Summer Storms

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“It’s dark on the Left now. They’ve reached that predictable moment where inflicting pain is all they have left.“

- Sasha Stone

Theories on the Epstein mess fly around like a murmuration of starlings wheeling across an angry summer sky. The birds are just birds. They are not the storm clouds in the background. Mark the difference.

You can rightly say that Mr. Trump has handled this Epstein business rather awkwardly - especially last Wednesday’s little show of vexation in the cabinet meeting, barking, nothing to see. . . just move along. What?

You’ve been watching the Epstein psychodrama unspool for nearly twenty years, so how can it possibly come to this?

Looks like Pam Bondi fumbled badly in those early days on the job, promising things she was less than fully informed about. The public was already convinced that the entire power structure of the nation — of all Western Civ, actually — was a convocation of perverts, and that a vast trove of evidence was sitting there waiting to be laid on them. And then Mr. Trump slammed the door shut. Mssers. Patel and Bongino at the FBI got caught flat-footed, and “Danny Boombatz” especially freaked, seeing his reputation as a truth-teller likely to shred all over cable TV. Most unfortunate, the whole appalling episode.

But then, Sunday, the president suggested on his social media that the Epstein business had become a Democratic Party op. He did not elaborate. And maybe it sounds suspiciously spurious. But, is it not worth considering? Consider also: In all of Epstein’s dark activities there was surely a there there. He did run a concerted blackmail enterprise for some combo of Israel’s Mossad, the CIA, and the UK’s MI6 intel outfit. And, since blackmail requires documentation, there was a ton of it, eventually scooped out of his various domiciles by the FBI.

The key is: had become a Democratic Party op. Didn’t start out that way, but might have turned into one. Consider: The Democratic Party was up to its eyeballs in ops against Mr. Trump since he rode down that fabled escalator in 2015. The “intel community” was the chief player in these operations. The intel community ran rings around Mr. Trump with all manner of fabricated nonsense during the election campaign of 2016 and throughout his first term. You could say — and I believe the DOJ under Ms. Bondi will say in cases waiting to be brought — that these many operations amounted to one continuous seditious conspiracy to overthrow a president. It ran from the Steele dossier, through the Mueller Investigation, through the Norm Eisen / Adam Schiff engineered impeachment No 1, through the gamed election of 2020, through the J-6 committee, and through all the nefarious lawfare gambits against Mr. Trump during the “Joe Biden” fake presidency.

Why wouldn’t the Epstein files now turn out to be an extension of these same operations? The DOJ first moved against Epstein in 2005. The case culminated in 2008 with a plea deal on some Mickey Mouse state prostitution charges and a non-prosecution agreement with the feds under US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alex Acosta — who was reported later saying that Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” and that the case was therefore “beyond my pay-grade” to prosecute.

Between 2008 and 2019, Epstein returned to his international swashbuckling ways.

Strangely, he was finally busted on June 6, 2019, by then-AG William Barr, whose father, Donald Barr, had been headmaster of New York City’s Dalton prep school, where Jeffrey Epstein, age twenty-one, was hired to teach math and physics in 1974, though he lacked a college degree.

All that may just be coincidental, of course.

A little more than a month after his arrest on sex trafficking charges in the summer of 2019, Epstein died in the Manhattan federal lockup under mysterious circumstances.

The outstanding question even afterward was: trafficking with-and-to whom?

And the general assumption among the public was: trafficking teenage girls to a long list of public officials, movie stars, financial bigshots, and miscellaneous celebs such as Prince Andrew of the British royal family.

Astoundingly little was learned from the prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021-22, which was led by Maurene Comey, daughter of former FBI Director James Comey (fired in 2017). Small world. The case only covered Ms. Maxwell’s activities between 1994 and 2004. Why only that period? Never explained. Rumors of a “client list” being among the evidence have never been substantiated, and were repudiated last week by AG Pam Bondi and President Trump.

Okay, all very well, such as it is. But consider: all the evidence, in all the cases against Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, has been in the possession of the FBI and the DOJ since at least the first Epstein case in 2005-08.

If there was any evidence of Donald Trump caught in some indecent act, why did it not get leaked during the campaign of 2016, or any time since then? His political adversaries tried virtually everything else to knock him out of the arena, up to even assassination — but not that?

