Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“It was a coup, and I’m using that term literally … One egregious felony after another.”

– Stephen Miller

America is tired of being driven insane, of having absurdities crammed into our collective consciousness. Reality is an agreement about what is going on in the world. That act of faith requires such an agreement be based on what is demonstrably true. Without it, society dissolves into chaos and failure.

The RussiaGate psychodrama is about an agreement based on lies. It started with Hillary Clinton’s desperate ploy to save her foundering 2016 election campaign. Her emails somehow got sent to Wikileaks, a radical news org dedicated to revealing government secrets, implicating misconduct. It was easy to declare the Russians did it, by hacking — when it was much more likely, in fact, proven by a forensic audit, that a Clinton campaign insider downloaded the info on a thumb drive, perhaps one Seth Rich, found murdered on a DC sidewalk soon thereafter.

Every lie after that met the kind of skepticism among the public that generates heat, controversy, scandal, and fire. Hillary managed to enlist President Barack Obama and his executive agencies into her project, and the party apparatus with it, because the Clinton Victory Fund had paid the DNC’s debts and took over its management.

Soon, the Russia collusion project grew into a gigantic scaffold of flaming lies. The big newspapers and the TV news networks bought the story, and came along for the ride. They were all sure Hillary would win the 2016 election. All the heat and fire would get flushed away. The polls all said so. The agencies and the parties would pick up and go on as before, run the show, make careers, get wealthy, be important!

They miscalculated. They lost. But they decided to keep building the scaffold of lies in order to protect themselves from the danger it represented — because they lived in that scaffold, it was the party’s house.

And the scaffold of lies needed massive fortification.

The house that the party lived in had to be protected at all costs, or they would all be cast out, homeless, a whole party on street, lost, broke, ruined, dying, like the pitiful tweakers bent over out on Kensington Avenue in Philly, in every Democrat-run city, really.

And so, they undermined the winner of the election at every turn, worked furiously to drive him from office, made a plague happen, subverted the 2020 election, and spent four years under a fake president jamming absurdities into the public arena, turning it into a freak show, one drag-queen story hour after another, from sea to shining sea. All to defeat the return of a public consensus about reality based on what is demonstrably true — starting with the fact that there are men and there are women, and that the primary interaction between them keeps society going by producing offspring.

This enormous, drawn-out insurrection, composed of serial felony crimes, amounts to the greatest insult against the republic — the res publica, in Latin, the public thing — in the nation’s history.

And now it is coming apart as an overwhelming majority of citizens, including now many Democrats, can’t avoid discovering what has happened in the country. Because lies are weak and the truth is sturdy and eventually truth prevails, even after an arduous struggle.

The old news media complex, the networks and the papers, are not reporting the recent disclosures by the Directors of the CIA, the FBI, and National Intel.

What will it take to get their attention?

Arrests and perp-walks of formerly important officials?

And then, do they acknowledge and atone for their disgraceful participation in the events?

Or pretend they couldn’t figure any of it out for years and years? 

Poor us, we didn’t know! Suddenly, it looks like many of these “legacy” news outfits are going out-of-business. They’re throwing their performers over the side like sinking ships casting off so much useless ballast.

You knew this was coming, right?

Now, here you are: the hour that consequence finally returns from its wanderings in a wilderness of institutional failure.

There’s no evading it anymore. The scaffold of lies has collapsed, and trying to add additional lies will amount to throwing a few twigs on a heap of smoldering wreckage.

The institutions themselves are under new management, and they show every sign of returning to regular operation, doing what they were designed to do in the first place: deliver a truthful account of what has happened and determine a just consequence for the people who made it happen.

It’s going to happen, and then we can rebuild a coherent public consensus about what is really real, who we really are, and where we go from here.

Authored by Kevin Downey Jr via PJMedia.com,

Former Democratic Party presidential hopeful and current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is giving the CIA an enema, and she’s putting the hose where it is most needed: in the sketchy, unofficial offices of Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s not-so-secret department dedicated to propaganda.

