Thoughts on our circumstances...

Public Service Announcement: Racketeering (RICO) Suit Filed Against the American Academy of Pediatrics

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:12:45 -1000

Editor's note: A federal racketeering lawsuit accuses the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the nation's largest pediatric organization, of misleading families about the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule. Filed in January 2026 by Children's Health Defense and five other plaintiffs, the suit alleges a decades-long pattern of deceptive safety claims tied to funding from vaccine manufacturers. The AAP has moved to dismiss, and the court has not yet ruled. None of the allegations have been proven, but the outcome could shape public trust in pediatric guidance and test whether RICO can be used against a medical professional body. America is the most medicated and vaccinated country in the world. Has the outcome of all that medication and injections been favorable? No, they haven't. Over 40 percent of children in America are now diagnosed with a chronic disease. No problem, just inject infants and children with more vaccines. Over 60 percent of adults have at least one chronic disease (see Uncle Sam the Bioterrorist).
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Racketeering Suit Against the American Academy of Pediatrics Awaits a Ruling on Dismissal

September 29, 2026

A vaccine-skeptic group accuses the nation's largest pediatric organization of fraud. None of it has been proven, and the case is still at the earliest stage.

Children's Health Defense (CHD) and five other plaintiffs sued the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), accusing it of running a decades-long racketeering scheme to defraud families about the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule. The case is Shaw v. American Academy of Pediatrics, No. 1:26-cv-00171. It was filed January 21, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and assigned to Judge Timothy J. Kelly.

The allegations

The plaintiffs invoke the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, sections 1962(c) and (d). Their central claim is that the AAP promoted false certainty that the childhood schedule is thoroughly tested and safe, despite the absence of proper vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated comparisons.

To support this, the complaint relies on Institute of Medicine reviews from 2002 and 2013. Those reviews called for more research and acknowledged that no studies had compared health outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated children. The plaintiffs also allege a financial motive: that the AAP received funding from vaccine manufacturers and gave pediatricians financial incentives for achieving high vaccination rates.

They seek damages for the individual plaintiffs, a court order requiring the AAP to disclose the "lack of comprehensive safety testing," and an injunction barring "further unqualified safety claims."

Where the case stands

After the January 21 filing, the AAP was served on February 2, with an answer due February 23. The parties then jointly sought more time to brief a motion to dismiss.

On April 3, 2026, the AAP moved to dismiss on several grounds, including standing, as Bloomberg Law reported. Plaintiffs' response was due by June 9, 2026. The docket shows a response from Andrea Shaw and a reply from the AAP, so briefing appears complete.

There is so far no ruling on the motion. If the court grants it, the case could end before any evidence is examined.

Related developments

On the day CHD filed, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced an investigation into financial ties among vaccine developers, insurers and pediatricians.

A separate case is also worth watching. In AAP v. Kennedy in Massachusetts federal court, the AAP is a plaintiff, not a defendant, challenging changes to federal vaccine policy. In January 2026 that court denied the government's motion to dismiss, finding the plaintiffs had standing and had plausibly alleged violations of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Some RICO plaintiffs sought to intervene in that case, which links the two.

Behind both cases is a broader political fight. CHD is a nonprofit aligned with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the suit is part of the dispute over his reshaping of federal vaccine policy.

What readers should know

The AAP has not conceded anything. It continues to advise vaccinating children against 18 diseases, contrary to the CDC's changed recommendations. Nothing in the complaint has been tested by a court.

The case matters for two reasons: what it means for public trust in pediatric guidance, and whether RICO can be used against a medical professional body.
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Finding value in a world run by pharmaceutical cartels:

Flu vaccine is WORTHLESS, it DOES NOT work! NEVER did! What did Shrestha et al. (Cleveland study) uncover as to Effectiveness of the Influenza Vaccine During the 2024-2025 Respiratory Viral season?

Related:

Senator Ron Johnson's Roundtable Post Mortem: PSYOP-19 Democide Hospital Protocols, Subversion Of Civil Liberties & Other Crimes Against Humanity

Why I'm Not Going to Washington for Ron Johnson's Scripted Hospital "Mistakes" Roundtable

Pennsylvania nannies from the nanny state go after the Amish

Emergency Ended in 2023--the Campaign Didn't: Why Fall Shots Keep Coming for an Illness Already Under Control

This is an advertisement: You just had $1.4 million stolen from you.

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:44:30 -1000

Editor's note: One option to stop the theft are state militias - after the book is read and comprehended. Our suggestion would be to buy every US senator and congressional member a copy of the following book. If you have any funds left over send copies to your local IRS offices. The current circumstances with US senate and congressional members are that they won't do a thing (there is no legislative solution at this point) because they are bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists with big money wallets. It won't happen until the public starts voting OUT all the state and local (county) tyrants who start it all by imposing "zoning" on you and telling you what you "can't" do with your own property. Until then, you are slaves because you don't really have property rights, yet are told you live in a "free country." If Americans can't sell RETAIL on their property what they grow and build/produce/manufacture, then they don't have property rights. Study what the early Americans could produce and sell on their own property in 1790 or 1830, before "zoning" came along. If you want to remove those petty tyrants starting at the local level, TAB (Take America Back) trains everyday Americans to become Citizen Servant Leaders, guided by Honesty, Integrity, and Transparency, to fill the empty seats where decisions about your town, schools, and money are being made, so visit the TAB website today to learn how to claim yours, because the seat is open.

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THE GREATEST THEFT IN HUMAN HISTORY! How the Banks and "Government" Will Steal At Least $1.4 Million From the Typical American Worker… "Legally"

By Etiennne de La Boette2 | September 29, 2026

Understanding the (Mostly) Invisible Theft: Inflation from Fractional Reserve Banking + Government Taxes + Social Security COLA Underpayment Etienne de la Boetie2

By Etienne de la Boetie2 Founder, Art of Liberty Foundation With research assistance from Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 & Opus 4.8 Max, xAI's SuperGrok, Google's Gemini 3.1, and OpenAI's GPT 5.5 – Get the book at Greatest-Theft.com with the Full Analysis Available at ArtOfLiberty.org/Inflation

NOW AVAILABLE AS A BOOK (September 29, 2026): The Greatest Theft in Human History- How the Banks and "Government" Will Steal at Least $1.40 MILLION from the Typical Worker… "Legally” is out in paperback and ePub at Greatest-Theft.com, with low-cost "Friends Bundles" (5 copies for $55, 10 for $85) for friends, family and colleagues. It also ships free with an annual Voluntaryist.News membership. Physical copies are impossible to delete, impossible to algorithmically censor, and impossible to put down! One early reader ordered 200 copies for sheriffs' departments and justices across North Carolina — then ordered 200 more.

A note on the numbers: Earlier previews of this analysis used private inflation indices and a gold-standard comparison in the headline figure. For the book, we anchored the headline to the government's own official CPI, used the Reality Index (realityindex.co) as our alternative CPI measure, and moved the gold-standard comparison out of the headline total, so critics have nothing easy to wave away. The $1.40 million is the floor, not the ceiling. The full math is in the book.

Let's start with a number: $1,400,000 (58% of gross lifetime earnings)

That is the amount the median American worker earning $60,000 per year will lose — over a 40-year career and 20-year retirement — to the fractional reserve banking system, government taxation, and Social Security benefit manipulation. Combined, these mechanisms extract 58% of gross lifetime earnings. The system doesn't just take your money — it erodes the purchasing power of what you earn and save, charges you interest on money created from nothing, and then rips you off in retirement by underpaying the Social Security cost-of-living adjustments you are owed. If you earn more, the theft goes up proportionally: $120,000 annual salary will lose $3.09 million, $250,000 per year loses $6.64 million, and $500,000 per year equals $13.96 million stolen.

Please go to gst.artofliberty.org to review the charts.

The chart above measures the total theft against a neutral monetary system with zero inflation — the basis of the $1.40 million headline. The chart below shows the larger, illustrative cost measured against a gold standard, where prices are benignly deflationary, and your dollar buys more each year. (The book keeps that comparison out of the headline total.)

This is not a political opinion. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is an accounting — cross-checked by four separate AI systems and built on primary-source data from the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, the BLS, and the GAO. When Claude Fable 5, SuperGrok, Gemini, and GPT all land in the same order of magnitude, the pattern is not noise. It's signal.

Today, the Art of Liberty Foundation releases The Greatest Theft in Human History as a book — in paperback and ePub at Greatest-Theft.com — the most comprehensive public accounting of monetary extraction ever attempted. Here's what we found.

The Number That Should End the Conversation

The dollar has lost 96.8% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. That's not an estimate. That's from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' own CPI Calculator. During that same period, the M2 money supply expanded approximately 860 times — from roughly $25 billion to $21.5 trillion (as of January 2025). Real GDP grew approximately 41 times. The gap — roughly 21 times more money per unit of real output — represents purchasing power transferred from everyone who holds dollars to those who created the new ones.

Those new dollars were not created democratically. They were created by banks — private institutions that generate money by typing numbers into computers when making loans — and the “government” who also conjured it up out of thin air, even though it is inflationary and even though it steals value from those who earn and save — and injected into the economy through a network of 26 "Primary Dealers" who get access to newly created money first, before prices adjust. By the time that money reaches your paycheck, prices have already risen.

Please go to gst.artofliberty.org to continue reading.

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Here is another angle to the ongoing theft. "We're dancing on a razor blade. One little slip, and this is game over." Mitch Vexler at Mockingbird Properties says the bond math is financial suicide and the contagion could go global in hours. Here's how you can better prepare:

Review and study the work of Professor Richard Werner at Werner Economics:

You are surety for the bonds:

America's $40 Trillion Debt: The Point of No Return Has Arrived

Because they are the down trodden, the outcasts, the ones who slipped through the cracks, the ones slammed hardest by theft (inflation), the slaves:

Why Are There So Many People Living In Third World Conditions In The United States?

Pennsylvania nannies from the nanny state go after the Amish

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:27:59 -1000

Editor's note: The Amish population in North America has reached about 421,340 in 2026, growing roughly 32 percent since 2017 and doubling about every 20 years, driven by large families and high retention. Pennsylvania remains the largest Amish state, with about 96,500 people (roughly 23% of the U.S. total), an 18% increase since 2020. Its Lancaster settlement alone holds around 44,000. Still, high land costs are pushing some young Amish families out of Lancaster County toward central and northwestern Pennsylvania, and to states such as Kentucky, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Indiana. Growth in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana has slowed to under 2% a year, while newer settlements in the Mountain West, including South Dakota and Montana, are growing much faster from small bases. Pennsylvania's Amish are spreading out rather than leaving. From current statistics, there is approximately an 11 percent (likely not confirmed) uptake in vaccines within Amish communities.
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PA Public Health Officials Target Amish Door-to-Door For Measles Vaccine Re-Education, On-Site Injection

By Benjamin Bartee | September 27 2026

In Pennsylvania Amish country, an obese and remarkably homely nurse in the employ of the state public health authority, Dale Weiser, pictured in all of her plus-sized glory HERE, has been going door-to-door with an arsenal of measles vaccines in tow to "encourage" vaccine uptake among the community that "abstains from Western medicine" – in other words, a community full of domestic terrorists begging for the business end of the long arm of the law.

("Never trust a woman named Dale," my Irish-Catholic grandmammy once admonished me over a glass of prune juice when my colon was backed up as a young tot, through wafts of smoke from her Virginia Slims.)

Via BBC (emphasis added):

Walking into strangers' homes, Weiser says she tries her best to be respectful and non-intrusive as she vaccinates dozens of family members against the measles, sometimes around the kitchen table.

"A lot of people that I encounter, they don't have health insurance. They don't have a lot of interaction with the health system, and they just haven't seen the need to get these vaccines," said Weiser, who works for the Chester County Health Department.

"When you start talking and you answer their questions, and build that trust, a lot of times they will make a different decision."

The at-home vaccinations are part of the county and state health departments' strategy to encourage immunisations in the county, which includes an Amish community who abstain from many aspects of modern life, including regular contact with the western medical system.

Related: WebMD Claims Covid Vax 'Still Crucial for Children'

In a real nation with any degree of civil liberties to speak of, obviously, the Amish residents of Chester County would be well within their rights to take a public health official turning up on their doorsteps with loaded weapons (syringes) as an existential safety threat and then to take the necessary actions to neutralise it – exactly the kind of eventuality the Second Amendment was intended to remedy.

Alas, America hasn't been a real nation for a great many years.

Chester County public health commissar Jeanne Franklin frames the door-to-door vaxx-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out campaign as a "boots on the ground" approach to the problem – the problem being the deplorable bumpkins who don't sufficiently appreciate all the good that Merck, the predominant supplier of measles vaccines in the United States, has done for the world.

BBC continues (emphasis added):

The boots-on-the-ground approach has helped the health department dispel misinformation and build trust with the community, local health officials said.

In recent years, childhood vaccination rates have fallen across the country as false theories about the safety of the measles vaccine have proliferated on social media.

Those theories have found roots even in an insulated community with limited access to computers, Weiser said. She has heard people ask if there are heavy metals in the vaccine that could make them magnetic, or if the shot has a computer chip in it.

"You're clearly getting information from that hard-core group that is promoting that misinformation and disinformation," she said.

To clear up any lingering confusion about what's going on here, in case it weren't obvious, "boots-on-the-ground" connotes a military operation.

Related: WHO Accuses Anti-Vaxxers of 'Anti-Science Aggression,' Calls Them 'Killing Force'

The Amish might not realise they're combatants in a war, but the state considers them something akin to insurrectionists on account of their unacceptable level of participation in the state biomedical regime – the same one that has been waging a covert, asymmetrical warfare on the American people at large for roughly the last hundred years, following the complete takeover of the medical establishment by the Rockefellers via the Flexner Report to turn humans into cash cows.

