osama Bin Laden, saturated fat, polio, SARS-COV2, the hole in the ozone layer, high cholesterol, salt, high blood pressure, COVID, global warming, climate change, acid rain, cancer, ticks, rising sea levels, West Nile virus, Charlie Hebdo, 9/11, the flesh eating disease, yellow fever, mosquitoes, shingles, mad cow, Avian bird flu, Y2K, e-coli, the new normal, the cold war, the iron curtain, the shoe bomber, masks, the gas shortage, listeria, anthrax, Epstein-Barr, MTHFR, Jeffery Epstein, 6 feet apart, Trump, not enough inclusion and equity, H1N1, the insurrection, the flu, the war on terror, gun control, bump stocks, ceremonial knives. community standards, Brexit, stock market crash, AR-15’s, whooping cough, tainted blood, Lyme, the red scare, non-maskers, a rise in cases, fake news, Iran hostages, Saddam Hussein, CV-19, a vaccine shortage, weapons of mass destruction, Ayatollah Khomeini, unprotected sex, ICBM’s, the Taliban, masks worn below the nose, WW III, the DNC emails, Oct 7th, antisemites, impeachment, COVID deniers, conspiracy theorists, science deniers, fringe groups, hate speech, Russian collusion, misinformation, disinformation, viruses, variants, gain of function viruses, bioweapons, the Wuhan lab, the death is real, the Asian killer hornets, people’s breath that carries the virus, North Korea, Iran is 2 weeks away from having nuclear weapons, the danger of not walking with the arrows at the grocery store, China, the AI race, the anti-Christ, global boiling, heat waves, mass inflation etc, etc..

You’re being abused at the perfect frequency and given this exact psychological-abuse formula, which breeds the perfect PTSD-trauma-based mind control slave. This is why a good percentage of the public are now acting like perpetual abuse victims and battered women.

From the media propaganda of acid rain to the hole in the ozone layer and from West Nile Virus to the newest COVID variant......the playbook is always the same. Keep Joe and Jane Public in fear, keep the abuse rolling and keep them under control.

Form 9/11 to Pearl Harbor and from The Strait of Hormuz soap opera to the COVID lockdowns.....the ruling group is constantly weaponizing abusive human psychology against everyone. And just for the record......9/11, Pearl Harbor, the attack on Iran and the COVID lockdowns were all purposely organized by the ruling group in order to keep us in this terror-based abuse cycle.

Government and media collude with each other on a regular basis, to constantly abuse us, so we can’t find our mental and physical resilience again. Your perpetual fear, abuse and terror are not accidents and aren’t a chance happening. It’s all just a simple psychological formula used by all abusers, against their abuse victims, to keep their victims under a very tight spell of dominance, exploitation and slavery.

Watch my documentary PLANET MIND CONTROL, so you can finally understand how the average person is easily tricked into believing that a hyper abusive government and media duo are looking out for their best interests. It’s time to break the spell. It’s time to put the garbage to the curb.

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