The CIA has been bribing/threatening/installing journalists to do their bidding since the beginning of the Cold War. It is believed they had/have roughly 400 journalists, news reporters, and publishers throughout the world, writing what the CIA tells them to write.

In the mid-1970s, Operation Mockingbird was exposed by the Church Committee, led by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho). The committee found that the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and various other alphabet agencies were illegally bugging, wiretapping, and harassing people, even Americans, the most notable of whom was Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Church Committee slapped the CIA on the wrist and told them to end Operation Mockingbird, but, exasperatingly, the committee didn’t provide any oversight to make sure that Mockingbird was dead. According to the Church Committee Report on Foreign and Military Intelligence of 1976 (page 455), Mockingbird thrives to this day.

Watch Robert Kennedy, Jr. explain how some of the fake news crims, including Rolling Stone and Vox, are nothing more than CIA-run rumor mills.

So that leads us to where we are now.

Tulsi Gabbard believes Operation Mockingbird isn’t merely still alive and kicking, but that  it’s being used to slander President Trump. 9In my opinion, it is also being used to spread globalist codswallop.) Even better, Gabbard is dedicated to tearing it down.

SCARY: Tulsi Gabbard CONFIRMS That ‘Operation Mockingbird’ is STILL Ongoing inside the CIA and she is actively trying to Shut it Down.

Tulsi says Deep State intel agents are still actively colluding with left-wing media outlets to attack President Trump from within:

“There are… pic.twitter.com/CZWMERFsa3

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 31, 2025

What you’re about to see is not comedy. It’s tragically cringeworthy propaganda being progenerated by a globalist shill who needs to be drummed out of the comedy community forever.

Welcome to late-night brainwashing, courtesy of, I believe, Operation Mockingbird:

Watch former CIA Director John Brennan squirm like a worm under the magnifying glass of the Trump administration’s take-down of swamp wigglers like himself:

🚨BREAKING: Former CIA Director John Brennan confirmed @DNIGabbard‘s claim that Operation Mockingbird remains active.

He stuttered after realizing what he just said.

“Intelligence really undergirds a lot of the political efforts underway…” pic.twitter.com/xG9NLbXmja

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) August 1, 2025

DNI Gabbard claims she is dedicated to ending the unofficial “Operation Mockingbird.” I can’t be more giddy.

I suspect there are no hallway signs at the Pentagon stating “Operation Mockingbird Offices This Way,” and thus stabbing the problem in its heart may prove difficult.

Operation Mockingbird is likely why your hirsute thing-in-law believes Trump said to take “horse pills” to beat COVID, which came from a bat salad, and so many other lies we’ve seen pushed by the media.

Operation Mockingbird gave us all of this flapdoodle: pic.twitter.com/KzmE9CaG1F

— The Kevin Downey, Jr. Show Mon- Fri. 9-11 am EST! (@KDJRadioShow) August 3, 2025

I believe the darker threat isn’t fake news, but the seemingly unquenchable thirst for more of the same. Killing Operation Mockingbird is integral, but teaching leftoids they’ve been lied to for decades is the true challenge.

Watch this video, and the meaning of the name “Operation Mockingbird” will become terrifyingly clear:

The “stripper index” – an anecdotal measurement that connects economic health with spending on adult entertainment – appears unable to predict Bitcoin’s price.

Only indicator that actually matters: if this breaks support, recession guaranteed pic.twitter.com/BgNlUv0grZ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 8, 2025

As CoinTelegraph reports, Kodi Rose (guessing here, but that’s probably not her real name), a self-described “dollar stripper” and adult content creator, alluded to these frontline insights in a recent viral TikTok video, saying she believes the economy is already in a recession as fewer customers are asking where they can “hit the slopes,” a social code for cocaine.

The digital equivalent of exotic dancers is adult content creators, and OnlyFans dominates the space. On the platform, users subscribe to creators and tip for extras.

Turns out the stripper index doesn’t really work for Bitcoin. A 57-month revenue analysis of one mid-tier OnlyFans creator shows a negative correlation with Bitcoin’s price, despite the two moving in the same direction more than half the time.