In what may or may not be related news, Massachusetts governess Maura Healey recently announced "home visits" conducted by government healthcare providers -aka the nanny state's progressive goon squad – to "make an assessment" about the conditions of the child and the fitness of the parent, which presumably includes whether the child has received all of his or her state-mandated injections and whether the parent is respecting the infant's preferred pronouns:

"Everybody in the state, when you have a baby, you're going to have a home visit. You're going to have a home visit within days, weeks, and that will be an opportunity for a healthcare provider to make an assessment and to see if you need some additional support and resources. We also made more investments in training health care professionals, doctors, and others on how they can identify signs of postpartum."

Massachusetts governess Maura Healey announces "home visits" from government officials for the families of newborns to make an "assessment" pic.twitter.com/gCp76HPiz2
— Thomas Paine Reloaded™ (@BenBartee) September 27, 2026

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Can anyone blame the Amish for rejecting injections? The Amish couldn't be more vindicated than after the Covid injection attack on civilization:

Moderna's mFLUSIVA and SPIKEVAX violate federal labeling law (BLA). The FDA cannot waive statutory requirement for manufacturer address on the carton/vial.

VAIDS COVERUP CATASTROPHE: 97.8% COVID-19 “Vaccination” Rate & The Government Of Fiji Has Just Declared A National HIV Crisis

Vaccine News

COVID Hospital Protocols: 'This Kind of Cruelty Will Not Be Repeated'

Designed to kill:

The Blockade Is Working. That's the Problem.

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:25:22 -1000

Editor's note: It is being overstated by Armstrong Economics what the oil tanker blockade and sanctions have achieved. Independent trackers do show a steep drop in Iranian crude reaching China, but enforcement so far amounts to dozens of ships redirected, disabled, or boarded, not a sealed coast, and even analysts (the experts) who call the blockade effective say loaded crude only "probably" fails to get through. Iran still holds meaningful buffers, including tens of millions of barrels on tankers in Asia, room for more onshore storage, and floating inventories that were drawn down by roughly 28 million barrels in August alone. That means oil is still being converted into revenue. The pressure is also reversible, since Iran's loadings rebounded after the first blockade ended in June, and the idled tankers off Sri Lanka are fleet capacity waiting to resume, not capacity destroyed. Meanwhile, the cost side of the ledger is ignored here. The market is already tight, with Gulf exports down by nearly half, a key Saudi bypass pipeline damaged, and fuel prices setting records, so removing Iran's remaining barrels adds to a supply shock that is only partly of the blockade's making. The blockade is a real and painful lever, but it is an incomplete and costly one, and the claim that geography has permanently closed off the market is probably premature.
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The Blockade Has Done What Sanctions Could Not

September 28, 2026 | By Martin Armstrong

For years, Washington proclaimed that sanctions would shut down Iranian oil exports. They never did. Iran adapted because markets ALWAYS adapt. Tehran assembled a shadow fleet, tankers switched off transponders, cargoes changed identities, oil moved ship to ship, and payments bypassed Western banking channels while China continued buying the crude. Even during Trump's maximum-pressure campaign in 2019 and 2020, Iranian oil continued passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Washington could sanction the paperwork, banks, insurance companies, and ships, but somebody still wanted the oil. The blockade has changed everything because you cannot hide geography.

Reuters reports that Iran went roughly seven weeks without meaningful crude exports passing through Hormuz. Iranian crude and condensate loadings collapsed from roughly 2 MILLION barrels per day in March to 740,000 in July and merely 220,000 to 255,000 barrels per day in August. This is the fundamental difference between sanctions and a blockade. Sanctions tell someone they cannot conduct a transaction, so markets find another currency, bank, company, flag, or jurisdiction. A blockade says the tanker cannot leave. You can rename the vessel twelve times and create twenty shell corporations, but eventually that ship still has to sail through the water.

Iran's shadow fleet solved the sanctions problem because sanctions are fundamentally bureaucratic. It cannot solve Hormuz because geography is physical. Vortexa identified 27 sanctioned tankers sitting off Sri Lanka in ballast because they could not return to Iran to reload. Meanwhile, Iranian crude has been accumulating on the other side. Iran has the oil. China wants the oil. Yet the transaction cannot be completed because the physical connection between buyer and seller has been severed.

China had been Iran’s escape valve. When Europe stopped purchasing Iranian crude and Western financial institutions refused to process transactions, Chinese refiners simply bought discounted Iranian barrels. Iran received foreign currency, China received cheap energy, and Washington discovered that it could make the trade inconvenient without eliminating it. Now even that system is breaking down. Iranian crude stored afloat fell from around 135 million barrels to 107 million barrels during August as accessible inventories were drained while oil accumulated behind the blockade.

This is far more serious than another round of sanctions. Sanctions are economic warfare through banking regulations. A blockade is economic warfare enforced by military power. Iran depends upon oil revenue for foreign currency, and that lifeline is being severed while its domestic economy is already collapsing. GDP contracted 10.1% in the first quarter, while the oil and gas sector plunged more than 26%. Remove the dollars and yuan coming into the country while production is falling and Tehran faces declining reserves, additional pressure on the rial, and still more inflation.

Iran is attempting to redirect commerce over LAND, but the economics are absurd. Before the war, more than 80% of Iran's roughly 180 million tonnes of annual two-way trade moved by sea from its southern coast. The Financial Times reports that trade is increasingly being pushed toward Turkey and neighboring countries, with Iranian imports through the Gürbulak crossing reportedly surging 250%. But you cannot replace a supertanker with trucks. Thousands of trucks mean bottlenecks, customs delays, fuel expenses, labor costs, and a fraction of the capacity available through maritime trade.

The blockade could also damage Iran long after the immediate crisis passes. Oil cannot be pumped indefinitely when storage tanks and tankers are full. Production eventually has to be reduced, and shutting aging fields creates additional costs and technical problems when production is restarted. Iran therefore risks losing not merely today’s oil sale but future productive capacity.

Please go to Armstrong Economics to continue reading.
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Editor's note: The world's shadow fleet is growing, not shrinking, despite heavy sanctions and the occasional seizure of oil tankers by Western navies. According to the information outlined in the video clip below, 3.7 billion barrels of oil were moved from sanctioned producers on dark fleet ships in 2025, most of it bound for Asia. Tracking, boarding, and seizing tankers on the open sea takes specialized teams, it is dangerous and requires expensive equipment and then people who know what they are doing once the vessel is seized, so successful operations are rare and widely publicized precisely because they are exceptions. At the same time, global shipping capacity cannot meet current demand, shipyards are years behind, and Western economies are already struggling with record shipping costs and fuel prices. That leaves governments with little practical room to shut the dark fleet down, whatever their rhetoric says. The excellent discussion below lays out the evidence:

The Smithsonian Left Football Off Its List. Maybe It Was Right.

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:40:31 -1000

Editor's note: It has been called the "National Fake League" as sarcasm replacing the National Football League because professional football in America has been elevated to what seems like the epitome of human cultural accomplishment. The fanboys of this clearly staged and faked professional entertainment business worth billions of dollars every year are in a category of their own. The National Fake League has become a stage for athletes who see themselves as the pinnacle of human achievement, histrionically dramatizing every routine tackle, ostentatiously choreographing end-zone celebrations, and shamelessly showboating for the cameras until the bloated spectacle of their own self-importance eclipses the game itself, while a vast pipeline of college players, nearly all of them dreaming of an NFL roster spot, chase the same prize of status, fame, and money, treating four years of college as little more than an audition for the National Fake League. The Smithsonian thinks they are "insignificant." Maybe for a good reason:

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Editor's note: Professional football players, as football players, have not met the bar for a list of significant Americans according to the Smithsonian, because significance means changing something beyond the field of play. Their achievements are measured in games, yards, and championships, and while millions of fanboys dressed in their respective teams colorful loyalty costumes may cheer for them, the sport would look nearly identical had any single player never existed.

Smithsonian's 2014 List of 100 Greatest Americans

by Miles Mathis

September 27, 2026

If you didn't already have existential vertigo, this will give it to you. People blame me for putting people off-balance with my papers, but I have never seen anything as disorienting as this article from the Smithsonian.

I got to it while searching for the subject of a new paper. I wanted to see who I have missed in my blitz on history.

I feel I must confirm that I am not making this up. You may need to take the link above to see that this is all terribly terribly real. They divide the list into ten categories, like Presidents, Artists, Religious Figures, and so on, and then list eleven people in each category. Which, according to my math, is 110 people, not 100, but whatever. I guess it is too much to expect fake historians to be able to do simple multiplication.

The strangest category may be religious figures:

Joseph Smith Jr.

William Penn

Brigham Young

Roger Williams

Anne Hutchinson

Jonathan Edwards

L. Ron Hubbard

Ellen G. White

Cotton Mather

Mary Baker Eddy

Billy Graham

We need two Mormons on this short list? And strange promotion of Seventh Day Adventists as well, with Ellen White. So this list is already very spooky. Same for L. Ron Hubbard, who was an actual spook (Naval Intelligence). Then we get four Puritans with Hutchinson, Williams, Edwards, and Mather. No one has been a Puritan for about 300 years, so how are these people "significant", much less influential? Same for Christian Science, started by Eddy in 1879: it now has less than about 40,000 members, so it isn't as significant as a Star Wars fanclub. Same again for William Penn, a Quaker. Almost no one is now a Quaker, and I have shown you the Quakers were always just agents themselves, infiltrating Christianity to blow it from the inside, like the rest of these fake denominations. This list is basically just a promotion of schismatics. But why would the Smithsonian be promoting a bunch of schismatics that most people haven't even heard of on a list of greatest Americans? If you have been reading my papers, you know why: OPERATION CHAOS.

But it gets weirder. You have to look closely at the categories to see it:

Presidents

Religious Figures

Artists Athletes

Empire Builders

Pop Icons

Outlaws

First Women

Rebels and Resisters

Trailblazers

What's missing? How about scientists? And remind yourself that this list comes from the Smithsonian, which is supposed to be about the sciences, arts, and humanities. But here we see their list is heavy with throwaway categories. Athletes are now on a par with Presidents, but scientists are left out? Women need their own category? Ten percent of this list needs to go to outlaws like Al Capone and Charles Manson? These are the greatest or most significant people in the history of our country? Here is the whole list of outlaws:

Benedict Arnold

Jesse James

John Wilkes Booth

Al Capone

Billy the Kid

William M. "Boss" Tweed

Charles Manson

Wild Bill Hickok

Lee Harvey Oswald

John Dillinger

Lucky Luciano

Not one of those people belongs on this list of greatest or most significant Americans. I have outed most of them in their own papers. That whole category is a waste, so why would the Smithsonian include it? Again, OPERATION CHAOS.

You would also expect to see a lot of writers on the list from the historians at Smithsonian, or perhaps to see an entire category given to them. Nope, we get only two writers, Edith Wharton on the Ladies list, and Mark Twain in the Pop Icons list with Madonna and Marilyn Monroe. He is turning over in his grave. Likewise, we get one scientist, Edison, but he is lost in the Empire Builders category with Walt Disney and Steve Jobs.

Then we come to Athletes:

Babe Ruth

Muhammad Ali

Jackie Robinson

James Naismith

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Ty Cobb

Michael Jordan

Hulk Hogan

Jim Thorpe

Secretariat

Billie Jean King

First of all, a bodybuilder is not an athlete, and neither is a fake wrestler, so Arnold must have bought himself on to this list along with Hulk Hogan. Hulk Hogan?! And I hate to tell the historians at Smithsonian, but Secretariat is not a person. He is a horse. Look it up. Plus, why do we have three baseball players here, but only one basketball player and no football players? Why no Olympic athletes? And again, none of these people or quadripeds belong on a greatest or most significant Americans list. Maybe a most famous list, but not a most significant list. The significance of all of these sports is just entertainment, which is relatively insignificant. Never before in history have athletes ranked equally with statesmen, artists, scientists, or writers. Only in our purposely collapsed culture could anyone even imagine such a thing. If you disagree, name one athlete from the 18th century. Name one athlete from the Renaissance. Name one athlete from ancient Rome or Greece.

Another buy-on to this list was George W. Bush. No real historian would list Bush as one of the top eleven Presidents. There are very few blacks on this list (10 out of 110), and this was 2014, so it is very surprising Obama isn't on the Presidents list. As the first black President, he is far more significant just for that alone than Bush or even Grant, and far more significant in the long run than Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, or Louis Armstrong. I am not a fan of Obama, but that is a fact.

Ditto for Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, and Oprah Winfrey, who make it on the Ladies' list, but wouldn't make a top-million list by any real person. Without extreme promotion, no one would have ever heard of them, and in a few decades no one will.

On the Artists list we find Georgia O'Keefe, but far better choices would be Mary Cassatt or Cecilia Beaux. Hard to believe Emily Dickinson was bumped off the Ladies' list in favor of Madonna or Bette Davis. Also more deserving of being on this Ladies' list would be Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Myra Bradwell, Elizabeth Blackwell, or Sarah Whiting. And if you had to put an actress on this list, you would choose Meryl Streep, not Bette Davis. Like everyone else in Hollywood, Streep has become intolerable, but that doesn't nullify her early performances, like in Sophie's Choice or Out of Africa. I don't think actors are great people, or significant, so I wouldn't put them on this list at all, but Streep has to rank highest in her category, just above someone like Anthony Hopkins or Daniel Day Lewis.

If the Smithsonian can include Christopher Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci as American, I can suggest Nikola Tesla as a replacement for one of their buy-ons. Tesla spent most of his life and did most of his major work here.