The DOJ and FBI were arguably in their most roguish phase as weaponized agencies during the “Joe Biden” years. All the Epstein evidence resided in the New York City field office of the FBI. These were also the years when the apparatus of the Democratic Party — and its rank-and-file — fell into a fugue of vicious, psychotic animus against Mr. Trump and the populist movement he led, not just in the USA, but spreading throughout Western Civ.

Do you suppose that the FBI might have worked some hoodoo with those Epstein evidence files, especially to set the table for the 2026 mid-term elections, when knocking a few Republicans out of office might flip the House and Senate back to the Democratic Party? I would suppose it’s not just a thing; I think it’s the thing.

I would imagine that this is exactly what Mr. Trump was hinting at the other day when he referred to this business as yet another Democratic Party op.

He knows the mainstream media will never investigate it or report it.

And the alt-media is too momentarily disconcerted to entertain the idea.

So, he just slammed the door shut.

Nobody likes it, but it may be necessary. Other storms are brewing: financial gales, geopolitical thunderheads, and apparently — we are officially informed — the coming cases against John Brennan, James Comey, and other figures who initiated the coup, which is a much bigger deal than who might have been having sex with whom sixteen years ago.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 16:20

As ordered reported by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on May 21, 2025

Why AI's Siren Song Is So Hard To Resist

Authored by J.Peder Zane via AmericanGreatness.com,

Should we say please and thank you to Siri and Alexa?

Sure, it sounds a little nutty to extend courtesy to machines.

We don’t say job well done to our dishwashers, robot vacuums, sprinklers, and all the other gadgets that make our lives easier.

But Siri, Alexa, and all the other interactive devices we are steadily attaching ourselves to are radically different – they perform their labors with a smile. They captivate and engage us.

This augurs a profound change in human history. For millennia, technology bolstered and freed the human body. Wheels allowed us to move faster; arrows helped us vanquish mighty beasts. More recently, railroads, cars, planes, telephones, and computers have enabled us to overcome almost all our physical limitations, while household appliances have largely released us from menial labor. Set it and forget it.

As Duke Professor Adrian Bejan has observed, these revolutionary breakthroughs have already transformed us into something altogether new and different: a “human/machine species.” It is now almost impossible for people in the developed world to imagine who we are apart from the devices that are not just tools, like our ancestors’ sharpened stones, but appendages. Look at your hand and you’re likely to see a phone.

Alexa and other new technologies transcend the body. They don’t just offer physical service but an emotional connection. As artificial intelligence becomes better able to mimic human thought, human feeling, our attachment to and reliance upon these machines will deepen.

A recent article in Wired magazine states that this development is already quite advanced. Headlined, “My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them,” the piece profiles three Americans who say they are “in a serious relationship with an AI partner.”

It is tempting to dismiss these people as sad and somewhat kooky souls, but they are not outliers. “A recent survey by researchers at Brigham Young University,” Wired reports, “found that nearly one in five US adults has chatted with an AI system that simulates romantic partners. Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Instagram have been flooded with ads for the apps.”

This trend seems especially concerning during a period when both marriage and birth rates have been declining. Surveys suggest Americans are less sexually active and are spending more time alone. Too many of us seem to be giving up on each other. As we have seen with the rise of the smartphone—which has only been around since 2007!—there will be no dearth of scholars and commentators to warn us about the heavy price we will pay for detaching from one another.

While it is easy – and necessary – to critique the loneliness crisis and condemn the emerging appeal of AI partners, the better question is, why do all these experts seem destined to become modern-day Cassandras, issuing grave yet unheeded warnings? Why are human beings embracing a future that seems so inhumane?

Common answers draw on a range of economic, political, and cultural forces.

Most are on point, but they don’t unlock the key riddle: Why do these technologies seem irresistible?

Bejan – a celebrated mechanical engineer with whom I wrote a book, “Design in Nature” (Doubleday, 2012) – provides powerful insight into this question by identifying forces that transcend humanity’s wondrous inventions and most sublime thoughts. He focuses our gaze, instead, on the eternal laws of nature which define reality and insistently shape our behavior.

In a series of books and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, Bejan has detailed a principle of physics he calls the Constructal Law, which observes the tendency of natural systems that move and flow to self-organize into evolving designs that allow them to flow more easily. Over millions of years, for example, raindrops have coalesced to produce the tree-shaped river basins that cover the globe because they help them move more mass (the water) with less energy. We see this same phenomenon in a flash when lightning bolts create tree-shaped designs in the sky to move their current from the clouds.