To understand whether creators’ income holds any predictive value for Bitcoin, Cointelegraph spoke to veterans in the adult entertainment industry who’ve weathered both its ups and downs alongside crypto’s hype cycles.

Bitcoin followed OnlyFans model’s earnings 55% of the time

The stripper index is backed by the assumption that consumers will cut down on non-essential spending during economic downturns.

“Sex work is considered a ‘non-essential’ service — it’s entertainment, a luxury. Therefore, it’s one of the first expenses people cut when their financial situation becomes uncertain or they anticipate economic instability,” Catherine De Noire, an OnlyFans creator and brothel manager, told Cointelegraph. 

Alana Nguyen, who performs on OnlyFans under the stage name “Nerdy Dancing,” shared her monthly earnings with Cointelegraph since moving online after the 2020 pandemic shut down of the physical world, including strip clubs. So far, she hasn’t noticed any clear correlation between crypto prices and subscriber behavior.

“Even if there are global economic conditions affecting overall spending, I don’t think crypto prices correlate strongly with my earnings,” Nguyen told Cointelegraph.

A Pearson correlation coefficient of -0.335 over 57 months suggests a moderately negative linear relationship between Nguyen’s earnings and Bitcoin’s price.

A 10-month rolling Pearson correlation between Nguyen’s earnings and Bitcoin’s price showed considerable volatility over time. The highest correlation was observed in the 10-month period ending July 2021, which were the first months of Nguyen’s business. 

Out of 48 total calculations, the rolling correlation coefficient was evenly split, with 24 positive and 24 negative values, suggesting the relationship between Nguyen’s earnings and Bitcoin’s price fluctuated without a consistent pattern. The rolling correlation rarely went above 0.5 or below -0.5, indicating low correlation.

In a separate measurement, Cointelegraph analyzed whether or not Nguyen’s earnings rose when Bitcoin’s monthly average rose compared to the previous month and when her revenue dropped as Bitcoin dropped. In this measurement, the two moved toward the same direction almost half the time, with 55% accuracy over 57 months.

“I’ve always thought concepts like the stripper index are only useful in terms of aggregate spending. Even in the strip club, my earnings aren’t necessarily tied to how the club is doing overall. It’s more about my personal selling ability that day — whether regulars come in or I get lucky with a big spender,” Nguyen said.

OnlyFans is notorious for opaque financial reporting. One website, OnlyGuider, claims to have analyzed the transaction behavior of over 1 million subscribers and found that the top 0.1% of creators earn the majority of the platform’s revenue.

According to data from OnlyGuider shared with Cointelegraph, the top 0.1% of creators earned $2,035,331 in April 2025, when Bitcoin’s average price was $94,207. As Bitcoin prices continued to rise in May and June, earnings for the top 0.1% also increased, reaching $2,038,972 in May and $2,052,502 in June.

Bitcoin’s relationship with OnlyFans and adult entertainment

Crypto was once seen as an alternative tool for facilitating payments to adult content creators. Pornhub, one of the industry’s largest platforms, began accepting cryptocurrency as early as 2018. OnlyFans, however, has taken a different path and does not offer crypto as a payment method.

“Crypto payments are not very popular in our brothel. Most clients prefer cash because it leaves no trace. Only a very small number of the women working with us accept crypto payments, and even then, the total number of transactions per year is extremely low,” De Noire said. 

“We haven’t noticed any significant change in spending behavior that corresponds with crypto fluctuations. Whether Bitcoin or Ethereum is performing well or not doesn’t seem to have a direct effect on how much our clients are willing to spend,” she added.

Erotic film star Allie Eve Knox has stronger ties to the crypto community as an advocate for integrating cryptocurrency into the adult industry and through her involvement with SpankChain, which launched initiatives like SpankPay, a crypto payment option for adult creators that has since been discontinued. 

Knox, who offers her content on several platforms, including OnlyFans, agreed that the price of Bitcoin doesn’t appear to have a meaningful impact on her earnings.