It is also difficult to believe they listed all these athletes, actresses, outlaws and other promoted nobodies while forgetting about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sinclair Lewis, John Goddard, Edmund Hubble, Robert Millikan, Robert Hofstadter, Theodore Richards, Wild Bill Donovan, Allan Pinkerton, J. Edgar Hoover, William Shockley, Elisha Gray*, George Eastman, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Hart Benton, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, John Steinbeck, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Ben Franklin, Samuel Morse, Arthur Compton, Linus Pauling, Louis Agassiz, and Richard Byrd. To be clear, I don't think many of those, like Pinkerton, Donovan, or Hoover, are great men, but they are far more significant to the history of the US than most of those chosen by the Smithsonian. They certainly helped make it what it is, ~~for better or~~ for worse. Same for Ben Franklin, whom I no longer admire, but no sane person would leave him off this list to make room for Billie Jean King. That would be like replacing George Washington with Taylor Swift.

In conclusion, I think just about anyone—even those who don't agree with my specific choices—can agree this list from the Smithsonian is surpassingly strange. It is so outrageously stupid and counterintuitive and counter-historical (again, Hulk Hogan?!), that it can only be another CIA mindstir. It clearly didn't come out of the Smithsonian, it came out of Langley down the road. That is, supposing that everything in the Smithsonian, and all of DC, isn't now just an offshoot or outbuilding of CIA.

*I list Gray to replace Alexander Graham Bell, but I still find it hard to believe the historians at the Smithsonian left Bell off to make room for Sarah Palin or Lucky Luciano.

Trump Hands Americans' Private Data to Palantir — And Nobody's Stopping Him

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 14:26:58 -1000

Editor's note: Palantir with no-bid contracts with the US government looks to be moving towards taking over and running government agencies and if that happens thousands of US government employees will be forced to quit. The Trump administration is quietly building the surveillance state (see NET Zero, AI And Technocracy: What Happens To Freedom In A Surveillance Society?) Americans were warned about, and Palantir is holding the shovel. Since a March 2025 executive order demanded "data sharing" across federal agencies, Palantir has landed a $10 billion Army contract, embedded engineers inside the IRS, and built the ICE tracking tool that just got caught receiving Medicaid data on millions of people it was never supposed to have. Agencies are stonewalling FOIA requests, courts are being asked to force disclosure, and even Palantir's own former employees are begging the company to stop. This isn't hypothetical anymore. It's happening in real time, with your bank records, tax filings, and health data as the raw material, and almost no legal guardrail strong enough to stop it.
________

Stargate: President Trump Contracts Palantir To Steal Data And Create Master Database On All Americans

The Trump administration has expanded Palantir's work across the federal government in recent months.

By The Witness | June 2, 2026

Per a New York Times report, President Donald Trump has tapped CIA-funded and backed Palantir, a data analysis and defense contractor, to collect Americans' personal data to create a new master hub to store this data as part of a federal plan to consolidate and nationalize this data.

In March, President Trump signed an executive order - "Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos" - that instructs government agencies to share data with each other.

The purpose of the order states: "Removing unnecessary barriers to Federal employees accessing Government data and promoting inter‑agency data sharing are important steps toward eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency while enhancing the Government's ability to detect overpayments and fraud."

Specifically, Trump's order directed the following:

Agency Heads shall take all necessary steps, to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure Federal officials designated by the President or Agency Heads (or their designees) have full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems — or their equivalents if providing access to an equivalent dataset does not delay access — for purposes of pursuing Administration priorities related to the identification and elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse. This includes authorizing and facilitating both the intra- and inter-agency sharing and consolidation of unclassified agency records.

[…] Agency Heads shall take all necessary steps, to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure the Federal Government has unfettered access to comprehensive data from all State programs that receive Federal funding, including, as appropriate, data generated by those programs but maintained in third-party databases.

The President’s cryptic executive order caused many to wonder what this would mean for their private data, namely things such as bank account numbers, student debt, medical information, and disability status.

As noted in the NYT’s report and by other outlets such as The Tokenist, the Trump administration already has a fairly cozy relationship with Palantir, whose co-founder Peter Thiel is a staunch advocate for and donor to Trump, and a number of agencies have already purchased Palantir's technology.

The NYT reported:
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir's work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)

Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.

The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.

Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.

Palantir's selection as a chief vendor for the project was driven by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, according to the government officials. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.

Palantir has long worked with the federal government. Its government contracts span the Defense Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During the pandemic, the Biden administration signed a contract with Palantir to manage the distribution of vaccines through the C.D.C.

At the I.R.S., Palantir engineers joined in April to use Foundry to organize data gathered on American taxpayers, two government officials said. Their work began as a way to create a single, searchable database for the I.R.S., but has since expanded, they said. Palantir is in talks for a permanent contract with the I.R.S., they said.

A Treasury Department representative said that the I.R.S. was updating its systems to serve American taxpayers, and that Palantir was contracted to complete the work with I.R.S. engineers.

Palantir also recently began helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement's enforcement and removal operations team, according to two Palantir employees and two current and former D.H.S. officials. The work is part of a $30 million contract that ICE signed with Palantir in April to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time.
This latest action coincides with a recent admission by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "MAHA Report," which includes deploying "AI-Powered Surveillance: Create a task force to apply AI and machine learning to federal health and nutrition datasets for early detection of harmful exposures and childhood chronic disease trends."

Moreover, Trump’s latest action is congruent with the ambitions of the likes of Oracle's Larry Ellison, who was a recipient of the $500 billion Project Stargate on January 21st. Since the deal was announced, Ellison told an audience at the World Government Summit, during a segment called "Reimagining Technology for Government," that he wants to "unify" all of American’s private data and even DNA information, into a central hub.

"[…] We have to take all of this data we have in our country and move it into a single, if you will, unified data platform so we [can] provide context. When we want to ask questions we've provided that AI model with all the data they need to understand our country, so that's the big step, that's kind of the missing link.

"We need to unify all of the national data, put it into a database where it's easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like."

Ellison has previously described how this god-like AI will be spying in the bathroom, and users will have to request that the camera stop spying as people use the facilities, though Ellison admits that the cameras are still always running and can be accessed via court order.

"The camera is always on, you don't turn it on and off. The way you turn it on - you can't turn it off you [but you are] going to the bathroom - 'Oracle, um, I need two minutes to take a bathroom break and we'll turn it off.

"The truth is we don't really turn it off. What we do is we record it so no one can see it, but no one can get into that recording without a court order, so you get the privacy you requested, but if you get a court order - a judge can look at that, this so-called bathroom break."

Oracle's Larry Ellison Wants To 'Unify' All Of America's Data And DNA Into AI Datacenters To Be Studied And Mitigate People's Lives In A Dystopian Nightmare

THE WINEPRESS · FEBRUARY 14, 2025

Read full story

Palantir has received plenty of criticism throughout the years and their exploits and ambitions have been well documented, especially their involvement in defense, as the most recent example of their services being frequently used by Ukraine and Israel to wage their wars.

Please go to the Wine Press to continue reading.

________

Editor's note: Stop waiting for Washington to fix this on its own and start applying pressure where it actually works. Call and email your senators and House rep by name, demand they back a real federal privacy law with teeth and hard limits on interagency data sharing, and don't let them dodge with vague stupid talking points to evade this issue. Back the organizations already in court forcing disclosure, American Oversight, the EFF, and the ACLU, since litigation and FOIA suits are what's actually pried loose the facts about ICE, Medicaid data, and Palantir's reach so far. File your own FOIA requests. Push your state legislators to bar state agencies from feeding data into these federal systems, since several states have already drawn that line. And strip away what you can control directly: use data broker opt out services, lock down what third parties hold on you, and stop treating "I have nothing to hide" as a reason to stay silent. None of this works if people treat it as someone else's problem. This is a fight over whether the federal government can build a surveillance file on every American without consent, and it only gets stopped if enough people refuse to shrug it off.

Site Visit to Palantir's New Denver Headquarters

Nothing new here:

Thiel...POTUS Trump with his loyalty criteria has surrounded himself with morons & idiots and dolts and dummies! "Peter Thiel Dings Trump's Loyalty Tests For 'Not Very Smart' Administration Officials"

"...people will have to die."

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 12:32:47 -1000

Editor's note: This blog has repeatedly posted about a coming war that is being planned against Russia. This aggressive push for war is originating in the UK and within European political structures. The obscenity of it all. Obviously, the Russians know what is coming and are well prepared. In fact, they are so well prepared Russian industrial factories can manufacture more artillery rounds in a month than the US, the UK and Europe combined can produce in a year. The British political class and the UK media are gearing up a major propaganda effort generating fear of Russia and that the only way to "stop Russia" is by war. Comments by the prominent Jacob Rees-Mogg illustrate this intent as Alex Krainer points out below. It was Oswald Rayner, a British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) agent stationed in Russia during World War I and a close Oxford friend of Prince Felix Yusupov, who by several accounts fired the fatal shot in the murder of Grigori Rasputin on the night of December 16 to 17, 1916 that ignited the Bolshevik Revolution. If you want to understand WWI as it actually felt to the men living through it, rather than as it's remembered, read Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That. The book is unflinching and often darkly funny account of trench life, senseless slaughter, and shattered illusions remaining one of the most honest firsthand records of World War I ever written.

________

The war pigs are coming for our children!

The brainwash is intensifying. My son's class recently went on a school trip to London. Subtle psychological war indoctrination was slipped in.

By Alex Krainer | September 27, 2026

In TrendCompass on Monday, I wrote about the sudden lust for war against Russia that's gripped European ruling establishments like a fever, with a handful of notable superspreaders doing the rounds of TV panels and interviews as they try to convince the public that war is inevitable, that the people must step up and do their duty and enlist in the military to defend "our nations" and our way of life.

It all feels as though the decision that Europe will be going to war against Russia has already been made. As Mr. Pompous, Jacob Rees-Mogg put it:

"… If we face a war, we will need people who will join the armed services and who will go out and do their duty. We may even face circumstances where people have to die to save their country…"

One of the most enthusiastic war promoters, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently had this to say:

"There's no reason, that I can see, why we shouldn't send some peaceful ground forces to show our support, our constitutional support for free, independent Ukraine."

Johnson's wording itself is interesting: "peaceful ground forces," and "constitutional support," and it's obvious from the video (linked above) that he was struggling to spit all those words out exactly right so that his plea for a peaceful war could sound perfectly honorable and dignified. He seemed especially scrupulous to put the words constitutional and support together.

All the while, the British media are doing their part, dutifully informing their fellow citizens that the Russians are coming:

Please go to substack to view the graph.

In just one week, more than 250 articles have been published about the supposed threat from Russia, which is remarkable! They couldn't all be wrong, could they? Like that time they sold us the pandemic and the safe-and-effectives..?

But war propaganda has been planned and creeping for a while now, including subtle indoctrination of children.

Imagining Private Peaceful

Earlier this year, my son went on a school trip to London and when he came back, he had a leaflet on him (see below) titled, "IWM Photo Treasure Hunt - Private Peaceful," related to a novel about this "Private Peaceful," which was related to the children as part of the program on this trip.

The children's mission was to "Take photos of exhibits that connect to Private Peaceful," and, "When you return to school, create a PPTX presentation." The assignment also came with a warning: "If you do anything inappropriate, you will be punished accordingly," a truly bizarre thing to toss into a school trip. The following tasks, listed in the leaflet, were part of their assignment:

• Military discipline/execution ("Anything about court martial, desertion, or punishment. .. Would Charlie's execution be considered fair based on what you've learnt?")

• Letter or personal object ("What does this show about soldiers' feelings? How can you relate it to Private Peaceful?")

• Uniform/equipment ("How practical or comfortable does this look? … How did Tommo feel about his uniform / kit?”)

• Gas warfare ("How does this change your understanding of Tommo's fear and panic during gas attack?")

• Enlistment ("Tommo was able to enlist even though he was too young. Would you have been successful? Why or why not?")

• Battle/weapons ("How does this change your view of war? Does this make what the Peaceful brothers went through more heroic or more frightening? Why?)

• The trenches ("Walk through the trench reconstruction and note your impressions…")

There's something profoundly sinister about asking 14-year olds if the execution of a comrade was "fair," to imagine themselves in trenches and asking whether they think they could be "successful" at enlisting even if they are too young. Calling troops "the Peaceful brothers" seems like one of those Orwellian, war is peace and slavery is freedom, but this all was part of the kids' school trip program in London.

It all reeks of one of those Tavistock institute psychological “nudge unit” plans to prepare young minds to see themselves as cannon fodder disciplined future soldiers who should regard enlisting to join the Peaceful brothers at a young age as a success.

Counting down to a Russian provocation

Of course, all these psychological preparations for a peaceful war may not get very far without a proper galvanizing event that could trigger the mass formation psychosis and begin changing behaviors. For the young ones, that change should entail a transition from imagining themselves as soldiers to actually pursuing a "successful" enlistment and getting into real trenches.

Not so long ago, Europe's leaders were talking about war against Russia coming in 2029 or 2030, but now it seems that this timeline has been moved up quite a bit, perhaps only a matter of some unexpected surprise needed to induce the necessary mass formation psychosis for men across Europe to step up and enlist to do their duty. To be sure, Mr. Rees-Mogg and his children won’t be among them, but many ordinary Europeans won't be offered a different choice.

Please go to Alex Krainer's substack to continue reading.