Because human beings are part of nature, we are governed by this same urge. We devote much of our mental energy to figuring out how to do more with less. In many ways, the history of human civilization is the story of raindrops and river basins. Our civilizations have created innumerable evolving designs – including trade routes, cities, legal systems, and information networks – to move more stuff, more easily. This includes ourselves, which is why we have become a human/machine species.

At least since the Enlightenment, philosophers have warned about how modern culture strips life of meaning and connection. In recent years, the price we pay for being glued to our phones and now newfangled AI devices seems clear. But, Bejan shows, technology marches on because these “dehumanizing” advances align with our natural urge. This is, at bottom, the most human of instincts.

As machines become better able to mimic human thought and feeling, their appeal is likely to grow because they reduce the friction and resistance of relationships. Human beings are complicated. We make demands, reduce one another’s autonomy. Many people are turning their backs on parenthood, not just because children are expensive, but they can also be a hassle that limits our freedom.

We can argue until we’re blue in the face that those hassles are a profound blessing, that the friction of human relations enhances life. But, especially in an era marked by growing solipsism and narcissism, it is not hard to see why some people might choose to interact with partners who are designed to satisfy only their needs, like washing machines and microwave ovens, with whom they can share fearlessly share intimacies in a world where love means never having to say please or thank you.

This may be dehumanizing, but it is also natural.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 15:45

What Seinfeld Teaches Us About Memecoins

Authored by Omid Malekan,

The 90s TV show Seinfeld — which is widely considered one of the greatest comedies of all time — was famously “a show about nothing.” Unlike most other sitcoms of that era, there was no overarching story across 9 seasons. It wasn’t about friendship or love or family, and the characters never grew or changed. This was such a core part of the show that it became one of the few continuous plotlines as a show within the show.

Being about nothing was a great setup to highlight the absurdities of daily life and an effective way of questioning social mores. This is also why it’s one of the most quotable shows of all time.

Memecoins, to me, are “an asset class about nothing.” Unlike Bitcoin, which is a powerful form of money insurance, or the native coins of PoS chains, which secure a smart contract platform, or DePIN utility coins, which empower a useful service, or DeFi governance coins, which underwrite a financial product, memecoins have no purpose other than being a thing to buy and sell.

They are speculation for speculation’s sake.

Speculation is also part of the appeal of every other kind of cryptocoin, not to mention stocks, bonds, land, and countless other financial products. But speculation in those assets has a point: it enables price discovery and capital formation in the hope of someday achieving utility. If a chain like Ethereum hopes to one day become the global settlement layer — which I think it can — then we need speculation in ETH. The more valuable ETH becomes, the more secure the underlying platform, so the more activity it can attract, speculative and otherwise.

Speculation in every other kind of asset has a north star. There are still scams, booms and busts, and asset-specific controversies, but the market will ultimately reward the people who ignore the shenanigans — as opposed to the ones who embrace them. The people who bought Bitcoin a decade ago and simply held know this. As do the ones who bought Nvidia and didn’t get shaken out by the Covid crash, or anyone who bought a house in Austin in 2009.

Memecoins have no north star. Their supporters talk about “tokenizing attention” and “a new way to monetize content” but this is nonsense. Attention is by definition fleeting, particularly on the internet, and specifically for memes. Remember Peanut the Squirrel? Its memecoin is down 90% from peak.

The content claim is also comical, because the unit economics of content has always been low — your Instagram feed is borderline worthless. Memecoins have almost no content, they are often just a name and a picture. People create all sorts of content to manipulate the price higher, but content that exists to pump a coin is very different from content that is in and of itself useful. It’s self-referential bullshit whose entertainment value is tied to the value of a coin that will likely end up worthless.

Like Seinfeld, part of the appeal of memecoins is as a form of satire. Memecoins are effective at highlighting the rest of crypto’s tendency to overpromise and underdeliver. They are a nice contrast to the vapid seriousness of the hard-money-Bitcoin-will-cure-cancer crowd (not to mention most of Wall Street, which has its own hypocrisies). Memecoins are often funny, and in my essay attempting to steelman them I covered how comedy is society’s way of preparing itself for change. (Seinfeld was really good at this).

So it would be one thing if memecoins were just random assets that went benignly up and down, with some people making money while others lost. Then they’d just be like a casino, or fantasy football. Part gambling, part community, part fun. I think I wrote a blog post somewhere many years ago explaining Dogecoin as just that. But there is a sinister side to memecoins.