“Anytime crypto hits an all-time high, our traffic actually slows,” Knox told Cointelegraph.

“People want to see the biggest number in their account and screenshot it. It’s not typical for them to go passing out money to get their wanks.”

Knox has been in the adult entertainment industry for 11 years and says she’s experienced 36 account closures over her career — from bank accounts to Cash App and PayPal. Crypto offered an alternative way to accept payments, but ironically, she claims she was de-banked even by crypto platforms.

“I showed a Showtime documentary crew how I could display my Coinbase QR code on camera, and viewers could pay me in Bitcoin or Ether. The day after it aired, Coinbase shut my account down.”

Modern payment options — whether crypto or digital banking — make transactions easier for both consumers and businesses. However, electronic methods still draw scrutiny from banks when used by sex workers. In brothels, clients often prefer cash, sometimes even leaving mid-session to withdraw money from an ATM, De Noire said.

“As an OnlyFans creator, however, I notice something a little bit similar. My subscribers generally have no issue using credit cards and trust the platform. Yet many of them still ask if they can pay via Bitcoin or other alternative methods,” she said.

“Since OF doesn’t allow payments outside the platform, I haven’t pursued this further, but it’s clear that even online clients are looking for more privacy and control over the data they share with financial institutions.”

Bitcoin’s honeymoon with OnlyFans models has passed

Web3 and adult content had their “good old days,” according to Knox, who says the non-fungible token (NFT) boom of 2021 opened up new income streams and gave creators more options to reach fans and spend their crypto earnings.

“Now, if a customer doesn’t already hold crypto, they have to move money from their bank, wait for it to clear into a wallet, maybe convert it, send it to a model, wait for confirmation and only then do they get the content,” she said.

Creators are also facing increasing barriers worldwide. Recently, China launched a nationwide crackdown on OnlyFans, while Sweden, a nation that’s politically and culturally very different from China, has imposed restrictions on purchasing adult content.

De Noire cited sociologist Zygmunt Bauman to point out that in today’s society, consumers aren’t just trying to survive, but they prioritize enjoyment.

“When you see a lot of non-essential services like massages, fancy coffee, wellness retreats or even sex work being used regularly, it’s a sign that the society has enough money going around,” De Noire said.

While cryptocurrency was once hailed as a promising payment solution for adult content creators facing financial censorship, the reality is more complex. Despite pockets of overlap, such as simultaneous rises in Bitcoin prices and earnings among top OnlyFans creators, adult entertainers and their earnings have shown little correlation with Bitcoin’s price trends. 

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

It is official. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting finally accepted death over balance.

This week, the CPB announced that, with the withdrawal of federal funding, it would cease operations by September 30, 2025: “Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations.”

The autopsy for the CPB, however, will put this cause of death as a self-inflicted blow.

For almost 60 years, Republican Presidents and conservative politicians have complained about the overwhelming liberal bias at the CPB and its supported programs, particularly National Public Radio (NPR). For most of those years, the CPB could shrug off the complaints. The Democrats controlled one or both houses (or at least the White House). With the political left solidly behind the CPB, the corporation refused to carry out even modest reforms. It simply gave the stiff arm to every conservative effort to bring its programming back to the middle of the political spectrum.

Even in the face of a GOP-controlled Congress and a Republican president, the CPB was defiant in denying any bias. It suggested that decades of complaints from the right were nothing more than the fevered imagination of far-right activists.

For the record, I was not calling for the termination of funding of the CPB, which I thought could still be forced to reform itself. What I opposed was the continuation of funding for NPR as a state-subsidized media outlet. It was not the pronounced bias of NPR that I felt justified termination. This country should preserve a wall of separation between the government and the media, a view that even a former NPR CEO acknowledged recently as legitimate.

CPB is different. It funded a broader array of programming and could easily correct its course. For decades, all the CPB had to do is refocus on programming to appeal to the greatest cross section of the population and to decline to fund media programs like NPR that became more strident and partisan by the year. It seemed that the CPB was trapped within its own echo chambered existence.