________

Britain is instituting their version of the Ministry of Truth to shut down all dissent where democracy is now one sided. There will be no anti-war commentary in the UK permitted. They are intent on going to war with Russia. https://t.co/jxBGXLLJ3s
— Martin A. Armstrong (@ArmstrongEcon) September 25, 2026

What was it the prominent Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose net worth is estimated between £100 and £150 million, said recently? "And if we face a war we need people who will join the services and who will go out and do their duty. They may even face circumstances where people will have to die." Die for Ukraine and the cocaine-sniffing Zelensky, Rees-Mogg? Really? There are already well over 2 million dead and missing Ukrainian soldiers. Slav against Slav and knowing Russian history it is a slogged out slaughter. The only other possible explanation for Rees-Mogg's comments could be that he is under duress to force him into saying what he did. That is always a possibility. Separate Britain from the City of London.

The Coup Poll: What a New Survey Claims About Democratic Values

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 14:18:55 -1000

Editor's note: Imagine that? The Democratic Party are petty thieves. Law professor Jonathan Turley cites a Center for Strategic Politics survey claiming 59% of polled Democrats would feel positive about the US military removing Trump from office (also see When Did a Military Coup Become Acceptable in America?), alongside 87% backing impeachment and 84% backing 25th Amendment removal; Turley also flags the same poll's findings on rising support among Democrats for public ownership of grocery stores (46%) and restaurants (39%), using it to argue the party has drifted toward "socialism" and constitutional recklessness. Americans are being battered around like abused wives between the communists and the socialists.

EXCLUSIVE: California has created a shadow welfare system for illegal aliens. Free housing, cash, healthcare, food, phones, college tuition, even car insurance—costing taxpayers more than $10 billion per year.

We went inside the system and exposed it all. pic.twitter.com/oJh0mpstzN
— Christopher Rufo (@christopherrufo) September 23, 2026

Nepalese PM Balendra Shah told the UN General Assembly ("arrogant parasites")...

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 13:47:59 -1000

Editor's note: ...on September 24 that the world has "flawless logistics for war and broken logistics for food," pointing to fertilizer, fuel, and bitumen shortages at home while weapons cross borders without friction. He tied this to Nepal's recent disaster (an August 26 avalanche and flash floods that killed over 1,400 people, with more than 6,000 still missing) and pitched a joint Himalayan climate resilience plan with India and China, plus grant-based (not debt-based) disaster recovery funding for poorer nations. This is precisely what Nepalese PM Balendra Shah was referring to when he stated at the UN the "flawless logistics for war and broken logistics for food." On September 17-18, 2026 the US State Department (the node in America of the international architecture above nations) front sales office announced it had approved a potential $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, with Saudi Arabia "requesting 48 jets plus 49 Pratt & Whitney F135-PW-100 engines." The UN Security Council just "affirmed Saudi Arabia's right to self-defense" demanding the Houthis halt their attacks on the petro kingdom. The Saudi's with US and British assistance have been bombing the crap out of Yemen for more than ten years and somehow $24 billion in Lockheed Martin F-35 aircraft are going to end Houthi's attacks on Saudi Arabia?

Editor's note: A new mockumentary called "Lords of War," produced by the Quincy Institute and The Intercept, mocks the wealth of top Pentagon contractor CEOs while US service members struggle with substandard housing and stagnant pay. The piece notes Lockheed Martin pulled in $75 billion in revenue in 2025, over 72% of it from the US government, while its CEO compensation packages run into the tens of millions, dwarfing the pay of enlisted troops. The mockumentary ties this to broader data showing private contractors now absorb 54% of the Pentagon's annual budget, up from 41% in the 1990s, funded by lobbying armies and stock buybacks rather than actual defense outcomes. The linked Responsible Starcraft article contrasts this with documented failures on the ground: moldy, unaffordable base housing, a GAO report finding two-thirds of service members can't afford their housing, and sailors attempting to jump overboard during a grueling USS Abraham Lincoln deployment near Iran. Bottom line: contractors are getting richer off taxpayer money while the people they claim to support face deteriorating conditions, the real scandal, not just Beltway waste. The new mockumentary rips the scab off festering reality that billions in US taxpayer dollars go to destroying countries, while keeping a handful of CEOs very wealthy. How many of these CEOs are psychopaths?

Argentine's President Javier Milei is more correct in his assessment of the UN than most care to admit. Milei called the UN to its face "a useless organization that only serves to feed a caste of fatally arrogant parasites disguised as well-intentioned bureaucrats."

Milei Calls the UN a Caste of Parasites, Signs a Major Deal with the U.S.

Weapons manufacturing and its supply chains are worth billions and billions of dollars a year and nothing is going to interfere or slow down any coming wars and continued weapons manufacturing no matter what respective leaders of various countries talk about at the UN:

Taiwan's 105mm Wheeled Armored Vehicle Signals a New Era in Indigenous Armored Warfare

U.S. Navy Awards L3Harris $876M to Advance Next-Generation Jammer Low Band for EA-18G Growler

US Army secures giant rare earth magnet deal to build one million military drones

US Marines extend F-35B combat reach across 4,000-mile Pacific transit using KC-130Js

If this isn't AI falsified does this explain where all the money is being directed towards?

Translation:

Military Leaks Terrify the World: The Era of Missiles and Jet Engines Is Over Forever!

The mysterious U.S. TR-3B Black Manta aircraft, recently spotted in the skies over Argentina and Iran, ignites the biggest technological and military controversy in history: It was developed through direct "reverse engineering" from crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft (UFOs)!

No fuel combustion, no sound, and maneuvers that shatter every law of conventional physics...

Welcome to the age of anti-gravity and secret weapons!

🚨 تسريبات عسكرية ترعب العالم: انتهى عصر الصواريخ ومحركات النفاث للأبد! 🛸💥

طائرة TR-3B Black Manta الأمريكية الغامضة، التي رُصدت مؤخراً في سماء الأرجنتين وإيران، تُفجّر أكبر جدل تقني وعسكري في التاريخ:
تم تطويرها عبر "هندسة عكسية" مباشرة من مركبات فضائية (UFOs) ساقطة! 🤯…
— Mo Elgaraihy (@EngMoElgaraihy) September 26, 2026

Bookstores in Japan have seen a mysterious...

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:19:01 -1000

Editor's note: ...surge in bulk orders for philosophy, history, law, and Edo-period texts, with buyers all shipping to one unresponsive Okayama logistics center. Over 50 tons (about 100,000 volumes) have been exported to the US, and while no buyer has been identified, it echoes Anthropic's confirmed "Project Panama," in which court filings revealed the company bought, scanned, and destroyed millions of physical books to train Claude (Anthropic), a practice a judge ruled was fair use. No link between the Japan case and Anthropic has been confirmed. Separately, Japan currently has roughly 110 to 130 data centers, with an estimated 50 to 80 more planned or under construction amid an AI-driven building boom.

🦔Someone is buying Japanese used books by the ton. Not novels or comics. Philosophy, history, medical law, Edo-period cultural texts. Multiple buyer accounts all ship to one logistics center in Okayama Prefecture that won't answer questions. Export records show over 50 tons,… pic.twitter.com/0RPpAyCw0N
— Hedgie (@HedgieMarkets) September 24, 2026

A September 2026 Gambit Security report, covered by Tech Times, describes what it calls the first documented fully autonomous criminal AI hacking campaign: a Chinese-speaking operator used three open-source AI agent frameworks (Strix, Cairn, and Hermes) to breach hundreds of online retailers since July 2026 at roughly $25 per target, stealing over 600,000 credit card records (79 percent US-issued) and deploying skimmers on dozens of sites, with the human typing under 2,000 prompts total while the AI handled reconnaissance, exploitation, and cleanup on its own. Notably, the attacker had to fall back to an older Anthropic model after newer ones refused the attack requests, and in one case the AI's own cleanup routine accidentally destroyed a victim's database backups:

AI Agents Hacked 100 Online Retailers for $25 Each, Stealing 600,000 Cards

Axios reports that OpenAI's autonomous AI agents breached Australia's Medicare Statistics Reporting Service in June and probed other public sites, including a University of New Mexico domain and Data USA, while performing routine data-collection tasks and trying to bypass access restrictions, according to Australian officials and AI safety firm Transluce. No personal data is believed to have been accessed, but Australian PM Anthony Albanese called OpenAI's disclosure "unacceptable" and is launching a multi-agency task force to investigate. The incident follows other recent cases of OpenAI agents misbehaving, including hacking Hugging Face in July, and has prompted OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Elon Musk to voice support for slowing frontier AI development, though some, like Nvidia's Jensen Huang, argue the real issue is companies shipping unsafe products rather than AI acting on its own:

OpenAI agents tried hacking various sites in May, June

OpenAI Agents Hacked Governments, Then Altman Warned UN It Could Get Worse

Tech Giant Feared Its AI Tools Started A Commercial 'Doom Loop,' New Documents Reveal

All technology gets weaponized - no exceptions:

AI the Real Danger?

Apparently, we only have ten years remaining, then...

This is how the mechanism of replacement population works

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:46:10 -1000

Editor's note: US Senator Ted Cruz and Texas Governor Greg Abbott (see Who's Been Messing with Texas?) drew cheers at a Republican convention for vowing to ban Sharia law, while Muslim Americans describe Sharia in the US context as personal religious guidance on prayer, fasting, charity, and virtue, comparable to Jewish or Christian religious codes, and reject claims it threatens the Constitution. While it should be applauded that Cruz wants to "save America", we shouldn't use religion to get that messy job accomplished. The question here is Sharia law a "Trojan Horse?" Is Sharia law inherently violent toward non-believers, are moderate and extremist Muslims meaningfully distinct and does Sharia-controlled "no-go zones" exist in the US, citing Hamtramck, Michigan. No legal system other than the Constitution should operate in the US and can be considered an urgent societal discourse Americans are late coming to the table to discuss.

News update for 25 September 2026: Trump Rescinds $810 Million in Funds Tied to Illegal Immigration, Race Programs

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TAXES = DEATH: The Social Security Scam, Replacement Migration & The Intelligence-Industrial Complex

By 2nd Smartest Guy In the World | September 25, 2026

Social Security is a gargantuan Ponzi scheme whereby the number of current recipients has greatly outpaced the number of workers being scammed with unconstitutionally imposed taxes, an imbalance that will only get bigger.

Younger workers are increasingly dubious that they will ever get their money's worth for the Social Security taxes that they and their employers are forced into paying, and they are certainly not wrong, with retirees now collecting inflation-adjusted pittances all while the illegal invaders are gifted far more generous sums of money stolen from the productive tax slaves; to wit:

🚨 RUBIO JUST SAID THE NUMBER THEY NEVER WANTED ON TV 🚨

Americans work 40 years.
They retire.
Social Security: $800. $900. A thousand a month.

Somebody who got here from Cuba three months ago: $1,500 a month.

Marco Rubio said it out loud.

“So imagine if you’ve been working… pic.twitter.com/eFCvLdMxJR
— Unmask The SYS (@UnmaskTheSys) September 23, 2026

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, a state where the CIA’s ultimate Manchurian Candidate operative Barack Hussein Obama deliberately imported tens of thousands of Somali illegals, almost all of these invaders are on welfare.
________

Editor's note: Here is the breakdown if we are to believe "official" Minnesota records. Understand that official statistics on Somali welfare use in Minnesota vary from 8 percent to 89 percent depending on who's counting and what they choose to count, which isn't a data problem so much as a trust problem: when the same underlying numbers can be spun into a headline four times as damning or four times as reassuring, the statistic has stopped being a fact and become a weapon. A December 2025 CIS report, based on 2014 to 2023 Census data, found that 81 percent of Somali immigrant households in Minnesota consume some form of welfare, compared to 21 percent of native households, with that figure rising to 89 percent among Somali households with children. Broken down by program, the report found 54 percent of Somali immigrant households receive SNAP (food stamps), 73 percent have someone on Medicaid, and 27 percent receive cash welfare such as TANF, SSI, or general assistance, compared to native household rates of 7 percent, 18 percent, and 6 percent respectively. Separately, Minnesota's state demographer, using 2019 to 2023 Census data covering the broader population of Somali ancestry (not just immigrants), found that 84 percent received some combination of public assistance, SNAP, or Medicaid, with 60 percent receiving SNAP and 78 percent having Medicaid coverage. Somalia is over 99 percent Sunni Muslim, and the Somali diaspora in Minnesota, one of the largest Somali populations in the US, is overwhelmingly Muslim as well. Minneapolis-St. Paul is home to numerous Somali mosques and Islamic community centers, and Islam is central to Somali cultural and communal identity both in Somalia and among the diaspora in Minnesota.

________

Madness indeed:

Insanity is when illegal refugees get $3,874 a

month in federal assistance while Social Security

checks average $1,200 a month.

Certainly, the Federal government is far worse than merely illegitimate:

A government that taxes its citizens

to benefit foreigners is illegitimate.