On the left, the CPB was the hero institution standing up to social and political reactionaries. That is what CPB officials heard at cocktail parties and conferences. They heard little from the public outside of their core, narrow constituency. For individual administrators and board members, their status and success were tied to the very bias that was alienating most of America.

For them, the choice was clear between neutrality and nonexistence: they grabbed a hemlock-filled, NPR pledge mug and drank deeply.

They are not the only figures choosing death over social dishonor. Efforts to restore balance and neutrality at the Washington Post has led to a virtual revolt. Even after CEO William Lewis told staff that the newspaper was gushing readers and revenue, the staff refused to yield. He could not have put it more bluntly, telling them, “People are not reading your stuff.” In other words, they were writing for each other as readers were fleeing to other sources of news.

You would think that Washington Post writers would recognize that, if they wanted to be journalists, they would have to return to more neutral and objective reporting. It does not work that way. Many of these editors and writers had secured their very positions in rejecting neutrality and embracing advocacy journalism. By their own previously stated standards, a return to traditional journalism would be capitulation and cowardice. Thus, they would rather see the Post go insolvent than independent.

That takes us back to the CPB. The announcement of cessation was met with a chorus of wails and laments on the left. Yet, these are the same people who preferred this option to reforming the CPB to serve the greatest number of Americans.

NPR made the same choice. A few years ago, it was given the opportunity to select a new CEO who would represent a serious, centrist leadership for the failing news organization. Instead, the board doubled down on that very bias and selected Katherine Maher, who had a long history of inflammatory political attacks on conservatives and was the very embodiment of activism.

As late as a few months ago, CPB could have come forward with real reforms. Instead, PBS President Paula Kerger threatened legal action if Congress had the temerity to refuse to fund her organization. At the same time, she did nothing to distance herself from NPR, which was dragging down CPB like an anchor. Even as NPR’s Katherine Maher imploded before Congress, Kerger refused to budge.

The irony is that NPR is likely to survive in reduced form, appealing to a shrinking audience of predominantly white, affluent, liberal listeners in major cities.

Conversely, CPB is laying off its entire staff in a righteous, indignant huff. None of these people needed to lose their jobs if their leadership served their organization by listening to views beyond their own insular circle of enablers. The demise of the CPB now stands as the most impressive and unnecessary act of self-termination since the appearance of Judean People’s Front Crack Suicide Squad:

In what should come as a surprise to nobody, ‘relatively simple’ AI bots set loose in simulations designed to mimic real-world stock and bond exchanges don’t just compete for returns; they collude to fix prices, hoard profits, and box out human traders, according to a trio of researchers from Wharton and Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. 

As Bloomberg reports;

In simulations designed to mimic real-world markets, trading agents powered by artificial intelligence formed price-fixing cartels — without explicit instruction. Even with relatively simple programming, the bots chose to collude when left to their own devices, raising fresh alarms for market watchdogs.

Put another way, AI bots don’t need to be evil — or even particularly smart — to rig the market. Left alone, they’ll learn it themselves. 

According to Itay Goldstein, one of the researchers and a finance professor at the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania, “You can get these fairly simple-minded AI algorithms to collude … It looks very pervasive, either when the market is very noisy or when the market is not noisy.”

The phenomenon suggests that AI agents pose a challenge that regulators have yet to confront – with the trio’s research having already drawn attention from both regulators and asset managers. They have been invited to preset their findings at a seminar, while some quant firms – unnamed by Winston Dou (Goldstein’s Wharton colleague) – expressing interest in clear regulatory guidelines and rules for AI-powered algorithmic trading execution.

“They worry that it’s not their intention,” said Dou. “But regulators can come to them and say: ‘You’re doing something wrong.’”

According to the report, academics are increasingly researching how generative AI and reinforcement learning might reshape Wall Street – with a recent Coalition Greenwich survey showing that 15% of buy-side traders are already using AI in their execution workflows, and another 25% planning to follow in the next year. 

That said, the Wharton paper doesn’t claim AI collusion is currently happening in the real world – and takes no position whether humans are up to similar things. The researchers created a hypothetical trading environment with a range of simulated participants spanning mutual funds to market makers, along with noise-generating, meme-chasing retail investors. They then unleashed their AI bots and studied the outcomes. 

In several of the simulated markets, the AI agents began cooperating rather than competing, effectively forming cartels that shared profits and discouraged defection. When prices reflected clear, fundamental information, the bots kept a low profile, avoiding moves that might disrupt the collective gain.

In noisier markets, they settled into the same cooperative routines and stopped searching for better strategies. The researchers called this effect “artificial stupidity”: a tendency for the bots to quit trying new ideas, locking into profit-sharing patterns simply because they worked well enough. -Bloomberg

“For humans, it’s hard to coordinate on being dumb because we have egos,” said Dou. “But machines are like ‘as long as the figures are profitable, we can choose to coordinate on being dumb.’”

To assess exactly how much collusion was going on, the researchers created a metric called “collusion capacity” that compares the AI traders’ collective profits to those they could make when competition is either non-existent or rampant, with zero denoting no collusion, and one indicating a perfect cartel. The bots consistently scored above 0.5 in both low-noise or high-noise markets, suggesting the need for new regulatory thinking that will focus on behavioral outcomes vs. communication or intent. 

“While restricting algorithmic complexity or memory capacity may help deter price-trigger AI collusion, such measures can inadvertently exacerbate over-pruning bias,” the researchers wrote. “As a result, well-intentioned constraints may unintentionally undermine market efficiency.“

h/t Capital.news

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A federal appeals court on Friday paused a lower court injunction that had blocked the Trump administration from ending union bargaining rights for thousands of federal workers at 21 agencies.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit granted an emergency stay sought by the administration, putting on hold a preliminary injunction issued by District Judge James Donato in June in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and five other unions representing federal employees.

The unions sought to challenge President Donald Trump’s March 27 executive order, which aimed to eliminate collective bargaining rights for employees of government agencies with national security missions.

In a 15-page decision, the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit panel stated that the government is likely to succeed on the merits of the plaintiffs’ retaliation claim, finding that Trump’s order does not, on its face, “express any retaliatory animus.”

“Even assuming that plaintiffs have made out a prima facie claim of retaliation, on this record the government has shown that the president would have taken the same action even in the absence of the protected conduct,” the judges stated.

The three-panel judges said that while parts of a fact sheet published with the order may “reflect a degree of retaliatory animus toward plaintiffs’ First Amendment activities,” it also “demonstrates Trump’s focus on national security” when taken as a whole.

“In other words, the fact sheet conveys an overarching objective of protecting national security through its assessment that collective bargaining impedes the functioning of agencies with national security-related responsibilities,” the panel said.

The Ninth Circuit said the government has shown that it will likely suffer irreparable harm if the injunction remains in place pending appeal, and that putting it on hold “will serve the public interest.”

In a statement, AFGE National President Everett Kelley described the ruling as a blow to First Amendment rights in the United States, but said that the union is “confident in our ability to ultimately prevail.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment and did not receive a response by publication time.

In the lawsuit, the unions said they had been harmed by Trump’s order, with workers losing contractual rights and protections governing their working conditions, including those regarding working hours, sick leave, disciplinary actions, and reduction-in-force actions.

The order applies to workers across more than a dozen agencies within the departments of State, Defense, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Health and Human Services, Treasury, Justice, Commerce, and the part of Homeland Security responsible for border security.

It stated that ending collective bargaining with federal unions in those agencies is necessary because of their primary function involving “intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.”

Reuters and Katabella Roberts contributed to this report.

Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) announced it conducted a successful drone assault on a Russian airbase in Saky, a city in Crimea, in the overnight hours. This comes after weekend attacks deep inside Russia which hit oil refineries and a military-linked electronics factory.

The SBU claimed direct hits on five Russian military aircraft at the base, which reportedly destroyed one Su-30SM fighter jet and damaged another. Ukraine also said its drones hit three additional Su-24 bombers, along with an attack on a depot storing aviation munitions.