1776

2026

These illegal savages are also being brought in to influence elections that result in them getting even more free money and benefits:

WOAH 🚨 1,000 Muslims per day are being registered to vote in Houston, Texas

Yes, this is real

The Islamic Society of Greater Houston confirms they are registering roughly 1,000 voters a week at mosques across the city of Houston

The Muslim leaders say they will defeat… pic.twitter.com/ad00jlOowG
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) September 24, 2026

Please go to substack to continue reading.
________

Editor's note: And how many of these immigrants will receive monthly US government welfare checks? Who are these activist judges because this certainly is not law? What has generated controversy is something different: Schiltz mentioned in the linked Zero Hedge article below, was raised in a devoutly Catholic family, and his wife were listed in a 2019 annual report for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM), a nonprofit providing free legal aid to immigrants that has criticized Trump-era immigration policy. Schiltz confirmed to Fox News Digital he has "donated for many years" to ILCM and to Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid, saying "he believes poor people should have legal representation, support in line with a long tradition of Catholic individuals and organizations," such as Catholic Charities and the USCCB, being active in migrant assistance. This led some conservative commentators, including Article III Project's Will Chamberlain, to argue Schiltz should recuse from immigration cases given ILCM's stance against Trump's executive orders. But as Fox News itself noted, judges donating to nonprofits isn't grounds for recusal unless it creates an actual conflict of interest:

DHS Lawyer Says Minnesota Judges Coordinated To Block Immigration Enforcement

England is gone:

Busloads of migrants harass and intimidate native Britons in Essex; Private security guards are hired to protect women and girls

The Catholic Church is the problem here and if readers do not comprehend this then perhaps a read through the following material will provide some clarity:

Origin Begins at Fertilization - Catholic Church: Reform or Leave America

Catholics: Resolution Time

American Catholics have a decision to make

The British Engineers Helping Ukraine Hit Russia — While NATO Says It's "Not Involved"

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 12:41:27 -1000

Editor's note: Louis Mosley is CEO of Palantir UK, a role he took after working in finance, including at Santander UK, before joining Palantir in 2016. He previously served as a Conservative councillor for Kensington and Chelsea from 2011 to 2014, and is the grandson of Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. As Palantir UK's chief, he has become a prominent defender of the company's contracts with British institutions like the NHS and Ministry of Defence, work that has drawn scrutiny over privacy, deportations, and military operations. Why is Loius Mosey as CEO of Palantir being mentioned? Because it is Palantir running the software for targeting data for drones being launched off of civilian trucks inside Ukraine close to the Russia border. This is probably why the Russian military has been destroying gas stations in Ukraine. Those civilian trucks are being fueled up at those gas stations and then after launching drones can be easily hidden inside garages and warehouses. British engineers from Palantir, working alongside Ukrainian counterparts, reportedly developed software that maps drone routes to evade Russian air defenses, using commercial satellite imagery and signals intelligence. These offensive drone strikes have fueled speculation that factors into Russia's continued strikes on Ukrainian data infrastructure. Now we come to this report by El Mundo claiming "the CIA warned European governments that Russia might hide drones aboard merchant ships to strike Spain, France, or Italy and other European countries." This is another fabricated story by western sources likely meant to target Russia's "shadow fleet."
________

"Geranium Apocalypse" Courtesy of the CIA

September 24, 2026 | By Islander Reports

Europe has apparently found its next Russian horror story: drones hidden aboard merchant ships, sailing quietly into the Mediterranean before suddenly striking Spain, France or Italy. And right on cue comes the CIA, with El Mundo reporting that US intelligence has "warned" European governments of precisely such a Russian plan. One small problem: even Italy's defence minister says the supposed alert has not been confirmed. The bigger question is even simpler — why would Russia risk turning civilian shipping into disposable drone platforms when it already possesses far more effective ways of hitting anything it actually wants to hit?

The headline practically writes itself: CIA reveals Moscow’s secret plan to attack Europe from the sea.

Read beyond it, however, and the whole thing starts looking like dollar store propaganda.

According to the reporting, small Russian Gerbera drones could supposedly be concealed inside shipping containers aboard commercial vessels, carried into the Mediterranean under normal civilian cover, and then launched toward targets in southern Europe.

Technically possible? Of course.

But operationally, the logic is much less obvious.

Why would Moscow take merchant vessels that need access to ports, insurance, narrow straits and international shipping lanes and turn them into military launch platforms?

The moment a tanker or container ship becomes associated with drone strikes, it stops being merely commercial shipping. Every port becomes a potential inspection point. Every chokepoint becomes a problem. Every Russian linked vessel becomes a candidate for detention.

And that includes the Bosporus.

For Russia, keeping commercial shipping moving is strategically valuable in its own right. Putting drone launchers aboard those vessels would hand Europe an argument for treating the entire fleet as a security threat rather than simply a sanctions issue.

Which is precisely why the timing of this story is so interesting.

Europe is already saturated with reports of "mysterious drones," sabotage plots, Russian intelligence operations and hybrid warfare. At the same time, pressure on Russia’s so-called shadow fleet is intensifying, with the latest US sanctions legislation explicitly targeting the tanker network used to keep Russian energy exports moving.

Then, almost perfectly on cue, comes another ingredient:

Russian commercial ships may actually be floating drone bases.

How convenient.

A sanctioned tanker can still be argued over as an economic question.

A tanker presented to the public as a potential weapons platform is something else entirely.

And suddenly the pieces begin fitting together rather neatly.

Kaliningrad is portrayed as the threat from the east.

The "shadow fleet" becomes the threat from the sea.

Every unidentified drone feeds the atmosphere.

And now the CIA reportedly supplies the grand finale: Gerberas hidden inside cargo containers somewhere in the Mediterranean.

There is an even more uncomfortable scenario.

Suppose tomorrow a false flag Gerberas or simply a suddenly appears after being launched from a vessel somewhere off the European coast.

The political consequences would arrive before investigators had even finished collecting the wreckage.

Europe would instantly have a powerful justification for stepping up searches, seizures and restrictions against Russian linked merchant shipping. Governments could present an intensified campaign against the shadow fleet not merely as sanctions enforcement, but as a basic national defence pretext.

Please go to substack to continue reading.

________

Cutting off the logistics for drone warfare on Russia:

Russia views any military cargo for Kiev as legitimate target — diplomat

Russia is not negotiating with the west:

Lavrov Tells UN Security Council Russia Won't Pause the War During Negotiations

Get used to it. Drone warfare is the future:

US Army secures giant rare earth magnet deal to build one million military drones

It should be obvious by now that...

The New Arms Race Is Artificial Intelligence

Sold to Brussels, Sold on Death: What's Really Happening to Canada

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:24:36 -1000

Editor's note: Grant Abraham (author of Battle for the Soul of Canada: Firing the Forge), founder of Canada's Reforge Party, appeared on Rich Does Politics to discuss the upcoming October 19th Alberta Referendum, a non-binding vote on Alberta independence. Abraham argues the real issue isn't Alberta leaving, but what he calls Canada's ongoing transformation into a "post-national state," a shift he traces to Justin Trudeau's 2015 comments and says became more visible to Canadians during COVID. Abraham frames Alberta's independence movement as a way to preserve traditional Canadian identity, and suggests it could eventually help reunite the country on different terms. They also discuss EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen recently inviting Canada to become an "Associate Member" of the EU, an offer Prime Minister Mark Carney has moved quickly to pursue, with some conservative commentators raising concerns about what closer EU ties, including possible Schengen Area alignment, could mean for immigration policy.
________

The Post-National State

September 23, 2026 | By Forbidden News

Grant Abraham, Founder of Canada's Reforge Party joined Rich Does Politics to give his excellent insights into what's happening in Canada, which has become the leading battle line in the Globalists' war on humanity and how it's being played out in the upcoming October 19th non-binding Alberta Referendum.

A lot of felow Canadians tell Grant, "We don't know what it's going to look like if Alberta leaves," and he replies, "Actually, you don't know what it looks like to stay in Canada, because Canada is being deconstructed right in front of you, and Alberta needs to get out before it shipwrecks."

From Grant's perspective, the Referendum isn't really about Alberta leaving, it's about preserving what Canada truly is, that's being stolen by the Globalists through what he calls the "Post-National Agenda".

Grant explains:

"Canadians were told back in 2015 by Justin Trudeau that we would be the first 'post-nation state'. And that is when I really started watching and tuning in.

"And then, I saw that Justin Trudeau…was actually turning Canada into a post-nation state and rewiring the operating system of how the country works.

"And Canadians took a long time to begin to wake up that their country was being pulled out from underneath them. And it was really COVID that landed the hard punch for people to say, "Where the Hell has our country gone? What is going on?"

"So I say to them, 'Look, Post-Nationalism means what the country is going to look like after the death of the country and are you prepared for that?'"

Grant says many Albertans see independence as an essential step towards preserving what Canadians love about their country and he believes their movement could eventually reforge Canada back together after the inevitable clash.

He says:

"I believe that our country is supposed to be together, but right now, we have maggots and parasites that are against the Canadian people. They're undermining the Canadian sovereignty."

Speaking of which, during EC President Ursula von der Leyen's September 16th State of the Union Address in Strasbourg, she invited Canada to become the first "Associate Member" of the European Union and she proposed upgrading the existing Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) to an "Alliance for the Future" that would create "a common prosperity and economic security space.” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney ran to Strasbourg to help accelerate the process.

Conservative Canadian YouTubers are grumbling that an associate membership in the EU could make them part of the Schengen Area, essentially putting Canada on the Turkish border and allowing visa-free entry into Canada for Europe's millions of illegal migrants.

Grant continues:

"This is part of the Great Game. This isn't just boring Canadian politics. The Americans are not prepared to have an outlying picket of the Globalist agenda sitting right across their northern border, creating geopolitical insecurity.

"This isn't just some trifling thing. Canada will not be allowed to be the host that destabilizes continental security. More and more people in Canada are starting to recognize that.

"That's why I believe that there's a polarizing perspective happening within Canadians that are tuning in to how significant the stakes are, in relation to identifying the threat, which is the Carney Globalist New World Order agenda that's being played out, as a gasping desire to see the New World Order agenda resuscitated through Canada and the resolve of the Americans to not see it happen in North America and free people in Canada saying, 'Look, we never signed up to join the EU. We never gave a mandate for our sovereignty to be traded. We never agreed for a post-nation state. We never agreed for our legal rights to be undermined. We never agreed for legislation to be coming in that would undermine our property, or surrender our privacy, or give up our free speech.' There's a value clash that's going on that's much more potent and, let's say, simmering than just a referendum on independence."

Grant reminds us that in early 2025, the White House announced tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, due to a national emergency invoked under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), as a result of the extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and deadly drugs.

Grant notes that whereas, Mexico and China signaled their cooperation, Canada chose to start a trade war with the United States.

Please go to Forbidden News to continue reading.

_________

Editor's note: Canadian journalist Matthew Ehret, a vocal critic of globalist institutions and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review, shares a first-person account of his debut trip to Moscow, where he attended the "We Won Together" film festival and the World Peoples' Assembly, a summit drawing thousands of participants and former officials from around the world. He describes Moscow's architecture as a striking mix of classical, Art Nouveau, and Soviet-era styles, praising the city's subway system and the character of its people. Highlights included Red Square and the Kremlin, sculptures commemorating US-Soviet and Russian-American historical ties, a museum tour on Russia's revolutionary history, and a pelmeni-making session with local hosts. At the Assembly, Ehret reconnected with familiar figures from geopolitical commentary circles and gave a talk on reviving US-Russian cooperation. He ends on an anecdote of strangers singing together in a Moscow pub, a moment of communal culture he contrasts with what he sees as its erosion in Canada and America:

A Report from my first visit to Moscow

Readers to this blog might recall that in 2015, Russia's Vladimir Putin kicked George Soros related operations including NGOs out of Russia as a threat to state security. Those same Soros operations and NGOs are still actively operating in Canada and in America and they need to be exposed and expunged:

Russia Blacklists Soros Foundations as 'Undesirable'

Russia Bans George Soros Foundation as State Security 'Threat'

Canada's steady expansion of euthanasia has turned the country into something of a real-world experiment, one worth examining closely. Canada's euthanasia regime, sold as compassion for the terminally ill, has metastasized since 2016, when the "reasonably foreseeable death" requirement was stripped away in 2021. More than 30,000 Canadians have died by lethal injection since legalization, now accounting for over 4% of deaths nationwide, among the highest euthanasia rates on Earth. Ottawa has even flirted with extending eligibility to people whose only affliction is mental illness, a plan so fraught it's been delayed twice. Disability advocates have documented Canadians turning to MAID (Medically Assisted In Dying) not because they were dying, but because the state made lethal injection easier to access than a wheelchair ramp or a livable disability pension. A program marketed as autonomy has become a grim cost-saving valve for an overburdened healthcare system. In the final analysis the only group that needs to be medically assisted in dying are the globalists and their central banking overseers.

"Piss Off Jacob Rees Mogg, you pompous prick."

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 17:45:50 -1000

Editor's note: As Godfrey Bloom remarks, concerning Jacob Rees-Mogg telling the working class their duty and to "do the decent thing" by joining up to go to the front: "Over the top, people, good luck, and I will see you at my club." Bloom goes on to say, "Leave for the front, get the old uniform on, polish up the bayonet, and remember your days in the school corps." Bloom says he was not a contemporary of Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson at Eton, but he does know, and got it through the grapevine, that whenever there was rough and tumble with Rees-Mogg, he always had a crumpled-up letter from the matron in his pocket. And when he was called up for anything dangerous at all, he would whip the letter out and say, "Look, I would love to go to the front, I'd love to leave for the front, I'm a roughy-toughy sort of guy, as everyone can tell just by looking at me, but I've got this note from the matron, and I've got this bloody verruca and this dodgy knee and all the rest of it. But good luck, you fellows, and you working-class people, over the top you go, and I'll see you at the club."

None of these men would be conscripted and they would not have to fight , but they discuss locking up people who dissent from the policy of war with Russia. That’s what martial law will look like.

War is created by old men and fought by young men, soon to be women too.

These… pic.twitter.com/niF9GEAHmv
— Andrew Bridgen (@ABridgen) September 22, 2026

If you are under 50, male or have sons you need to watch this NOW!
Just listen to the Fabian society red tie warmonger
They are now talking openly about locking people up for not swallowing this fake war and wants conscription imposed so OUR sons go and die in a War against… pic.twitter.com/Al0gu1lpMH
— Knights Templar International (@KnightsTempOrg) September 22, 2026

Contrary to Jacob Rees Mogg, the pompous prick", John Cleese took the piss out of Islam:

John Cleese can say whatever the hell he wants about Islam

Prepare for war, apparently, they actually believe this:

Britain's elites want you ready to die for a war they keep imagining

Russia and China now settle close to 90 percent...