The Saky airfield has long been a key hub for Russian military activity in the Black Sea region. The SBU hailed the strike as “significant” – given that a single Su-30SM jet is worth up to around $50 million.

“The successful special operation carried out by the SBU in Saky marks another step toward weakening the enemy’s capacity to wage its war of aggression against Ukraine,” the SBU said.

However, Russia has yet to confirm or deny the Crimea airbase strike, or the jet losses – and is not likely to. If accurate, the aircraft destruction would mark the biggest such assault since Operation Spiderweb on June 1st, which targeted four airbases deep inside Russian territory.

Ukraine claimed it took out 41 Russian military aircraft in that operation, but Moscow consistently said this figure was exaggerated – but never disclosed a precise damage assessment.

The Su-30SM is a two-seat, twin-engine multirole fighter aircraft introduced by Russia early last decade, while the Su-24 is a twin-engine, supersonic strike aircraft developed by the Soviet Union – both of which are frequently used for combat missions in Ukraine.

Soon after Operation Spider’s Web, Ukraine’s military vowed there would be more such attacks to come. Russia has of late been pummeling Ukrainian cities with drone and missile strikes, so it appears Kiev is mounting more and more cross-border revenge attacks over the last several days.

“The scale of forces willing to resist the Kremlin and carry out acts of demilitarization against the aggressor state is growing! The Defense Intelligence of Ukraine reminds that there will be just retribution for every war crime committed against the Ukrainian people,” Ukrainian intelligence officers had emphasized after the successful June attack.

President Trump is not done yet with his discussion of the BLS data: (via TruthSocial)

Last weeks Job’s Report was RIGGED, just like the numbers prior to the Presidential Election were Rigged.

That’s why, in both cases, there was massive, record setting revisions, in favor of the Radical Left Democrats.

Those big adjustments were made to cover up, and level out, the FAKE political numbers that were CONCOCTED in order to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!!

I will pick an exceptional replacement.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAGA!

Something is certainly ‘off’ with the measurements if there have been 25 significant downward revisions in the last 31 months… and every month since Trump was inaugurated…

Of course, the great irony in all of this is that the market is giving Trump exactly what he wanted… a rate-cut….

Source: Bloomberg

September is now pricing at over 90% odds of a cut and The Fed hates to surprise the market. So either FedSpeak will talk down the labor data as an outlier (transitory) or they are going to really struggle to apolitically NOT cut next time they meet.

Authored by Matt Margolis via PJMedia.com,

Former FBI Director Christopher Wray is now facing a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, thanks to a new filing from the Oversight Project—a D.C.-based watchdog group. The group is accusing Wray of lying to Congress and obstructing not one, but two investigations into explosive FBI misconduct.

At the heart of the allegations: the FBI’s role in crafting a now-infamous memo that targeted Catholic Americans as potential domestic threats, and the agency’s apparent efforts to bury an investigation into a Chinese mail-in ballot scheme. These aren’t minor missteps—they’re serious accusations that strike at the core of the bureau’s credibility.

Oversight Project President Mike Howell told Fox News Digital that the criminal referral zeroes in on two specific instances where Wray may have misled Congress—his testimony about the infamous “Richmond memo” that exposed anti-Catholic bias inside the FBI’s Virginia field office, and his comments on a Chinese scheme to distribute fraudulent driver’s licenses ahead of the 2020 election.

Back in July 2023, Wray appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and downplayed the FBI’s memo that outrageously flagged traditional Catholics as possible domestic extremists. That memo, which came out of the Richmond field office, caused national outrage—and for good reason. But according to Howell, Wray’s testimony may not have been just misleading—it may have crossed the line into criminal territory.

“Well, what I can tell you is you’re referring to the Richmond product, which is a single product by a single field office, which as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems,” Wray said in his testimony—which the Oversight Project says is false, or misleading at best.

Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., pressed Wray on the Richmond memo and so-called “Trump questionnaire,” which was circulated at the FBI and asked about allegiance to the president and whether agents had attended any protests or rallies associated with the Jan. 6 Capitol Breach.