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:22:45 -1000

Editor's note: ...of their bilateral trade in rubles and yuan, a shift accelerated by US sanctions since 2022, and central banks worldwide bought roughly 863 tonnes of gold in 2025 with about 755 tonnes projected for 2026 as countries hedge against dollar dependence. On September 20, 2026, Trump signed the Graham-Blumenthal sanctions law, dubbed sanctions "from hell" by RT, authorizing tariffs up to 100 percent on countries buying Russian energy and up to 500 percent on direct Russian imports. Taken together, the sanctions law (see Sanctions Have Become Economic Warfare), the Russia-China de-dollarization trend, and the AfD's push for renewed Russian gas ties can reasonably be read as facets of the same broader contest: Washington trying to keep sanctions pressure and dollar-based leverage intact while Moscow works to erode both through alternative currencies and cracks in Western political unity. And so we have global war continuing given to us by our mafia bosses who are setting us up for WWIII as they do another "Drang nach Osten."

________

Trump signs off on Russia sanctions 'from hell': Who could get hit?

The new law authorizes the US president to impose secondary tariffs for key buyers of Russian energy

September 21, 2026 | By RT

US President Donald Trump has signed into law a sweeping expansion of sanctions against Russia, giving Washington new powers to target Moscow as well as major buyers of Russian energy. The legislation authorizes tariffs of up to 100% on goods from certain countries purchasing Russian oil and gas, while imports from Russia could face duties of up to 500%.

The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act also expands restrictions on Russian officials, financial institutions and other entities linked to the government. The White House has said the legislation is intended to increase economic pressure on Moscow over the Ukraine conflict while giving the president broad discretion over waivers and the eventual termination of sanctions.

RT examines the law's key provisions, who could be affected and what the measures could mean for Russia's trade partners.

What do the sanctions cover?

The legislation was approved by the Senate 86-11 in August before passing the House 262-159 on Wednesday. It originated with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal.

Unlike earlier sanctions focused largely on designated companies and individuals, the law broadens restrictions covering Russian government-linked officials, financial institutions and enterprises. It also targets vessels Washington says are used to circumvent restrictions on Russian oil exports.

One of its most consequential provisions gives the president authority to impose tariffs of up to 100% on goods from countries among the five largest buyers of Russian crude oil or natural gas. That is considerably below the 500% secondary tariff proposed in earlier versions of the legislation.

Who could be targeted?

China and India are among the countries most exposed to the secondary tariff provisions because of their large purchases of Russian crude.

Türkiye, a NATO member, is also a major importer of Russian energy, while EU countries continue to purchase Russian oil and gas despite the bloc's efforts to phase out Russian supplies.

The picture is particularly significant for natural gas, where the EU remains a major market for Russia. China has also expanded its purchases, while Türkiye remains another important destination.

The law, however, does not make maximum tariffs automatic. It contains exemptions and gives the US president broad discretion over their application, meaning the eventual impact will depend heavily on how the administration implements it.

How are major buyers responding?

China and India have rejected US pressure over their energy trade with Russia and stressed that their economic and energy interests will guide their policies.

China’s Commerce Ministry has said Beijing reserves the right to take "all necessary measures" to protect its sovereignty, development interests and Chinese companies, while calling for dialogue with Washington.

India's Foreign Ministry has reiterated New Delhi's "firm commitment to ensuring energy security for its 1.4 billion people," saying it would continue diversifying supplies according to market conditions.

Please go to RT to continue reading.

________

In reference to the...

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:46:45 -1000

Editor's note: ...facial recognition wrongful arrest post a couple of days ago: it warned that AI matches were being treated as proof instead of investigative leads, and the following republished news report shows that same warning has now played out with the US military after a Chinese vessel was wrongly flagged over suspected cargo. Earlier this year during the continuing US-Iran shooting match, a US special operations analyst used an AI chatbot to help draft an intelligence report claiming a Chinese ship in the Middle East was carrying nuclear weapons components. The military began preparing to intercept and board the vessel, with armed personnel and aircraft in motion, before officials discovered the report was AI-generated and the cargo identification was inaccurate. The report, which had fused open-source and classified intelligence, was later confirmed "entirely false."

News update for 18 September 2026: This isn't sci-fi, AI is already killing people
________

Obviously The AI Fad...

September 21, 2026 | By Reminiscence of the Future...

...is what Pentagon and CIA will use increasingly often because somebody told them that a garbage collector, aka Neural Networks, are somehow "intelligent".

The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program. The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said. It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was. The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false."

I can tell you more--Pentagon and CIA's ideas about warfare are "entirely false". This is not a hyperbole or figure of speech, this is a cold hard fact which cannot be denied anymore--we are dealing with a wholesale military incompetence. Pentagon now tries to hide behind Palantir in its atrocity against children of Minab. US military increasingly becomes a military which cannot shoot straight. Also, literally. As CNN report concludes:

The bot fused together open-source intelligence with secret signals intelligence in government holdings and reached its fateful conclusion about the material the ship was carrying. The analyst then used AI again to package the findings into a standard intelligence report — the kind that is trusted by military officials — and disseminated it. US Special Operations Command Pacific and the Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.

That's their "level". This is also why they have been duped by 404 side believing all kinds of fairy tales of Kiev regime about SMO. But never mind--Hollywood will make another Top Gun movie and Independence Day-VIII where US military saves Milky Way galaxy from invaders from Andromeda, and everybody will feel good.
________

Previous post showing concerns:

Tennessee grandma jailed for 5 months after AI flagged her for bank fraud in state she never visited

No New Fees, No New Caps: Trump's Latest H-1B Order Bets on Federal Coordination Instead

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:31:54 -1000

Editor's note: The most recent Executive Order (number hasn't been issued yet) directs federal agencies to tighten oversight of the H-1B visa program, which allows companies to hire foreign workers for specialty jobs, because the administration says the program has been widely misused by employers and outsourcing firms to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor (like trucking companies) rather than filling genuine skills gaps. It requires the State Department, Labor Department, and Homeland Security Department to coordinate with the Commerce Department, Education Department, and Small Business Administration when reviewing H-1B applications, sharing wage, employment, and industry data to catch violations of existing visa laws. It instructs officials to factor in whether a sponsoring company has recently laid off American workers or plans to do so when deciding whether to approve that company's H-1B petitions and visas. It also orders the Labor Department to begin reviewing past wage applications within 30 days to determine whether enforcement action is warranted against employers who may have violated pay requirements. The order does not create a new fee, cap, or outright ban; it focuses on stricter interagency review and enforcement of rules already on the books, and it takes effect immediately under existing law and available funding.
________

ENHANCING PROGRAM INTEGRITY AND INTERAGENCY

COORDINATION IN THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE H-1B

NONIMMIGRANT VISA PROGRAM

Executive Orders

September 18, 2026

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1. Purpose. The H-1B nonimmigrant visa program was created to identify uniquely skilled and highly specialized foreign temporary workers to strategically supplement the United States economy. Instead, the program has been widely abused by certain employers, third-party placement groups, and outsourcing firms to undercut and displace the supply of skilled United States labor. The large-scale, systematic abuse of the H-1B program to obtain non-qualifying foreign labor has undermined the additive purpose of the program and harmed the wages, working conditions, and job opportunities of skilled American workers.

The abuse of cheaper H-1B labor places downward pressure on domestic pay. H-1B visa holders earn far less than comparable United States-born workers, despite the statutory mandate that H-1B workers be paid equally to their domestic peers, with the estimated wage gap starting at $9,000 and climbing as high as $20,000 in H-1B reliant industries. One company even warned its shareholders that restrictions on cheap H-1B labor could force the company to use "local" workers, which "may only be available at higher wages."

Many employers have laid off large numbers of highly skilled American workers, only to promptly hire large numbers of H-1B workers who are often lower-skilled and lower-paid. For instance, technology sector employers have collectively requested H-1B visas for hundreds of thousands of workers, yet have also laid off somewhere between 800,000 to 1.3 million American employees from 2022 through 2026. Employers have even forced laid off American workers to train their foreign replacements.

Many jobs held by H-1B workers eventually leave the United States entirely. Employers with outsourcing business models use teams of H-1B visa holders to replace United States workers at third‑party client businesses and liaise with other individuals working off-site from their country of origin. As soon as practicable, much of their own work is transferred offshore. In Fiscal Year 2026, the top six users of the H-1B program operating with this outsourcing business model accounted for over 25,000 H-1B cap registrations. One foreign country's foreign minister even publicly admitted that H-1B “has become the outsourcing visa."

The systematic and organized abuse of the H-1B program is also a national security threat. Domestic law enforcement agencies have investigated H-1B-reliant outsourcing firms for engaging in visa fraud, conspiracy to launder money, and other illicit activities to encourage foreign workers to come to the United States. Abuses of the H-1B program also present a national security threat by discouraging Americans from pursuing careers in science and technology, risking vital United States leadership in these fields.

Numerous executive departments and agencies (agencies) have flagged employers' large‑scale, systematic abuse of the H-1B program to obtain lower‑paid, lower-skilled labor from abroad. These ongoing Government probes continue to identify widespread fraud and noncompliance among H-1B employers, such as: displacing American workers or otherwise giving preference to alien workers; misrepresenting the duties, requirements, or working conditions of job opportunities to avoid hiring or training American workers, falsely qualify jobs as specialty occupations, or lower applicable wage requirements; and misrepresenting aliens’ qualifications to perform specialty occupations by submitting questionable foreign degrees from diploma mills as support for their H-1B visa applications. The pervasiveness of these violations and the persistence of the violators confirm that more needs to be done to preserve the H-1B program’s integrity.

I have determined that continued efforts must be made to protect and prioritize the American workforce. It is therefore the policy of the United States that all relevant agencies shall implement appropriate measures to protect American workers from abuse of the H-1B program and ensure that the program serves the national interest.

Sec. 2. Interagency Coordination. When processing petitions, labor condition applications, and visas for the entry into the United States of aliens as nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation under section 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) (8 U.S.C. 1101(a)), the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall coordinate and consult with the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Education, and the Administrator of the Small Business Administration to ensure the compliance of such petitions, applications, and visas with statutory requirements, including those in sections 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b), 212(n), 214(i), and 274B of the INA. The Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Education, and the Administrator of the Small Business Administration shall provide any relevant wage, employment, academic, industrial, or other economic information.

Sec. 3. Consideration of Applications, Petitions, and Visas. (a) Consistent with sections 101(a)(15)(H)(i)(b), 212(n), 214(i), 215(a), and 274B of the INA, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall take into account in any labor condition application, petition, visa, and entry of aliens entering or attempting to enter the United States as H-1B nonimmigrants to perform services in a specialty occupation whether the employer sponsor directly or indirectly engaged in layoffs within the previous year or plans future layoffs that negatively affect the employment of similarly situated United States workers.

Please go to whitehouse.gov to continue reading.

________

Editor's note: This executive order relies almost entirely on agency follow-through rather than binding new rules, creating no new visa fee or cap and setting only one concrete deadline, a 30-day Labor Department wage-data review. Historically, similar Trump-era H-1B orders (like the 2017 "Buy American, Hire American" order) produced strong rhetoric but limited concrete outcomes, since real changes require lengthy rule-making that invites lawsuits. Enforcement is also entirely federal, so the common assumption that "blue states won't enforce it" doesn't really apply since states have no formal role in H-1B processing; the more accurate issue is that H-1B-dependent employers are concentrated in blue-state metro areas, a market fact rather than a jurisdictional one. Practical hurdles like limited DOL and USCIS staffing, pushback from tech and outsourcing industry lobbyists, and likely litigation if enforcement gets aggressive all make it plausible this order under-delivers relative to its stated goals. Whether it breaks from that pattern will largely depend on what the Labor Department's wage review turns up and whether it leads to real enforcement actions. Up until now the massive importation of H-1B visas that were replacing America's professional class with imported foreigners like form India (see: Servitors of Empire: Studies in the Dark Side of Asian America):

You Will Not Replace Us!

Minnesota's Anti-ICE Relief Fund Shut Down Due To Rampant Fraud

Note on the Department of Homeland Security currently under Corey Lewandowski (there are no formal charges or resolution yet) because this agency has been mentioned in the Executive Order partially republished above as a public service:

Did POTUS Trump ignored top military brass and Tulsi Gabbard (his then DNI) on Iran war repercussions: seems he did! She warned the administration seemingly NOT to launch the bombing; she was right

Have a listen to the pompous UK...

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 13:22:27 -1000

Editor's note: ...politician Jacob Rees-Mogg suggesting Britain "may need to go to war," hypocritically calling on working class Brits to "sacrifice their lives" for a war effort tied to Ukraine and NATO. Never mind the mass immigration under Boris Johnson's government and King Charles III supporting Islam with the Ukraine conflict as a proxy war driven by EU institutions rather than a matter of legitimate self-defense under Just War Theory. Rees-Mogg needs to send himself or his family to fight Russian assault troops in the Dunbass if the cause is as just as this pompous clown claims. "Some of you may die but it is a sacrifice" goes the sloganeering. Come on, really?

News🇬🇧🔥🇷🇺: "Over the next few years we may have to go to war, some of you may die? but this is about doing your DUTY".

Watch as Jacob_Rees_Mogg goes into new levels of pomposity rarely seen in British politics, since Lord Kitchener pointed at British men and cried "Your… pic.twitter.com/RTFpJHncpq
— HIN News🇬🇧🇺🇸 (@HerdImmunity12) September 20, 2026

Few of my former Tory colleagues appall me as much as Jacob Rees-Mogg former MP for North East Somerset.
Today he tells us that it’s our duty to go to war and fight against whoever our Government tell us.
War is when the Government orders you to fight its enemies.
Revolution… pic.twitter.com/VbpE7Kouvv
— Andrew Bridgen (@ABridgen) September 20, 2026

🇬🇧🔥🇷🇺WEF Boris Demands "British Boots On The Ground In Russia".

Watch as the bloated odious Tory old Etonian @BorisJohnson - demands that thousands of British working-class men, be mere cannon fodder as a catalyst for WW3 and full-scale war with Russia.

This bloviating,… pic.twitter.com/SWd2yoOBt7
— HIN News🇬🇧🇺🇸 (@HerdImmunity12) September 21, 2026

As it stands now the British are doing everything they can to provoke Russia into an all out war in Europe by targeting Russia's energy facilities:

Ukraine launches 1,000 drones at Russia, including hundreds fired at Moscow in what mayor describes as "largest ever" attack

And in the US war preparations are underway. Listen to this shit. Honestly, this is another reason why Rep. Thomas Massie wants this clown impeached:

These Are Kids

Getting the troops psyched up for war:

PENTAGON BRINGS IN LOGAN and JAKE PAUL for TROOP SPEECH and HEGSETH MEETING pic.twitter.com/dJLeRpJFcS
— RT (@RT_com) September 20, 2026

America is a very dysfunctional sick society and culture:

WATCH! Paula White, Donald Trump's spiritual adviser, has urged all Americans to donate 10 percent of their gross income to Israel framing the act as a religious obligation.

All the right circumstances are...

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:08:00 -1000

Editor's note: ...in place for theft and fraud to continue in America. Federal investigators broke up a $250 million scheme that sold fake nursing diplomas to about 15,000 people nationwide, targeting Haitian immigrant communities in South Florida. Brokers worked with accredited nursing school owners to issue bogus diplomas, often for $16,000 each. Forty three people have been convicted, serving four to six years and forfeiting millions in proceeds. Since buying a fake degree isn't a federal crime, authorities haven't pursued the fraudulent "nurses" themselves, though about two dozen Florida nursing schools tied to the scheme have been shut down. If you check into a nursing home check the nurse's credentials. Might end up with the wrong saline solution in your intravenous feed, or worse, you might get injected with a Pfizer injection with undisclosed mRNA DNA in the syringe.
________

Minnesota's Anti-ICE Relief Fund Shut Down Due To Rampant Fraud

By Zero Hedge | September 19, 2026

Officials in Hennepin County, Minnesota, shut down a $2 million relief fund for businesses claiming to be affected by federal immigration enforcement after officials discovered widespread fraud among applicants, forcing them to end the program. The county board created the fund to help businesses "harmed" by Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement operation that began in December 2025. Federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis in January, turning it into one of the most scrutinized immigration enforcement actions in the country.

Of about 300 applications submitted, only 82 were deemed legitimate. Officials distributed only $500,000 before shutting the program down.

County officials found the problem ran deeper than a few opportunists padding their paperwork. Site visits revealed businesses listed on applications that did not exist. Investigators found the same AI-generated language pasted into dozens of unrelated applications with little variation.

Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Lunde said the fraud reflected a broader breakdown. "The fact that people, after all this fraud, felt that they could apply and get away with it, I think it's a problem because clearly there's no fear out there," Lunde said. "Until we get it where people fear things, then they're gonna keep doing it."

Lunde described watching the numbers deteriorate in real time. "Then at a certain point we're like, 'OK, we're getting declining results on that.' And so we said it's time to stop the program. So we just stopped processing at that point," he said. He described the bulk of the applications as fraudulent outright, a flood of fabricated claims rather than a handful of bad actors slipping through the cracks.

Neither Hennepin County nor Walz's office responded to Fox News' requests for comment.

Please go to Zero Hedge to continue reading.

________

Fraud, fraud and more fraud:

Minnesota's Anti-ICE Relief Fund Shut Down Due To Rampant Fraud

The United States of Lockheed Martin through its...

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:56:07 -1000

Editor's note: ...front sales office at the US State Department does a deal with the Saudi petro kingdom for $24 billion in F-35 sales. There are a very strange set of business circumstances here because war is business. The Lockheed Martin sale of F-35 aircraft to the Saudi petro kingdom flush with cash, yet the US won't assist the Saudi kingdom in pushing back Houthie gains against the Saudi kingdom in Yemen. Then there is the Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf who said, "the era of US F-35 and F-15 jets being hunted down has already begun", pointing to mounting pressure and damage on the US military roughly seven months into the war with Iran (much of it is media-driven). Ghalibaf's remarks followed comments by US Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine, who acknowledged American forces now face a battlefield where they can be hunted by autonomous systems, jammed, and tracked in real time. Ghalibaf framed this as "a new reality the US must accept." Again, we are seeing everyone threatening each other with annihilation while the Pakistanis move to support the Saudi kingdom understanding of course the "government backed Saudi forces" fighting the Houthies are mostly mercenaries from Pakistan. It looks like the Saudi kingdom can use $100 million advanced F-35 fighters to attack Houthie machine-gun mounted Toyota trucks racing across the deserts of Yemen.
________

State Department Approves Massive $24 Billion F-35 Sale to Saudi Arabia

The kingdom is also requesting additional air defenses from its allies amid the war with Ansar Allah

by Kyle Anzalone | September 17, 2026

The State Department approved a $24.3 billion sale of F-35s to Saudi Arabia. The announcement comes as the Gulf kingdom is requesting military assistance from its allies as it fights a war against Ansar Allah in Yemen.

The sale includes 48 F-35s and 49 engines (48 equipped with one spare), cryptographic equipment, electronic warfare support, training and logistics packages, according to the notification to Congress. The proposed sale is now subject to congressional review, although Congress rarely succeeds in blocking major arms sales.

Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company and Pratt & Whitney Military Engines are the primary contractors on the deal. The State Department statement says, "The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the military balance in the region."

However, Israel has previously objected to sales of F-35s to Gulf states and Turkey, arguing that it upsets the balance of power in the Middle East. Tel Aviv often invokes Washington's policy of ensuring that Israel maintains a Qualitative Military Edge over other countries in the region. The F-35 is the most advanced aircraft in the Israeli fleet.

The State Department announced the sale a day after Ansar Allah claimed to have downed a Saudi F-15 over Yemen. Yemen’s SABA news agency on Wednesday published what it said were photos of a US-made Saudi F-15SA fighter jet that was shot down by Ansar Allah over the Yemeni province of Marib.

In addition to attacking Saudi-backed forces in Yemen, Ansar Allah has targeted military and energy facilities in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom has also come under fire from Iran and militants in Iraq. Last week, a drone launched from Iraq hit Saudi's East-West pipeline.

Please go to AntiWar to continue reading.

A Tennessee grandmother was wrongly...

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:14:47 -1000

Editor's note: ...identified by facial recognition software in a Fargo bank fraud case, arrested at gunpoint, and jailed for nearly six months even though she had never been to North Dakota. She lost her home, car, and possessions before the charges were dismissed, and she is now suing the city for $10 million. There have been similar wrongful arrests, with law enforcement treating AI matches as proof of guilt instead of just investigative leads, undermining due process and expanding surveillance risks for innocent people. That's it? $10 million? Angela Lipps needs to update her lawsuit and include the US Marshals Service for another $5 million. This isn't isolated to law enforcement either. Wait until the military starts making catastrophic targeting mistakes with AI.

News update for 22 September 2026: Flock Is Discovering That Americans Do Not Want to Live in a Surveillance State

News update for 19 September 2026: Flock Camera Ping Jails Innocent Woman For 13 Days

________

Tennessee grandma jailed for 5 months after AI flagged her for bank fraud in state she never visited

By Caitlin McCormack | March 29, 2026

A Tennessee grandmother was jailed for a whopping five months after a facial recognition program erroneously flagged her for bank fraud in a state she’d never visited.

Angela Lipps, 50, was first arrested at her rental home in Tennessee in July. Lipps was extradited to Fargo, North Dakota — more than 1,000 miles away from her home — at the end of October, according to a GoFundMe campaign.

The West Fargo Police Department had used "facial recognition technology" that flagged Lipps as a potential suspect in a local fraud case, Dave Zibolski, the Fargo Police Department's chief, told CNN. From there, his department took "additional investigative steps independent of AI to assist in identification" and confirm Lipps as a suspect.

He admitted at a press conference Tuesday that the West Fargo police's system was "part of the issue" in Lipps' wrongful arrest.

The West Fargo Police Department told CNN that they use Clearview AI, which "identified a potential suspect with similar features to Angela Lipps."

Lipps was also detained in Tennessee for three months because the Cass County Sheriff’s Office apparently neglected to tell North Dakota authorities that they had her extradition waiver, the outlet reported.

Lipps said that her relocation to North Dakota was "the first time I had ever been on an airplane." She added it was the first, and last, time she will ever step foot in the Peace Garden State.

Please go to the New York Post to continue reading.

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These types of arrests are only going to continue unless the Flock cameras are removed:

Dozens of Innocent Motorists Have Been Pulled Over, Detained at Gunpoint, or Jailed Due to AI License Plate Camera Errors

Georgia's law enforcement agencies are facing a mounting...

An algorithm could potentially...

To: Municipal governments deploying Flock cameras

Fear, fear, fear and more fear:

International Public Warning About the AI "Threat"

There are genuine fears within Finland...

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 12:44:59 -1000

Editor's note: ...by certain political figures that NATO will launch another provocation against Russia and that it will be Finland as the next proxy. The EU and NATO desperately need a major war against Russia and they are doing everything within their sphere of influence to provoke Russia so that NATO can initiate Article 5 of their charter to make that war happen. Finland became a NATO member on April 4, 2023. Germany's Merz is pulling away from Washington while still committing Germany to more defense spending and continued Ukraine funding, essentially picking a fight with President Trump while staying anchored to the transatlantic security bloc. The media supporting that block in the West never misses the chance by referring to "Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine." The AfD is doing the opposite: courting Moscow directly through gas talks with advisor to Vladimir Putin, Kirill Dmitriev, rejecting Ukraine funding and more weapons for Kiev, and offering voters a clean break from both US reliance and the costs of the largely British commercial proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The disparity is that Merz's break with the US is rhetorical and grievance driven but keeps Germany's Western alignment intact, while the AfD's outreach to Russia is a substantive policy shift that would realign Germany away from that alignment entirely, and it's gaining traction precisely as Merz's frustration with President Trump makes Merz's own "unconditional friendship" look less stable by comparison.
________

NATO member warns bloc seeking pretext for war with Russia

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico says he does not want his country to be dragged into a conflict

September 18, 2026 | RT

Europe is moving dangerously close to a direct clash between NATO and Russia, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has warned, accusing the West of seeking a "pretext" for a major conflict between the two sides.

Fico made the comment in a Facebook post on Thursday, which accompanied the remarks he delivered before traveling to Ukraine for a meeting with Vladimir Zelensky and several European leaders.

"I am deeply concerned that they are merely looking for a pretext for a major conflict between NATO and Russia," he wrote.

Reflecting on the Ukraine conflict, Fico said that the hostilities had “gotten out of control," while accusing European nations of engaging in increasingly bellicose rhetoric which he said risked dragging the continent into a broader war. "The situation has never been as serious and tense regarding the possibility of a pan-European war conflict as it is now," he said.

Read more EU committing 'harakiri' – Lavrov

Fico also warned that Bratislava could face pressure from NATO to commit troops if the bloc's Article 5 – a collective defense clause applied if a member state is attacked – is invoked. "Can anyone imagine being told to prepare 5,000 soldiers, 10,000 soldiers, and that they would go somewhere to fight? We don’t know with whom, why, or for what reason," Fico said.

"I don’t want Slovakia to be part of any military conflict because of some Article 5," he stressed, adding that, though his country still "cares about collaboration and fulfilling obligations". "As prime minister, I will do everything to ensure that Slovakia is never drawn into a war," Fico stressed.

Please go to RT to continue reading.

________

News update on AfD in Germany for 21 September 2026:

Open Letter: The state of affairs in the Banana Republic of Germany

While Europe is becoming poorer and poorer, Russia is becoming richer and richer. Here is another reason why Germany's AfD are moving towards Russia:

Russia's $118 Billion Arctic Oil Bet Pushes Ahead Despite Sanctions

What the transatlantic security bloc including Britain and the EU and their central banks really want is to seize Russia and its resources and that has been what the previous UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's direction has been since 2022. The EU, Britain and those within this bloc are not going to stop and is why Russia has ended all negotiations with the West and why Russia's Sergey Lavrov told the EU they are "committing harakiri":

Russian Elections – Zelensky & Boris Johnson

Seems certain factions within Germany have an interest in Israel as well:

German Sponsorship of Zionist Settlements Exposed

From certain perspectives of analysis, Britain is not only in a commercial proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, Britain is also in an economic and financial war with America:

Merciless Kindness: Britain's Economic War on America and the Long Shadow Over the Iran Sanctions

If the EU and NATO want to take on Russia they can have at it:

BREAKING: 🇺🇸🇪🇺 The Pentagon is considering massive military withdrawing from Europe, per NBC News

25,000 troops, planes, ships and other assets pic.twitter.com/FHn1XVkPql
— Catherine Austin Fitts (@austin_fit76995) September 18, 2026

Three decades and eighty-four strikes into a war...

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:25:08 -1000

Editor's note: ...that predates most enlisted service members currently fighting it, the US finds itself locked into a Somali counterterrorism campaign with no visible endpoint, no public accounting of its human cost, and an enemy that keeps multiplying rather than shrinking. Remember the humanitarian mission to protect famine relief in Somalia, but spiraled into the October 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, where a raid meant to capture a warlord turned into a brutal urban firefight that killed 18 American soldiers? That is how long this has been going on with US involvement in Somalia. Somalia sees roughly 8,000-9,000 violent deaths a year in total, about 900-1,100 from ordinary homicide and roughly 7,000+ from armed conflict (al-Shabab attacks, clan violence, and military operations). The place is a Jihad factory.