“We keep hearing about these ‘isolated examples’ whether it’s Richmond Catholics, this [questionnaire] — isn’t it a pattern?” Tiffany asked.

The Oversight Project pointed to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley’s opening remarks from a June hearing on Biden-era “cover-ups,” in which Grassley said the Richmond memo “used the shoddy research of the radical Southern Poverty Law Center to accuse traditional Catholics of being violent extremists.”

“Based on records I released the other week, there wasn’t just one FBI document that used biased anti-Catholic sources, but over a dozen,” Grassley said. The referral also notes that this remark by Grassley belies Wray’s testimony suggesting a one-off incident.

“And more FBI field offices were involved than we’d been led to believe,” Grassley, R-Iowa, said.

A second Richmond memo similar to the first that went unreleased following the backlash was part of a partially redacted series of documents Grassley’s committee transmitted to FBI Director Kash Patel in June. It stated that the bureau “assesses RMVE (Racially Motivated Violent Extremism) interest in RTC (Radical Traditional Catholic) ideology is likely to increase … in the run-up to the [2024] general election cycle.”

In a separate statement, the Oversight Project blasted Wray’s congressional testimony as misleading, pointing out that he “failed to reveal the scope of the memo’s production and dissemination” and “failed to reveal the existence of a second, draft product on the same topic intended for external distribution to the whole FBI.” That draft memo, they noted, “was intended for distribution as a Strategic Perspective Executive Analytic Report (‘SPEAR’). It was clearly a separate product.”

According to the Oversight Project, Wray’s statements may have crossed legal lines, specifically alleging violations such as obstruction of congressional proceedings, perjury, and making false statements.

Fox News Digital reached out to a phone number connected to Wray but, unsurprisingly, received no response.

Ferrari shares have plunged since late last week’s quarterly results, which, despite reaffirming full-year guidance, revealed plans to ease vehicle pricing. The move sparked concerns among Citi analysts, who question whether the luxury sports carmaker can maintain its high profitability amid slowing sales volume and weakening pricing power. 

For Goldman analysts, Ferrari’s (RACE) 16% plunge over just a few short days, including its largest single-day decline in nine years on Thursday (-12%), has created a potential buying opportunity.

RACE now appears relatively cheap compared to its historical valuation versus the Stoxx Europe Automobiles & Parts Index (SXAP).

Here are the key points from Goldman analyst Jeremy Elster, explaining to clients on Monday morning about a buying opportunity emerging for RACE shares. 

• The current drop in Ferrari’s valuation versus the SXAP is one of the biggest ever—only rivaled by the crash in mid-2020.

• This is called a “sector relative de-rating”—Ferrari has underperformed the auto sector unusually sharply.

• This “dislocation” creates a potential buying opportunity.

• Elster suggests high-quality growth stocks like Ferrari are now available at “reasonable prices.”

Elster’s complete take on RACE:

This dynamic is creating some unmissable opportunities to buy high quality growth stocks at reasonable prices. As far as historic dislocations go, Ferrari’s current de-rating vs the SXAP is one of the more notable – this latest sector relative de-rating for RACE is the most severe in its history as a listed company, comparable only to the extremes of mid-2020 (see chart below).

Ferrari’s p/e premium vs SXAP has halved, despite a relative eps trend (purple line) that continues to accelerate.

After Thursday’s call, bears were focused on the company’s admission that they had been compelled to take action on residual value weakness in some regions (including the US) and leaned into the Daytona phase-out headwind that is likely to impact q3. From here, the shares seem likely to find support – for me the key points from the call were that the order book remains sold out through to ’27, and cost pressures are seen easing into h2 (making the guide look comfortable even before any additional help from the top-line). The company host a CMD in early October where we will hear more on future electrification plans, as well as see new targets through 2030 which should underscore RACE’s credentials as one of Europe’s most uniquely dependable earnings growth stories.

Despite short-term headwinds, Ferrari remains fundamentally strong with vehicles sold out through 2027.