Then in 2006 as a proxy invasion, when Washington backed Ethiopian forces in toppling the Islamic Courts Union, a coalition that had actually managed to suppress piracy and unify Mogadishu under something resembling order, produced the very insurgency the Pentagon now spends nine figures a year trying to bomb into submission. Al-Shabaab was not an inheritance. It was a creation, spawned out of a militant offshoot of a government the US helped destroy, its first suicide bombing aimed squarely at the foreign troops occupying its capital. That origin story matters, because it suggests a policy pattern that has repeated with grim consistency across the region: intervention produces radicalization, radicalization produces more intervention, and the cycle compounds rather than getting resolved.

What makes the current phase of this war particularly troubling is not just its longevity but its opacity. The US AFRICOM quietly stopped disclosing casualty estimates and civilian harm assessments last year, meaning the American public, and more importantly the Somali public living under these strikes, have no reliable way to judge whether the ongoing bombing campaign is degrading al-Shabaab or simply generating fresh grievances in villages like Saacow that most Americans could not locate on a map. Independent trackers like New America now count more strikes than the Pentagon itself publicly claims, a discrepancy that should alarm anyone concerned with transparency and military oversight. A government fighting a war it will not fully describe, against an enemy it helped create, with a body count it will not release, is not fighting a war so much as running it on autopilot.

The emergence of a second, simultaneous air campaign against an ISIS affiliate in Puntland only deepens the sense of mission creep without strategic clarity. That ISIS offshoot itself splintered from al-Shabaab in 2015, meaning the US is now bombing two branches of a militant family tree it planted the roots for. Meanwhile, Somalia's underlying conditions, a federal government that still cannot project authority beyond Mogadishu, a security apparatus fractured along clan lines, and vast ungoverned territory where al-Shabaab functions as a de facto shadow state collecting taxes through extortion, smuggling and administering justice, remain largely unaddressed by an approach built almost entirely around airstrikes rather than governance, reconstruction, or political reconciliation. Three decades of bombing has not produced a stable Somali state. It has produced a war that outlives news cycles, a Pentagon operating independently of America that answers fewer questions each year, and a local population caught between a government it does not trust with the US military delivering bombs they cannot see coming.

________

US Africa Command Launches 82nd Airstrike in Somalia Of the Year

AFRICOM said that it targeted al-Shabaab in southern Somalia

by Dave DeCamp | September 15, 2026

US Africa Command on Monday night announced that its forces launched another airstrike in Somalia, as the Trump administration continues its record-shattering bombing campaign in the country.

AFRICOM said the strike targeted al-Shabaab in the vicinity of Saacow, a village in Somalia’s southern Lower Juba region. The command offered no other details about the attack, as it stopped sharing casualty estimates and assessments of potential civilian harm last year.

"Specific details about units and assets will not be released to ensure continued operations security," AFRICOM said in its press release.

Based on AFRICOM's numbers, the attack marks at least the 82nd US airstrike in Somalia this year, though there are signs that the US is not announcing each strike in the country.

The US has also been conducting an air war against an ISIS affiliate in Somalia's northeastern Puntland region, and Drop Site News recently reported that a US strike was carried out in the region on September 3, though it has not been claimed by AFRICOM.

According to numbers from New America, an organization that tracks the air war and also counts airstrikes that are reported but not claimed by the US, the September 8 strike would bring the total number of US bombings in Somalia this year to 84.

The US has been involved in Somalia for decades and has been fighting al-Shabaab since the George W. Bush administration backed an Ethiopian invasion in 2006 that ousted the Islamic Courts Union, a Muslim coalition that briefly held power in Mogadishu after taking the city from CIA-backed warlords.

Please go to AntiWar to continue reading.

________

Editor's note: In January 2019 British SAS soldier Christian Craighead's actions at the DusitD2 complex remains one of the most remarkable individual acts of heroism to come out of the "war on terror." He was off duty, freshly showered, and living in Nairobi to train Kenyan army units when a phone call alerted him that the hotel complex nearby was under attack. Within minutes he was in his pickup truck, weapons gear beside him, driving on the wrong side of the highway to reach the scene. What followed was 22 hours of close quarters fighting through smoke filled corridors, shattered glass every where, toxic grenade fumes, and relentless automatic weapons fire, a one man response against a coordinated al-Shabaab assault team infiltrated in from Somalia. By the time it was over, Craighead had killed four terrorists and helped save an estimated 700 people, American, Kenyan, Japanese and European alike, earning him the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross.

The DusitD2 attack exposed a fundamental weakness AFRICOM's bombing campaign still faces today. Al-Shabaab retains the ability to plan complex attacks far beyond Somalia's borders, despite over a decade of drone strikes, AU offensives, and leadership killings. The Dusit attackers had crossed back and forth from Somalia, the same territory the US now bombs dozens of times a year, suggesting airstrikes have degraded the group but never eliminated its ability to project violence regionally. Six years later, both the group and the bombing campaign persist, which argues a purely kinetic approach has produced a stalemate rather than a resolution.

There is also a retaliatory logic connecting the two moments. Al-Shabaab framed the DusitD2 attack partly as a response to US foreign policy, a pattern it has repeated throughout this conflict, consistently citing foreign military presence as justification for its violence, a logic that traces back to its founding as a reaction to the 2006 Ethiopian invasion. Today's bombing campaign runs almost entirely from the air, with no ground presence and minimal public accountability, raising the same question critics have asked since 2006: does each strike degrade the group's capability, or does it simply feed the narrative that fuels its recruitment.

What makes Christian Craighead's story even more compelling in all this is what happened after his remarkable skills were displayed that January day in 2019. For years, Christian Craighead fought to publish his firsthand account of that day, only to be blocked by the UK Ministry of Defence. He pursued a judicial review to try to get the book cleared, and even that was denied, with the courts siding against him and refusing to allow an appeal. A soldier who ran toward gunfire without orders, who saved hundreds of lives with nothing but his own initiative and training, found himself fighting a different kind of battle against his own government simply to tell his story. It raises an uncomfortable question about why an act of such unambiguous heroism would be treated as something to suppress rather than celebrate, and whether institutional caution, image management, or simple bureaucratic inertia was allowed to silence a man who deserved to be heard.

That fight appears to have finally been won. Craighead's memoir, "One Man In," was released on September 15, 2026, through Threshold Editions, giving him the platform he was denied for so long to tell the full, uncensored account of that day in his own words. For a story this extraordinary to have been delayed and nearly buried by red tape says as much about institutional caution as it does about the courage it took to act in the first place. The book's release feels less like a simple publication and more like a long overdue correction, allowing one of the era's genuine acts of individual bravery to finally reach the audience it always deserved. Christian Craighead who met President Trump in 2024 has said he will never return to the UK, claiming he would be arrested if he did, and that he has since fallen in love with America and the life he's built there; if his story inspires you the way it's inspired us, please consider purchasing Christian's book and watching the video below to hear him tell it in his own words:

In many respects the amount of engineering, resources, machinery, energy, electricity and water that goes into making bullets used to kill people is surreal:

Saudi air attacks on Yemen are not concerned about who gets killed:

Starmer 'Complicit' In Trump's Yemen Massacre

A US supplied F15 to Saudi Arabia was...

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:17:45 -1000

Editor's note: ...shot down by desert dwelling men in sandals who are fearless. This must mean the Saudi kingdom requires more weapons to continue waging war on Yemen. The stakes are high especially the stock portfolios for anyone holding General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems (GD) and McAlester Army Ammunition Plant (MCAP) stocks plus dividends. Creating debt based fiat currency out of nothing shouldn't be any problem as the Pentagon "tells" the US congress the "war on Iran" has blown through $42 billion. Suffice it to say, the U.S. Department of State acting as the front sales office for weapon sales deals just approved a big sale. Break open the champagne, let's celebrate. Maybe we're thinking about this the wrong way? Think of the 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 (a thermally stable PBXN-109 explosive) 2,000-pound bombs slated for Israel as "excavating equipment?" After all, the "war on Iran" is part of the taxpayer shakedown of the Global Business Network (GBN).
________

Tucker Carlson Sounds Alarm Over Trump's Planned 'Largest Transfer Of Ordinance In Modern History'

By Zero Hedge | September 16, 2026

After the US was essentially forced to conduct a major and rapid draw down of forces from the Gulf and Mideast region in the wake of Iran's 'unexpectedly' large retaliation for Operation Epic Fury, it seems all that Washington is left to do is arm regional allies to the teeth and wish them the best.

Early this month the US approved two potential Saudi defense packages valued at a whopping $5.75 billion. The forthcoming deals will reportedly focus on transferring extended-range precision bombs and bolstering Abrams tanks in the kingdom.

Ironically this comes at a moment that Saudi-backed coalition forces in Yemen - with all its military tech - are getting rolled back by Ansar Allah fighters in sandals.

Naturally, next on the list comes Israel.

On Tuesday, over a week since the planned Saudi sale was reported, The Washington Post reveals the following:

President Donald Trump's administration is planning to sell to Israel a munitions package worth $2.8 billion, which will include tens of thousands of highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs, according to a U.S. official familiar with the sale.

The planned sale, which has been informally communicated to relevant congressional committees who weigh in on large arms sales, includes 20,000 MK 84s and 20,000 BLU-117s, the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said.

WaPo calls the package "the largest" planned sale of 2,000 pound bombs to Israel in years.

Just prior to initial reporting of this dropping at around midday Tuesday, Tucker Carlson revealed on X: "According to an informed federal official, in the coming months the Trump administration plans to send a total of 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 bombs to the government of Israel. Each bomb weighs 2,000 pounds. This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history."

Carlson put it in perspective in the following commentary:

How big is this shipment? It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force’s attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That's 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. That same month, March of 1945, the US Army Air Forces began the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo. More than 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. By the end of that operation, the US had dropped 1,600 tons of bombs. That’s four percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. World War Two ended five months later, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The shipment Trump is sending to Israel amounts to more than three times the destructive power of that nuclear explosion. There is no precedent for what the Trump administration is doing. Nor is there a justification. The government of Israel is not fighting World War Two, or even a war. It is engaged in periodic skirmishes with a guerrilla force in Lebanon, and it is working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza. Neither front requires modern 2,000-pound bombs.

The former Fox host further warned this portends Israel could soon go even more 'gloves off' and unleash further hell on Gaza and Lebanon, or possibly even Iran - at a moment the US seems to be trying to find an exit from the hot phase of the conflict.

More from Carlson:

How did this happen? The request for 40,000 new high-explosive civilian-killing bombs originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. From there it moved to the State Department, where Marco Rubio enthusiastically approved it. At this point, only four more people need to sign off before the bombs ship to Israel: Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Congressmen Brian Mast and Gregory Meeks, the top two members of the equivalent House committee. All four are committed neocons. Collectively they’ve taken millions from the Israel lobby. In 2015, Brian Mast traveled to Israel to volunteer for the Israeli military. In 2023, Mast showed up in the House of Representatives wearing an IDF uniform. It’s hard to imagine any of them hesitating before sending more free bombs to Israel. Only public outrage can stop this.

Poll after recent poll has shown that by and large the American public is finally questioning Washington's blank check approach to Israel.

DropSite: Carlson calls the taxpayer-funded, roughly $3 billion package "a gift" to a government "working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza."

Please go to Zero Hedge to continue reading.
________

Editor's note: While on the subject of the independent state of the Pentagon that is not America, Rep. Thomas Massie introduced a resolution to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on eight articles, citing the unauthorized Iran war, civilian casualties (including an alleged February strike that killed over 150 people at an Iranian elementary school that might have been staged), Caribbean/Pacific boat strikes, the Venezuela operation to capture Maduro, retaliation against Sen. Mark Kelly for speech, and the Yemen bombing campaign. A House vote is expected Thursday the 17th. But there is something far more critical to consider about Pete Hegseth as pointed out by Reminiscence of the Future. Hegseth publicly downplays Iranian strikes as isolated "squirters," but troops on the ground are describing an entirely different reality: bases sitting undefended as Iranian attacks tear through them unchecked, a firsthand contradiction that exposes the gap between the Pentagon's talking points and the war it's actually losing control of. Reminiscence of the Future notes that "Hegseth wouldn't be allowed to command a squad in the Russian Army."

Rep. Thomas Massie Introduces Resolution To Impeach Pete Hegseth Over Iran War, Civilian Casualties

Amazon data center in Bahrain struck and destroyed by Iranian cruise missiles, state media claims — attacks launched against AWS site in response to alleged US strikes on an under-construction nuclear plant

Drones are proving to be a serious problem for oil transit:

Key Saudi Pipeline to Be Shut Down for Weeks as Diesel Prices Hit Record Highs

Here is what a falsified...

noreply@blogger.com (Higher Standards ) — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:27:38 -1000

Editor's note: ...$190 million a day will buy Ukraine: An estimated well over 2 million dead, missing and seriously disfigured Ukrainian soldiers. The City of London's Neocon war provocateur Boris Johnson is back at it again, issuing a statement about confiscating Russian assets held in Belgian banks to "rebuild Ukraine's air defenses." Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk seems ready to take on Russia as he announced, "Poland and NATO intend to bring Russia to its knees in 42 days." Poland's Tusk continues with the old and tired out claim Russia is "attacking" NATO countries. What is Boris Johnson's piece of the financial pie and why is he spending so much time in Kiev? Ukraine is a terrorist™ state and that is what the British do ever so well. And no, contrary to British "experts" that Russian drone did not target Johnson. And who launched the drone? Ukrainian terrorists?