Due to the openness and censorship-resistance of public blockchains, creating new memecoins is trivially easy and cheap. Not surprisingly, people create memecoins for no other reason than to extract a few hundred bucks from unsuspecting noobs before it goes to zero. They create websites and social media profiles to pretend like they are launching a new meme, one they’ll work to promote and “grow the community around”, but they have no intention of doing any of that. They’ll take the money and run.

When you have an asset class about nothing, it’s impossible to tell the difference between these disingenuous coins and the real ones — whatever that even means. I’m confident this type of industrial extraction is now the majority of meme activity. I’ve met people who do it for a living and VCs have shared tales of being pitched this as a business.

Next, new memecoins are prime targets for what crypto people call “sandwich attacks” and Wall Street calls front-running. This is a criminal activity that is easier to do on public blockchains, because everyone is pseudonymous, and best directed at memecoins, because they have no point. If I’m trying to buy land or a stock — or ETH — then I’m going to care where I buy it and how much I have to pay. Having a point means there’s a ceiling above which any asset is not worth owning.

But memecoins are pointless, so you could justify buying one that’s already doubled because you think it’ll quadruple. This helps explain why some can gain astronomical valuations in the short term. But that “I’ll pay anything” attitude makes memecoin traders more vulnerable to front-running.

Lastly, there are groups of people who routinely coordinate to execute pump and dump schemes on specific memecoins. They time their buys and sells, “paint” and “bang” the tape, and bribe influencers to promote their coin. Everyone in crypto knows people who do this (but shamefully look the other way).

This is criminal activity, and what I mean when I refer to the organized crime syndicates who really drive memecoin prices. If you don’t believe me, just listen to this interview where a key participant openly admits to it, or read up on how Dave Portnoy (a famous non-crypto person with 3.7m Twitter followers) routinely participated. There’s clear data of lone individuals making crazy profits from clearly disingenuous behavior.

This kind of illicit behavior is possible for any asset. People front-run stock trades and collusion to manipulate land prices is as old as time. But neither activity mattered to the long-term owners of Nvidia stock or Austin real estate because those investments had a point. Memecoins don’t, so they attract the worst kind of market participants. Tellingly, it’s often hard to tell the difference between the crooks and the idiots.

What, pray tell, does a good memecoin trader look like?

About the only thing that wasn’t universally beloved about Seinfeld was the ending. Spoiler alert, but the show ends with the protagonists being sent to jail for being bad people. Putting them literally on trial was mostly a device to bring back old characters and revisit previous hijinx, but it fell flat, possibly because it tried to give a moral ending to a show intended to not have any.

Memecoins receded to the background after the back-to-back embarrassments of the Trump coins and the Libra disaster but are now back in focus because Pump.fun, the most popular memecoin launch and trading platform, is about to issue its own token. Why? To cash out, drive more activity, and let others profit from the grift.

To me, this is a bit like the mob going public with a chain of fronts that cover up its illegal casino games. It’s bad form and — like the Seinfeld ending — contrary to what this whole movement was meant to present.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 15:05

CBO assesses its two-year and five-year economic forecasts from as early as 1976 and compares them with those of the Administration, the Survey of Professional Forecasters, and the Blue Chip consensus.

The Consumer Price Index for May is scheduled to be released tomorrow. The Consumer Price Index for June from the BLS. The consensus is for a 0.3% increase in CPI, and a 0.3% increase in core CPI. The consensus is for CPI to be up 2.6% year-over-year and core CPI to be up 2.9% YoY.

From Goldman Sachs economists:

We expect a 0.23% increase in June core CPI (vs. +0.3% consensus), corresponding to a year-over-year rate of 2.93% (vs. +3.0% consensus). We expect a 0.30% increase in headline CPI (vs. +0.3% consensus), reflecting higher food prices (+0.25%) and energy prices (+1.2%).
...
Going forward, tariffs will likely provide a somewhat larger boost to monthly inflation, and we expect monthly core CPI inflation between 0.3-0.4% over the next few months.

From BofA:

We forecast headline and core CPI to print at 0.3% m/m in June, which would be a notable acceleration from the recent trend. Stronger price hikes for core goods, discretionary services, and medical services should drive the pickup in core inflation. Based on our forecast, we project core PCE to print at 0.22% m/m in June, which would lower the likelihood of a September cut.

Note that month-to-month inflation was soft in May and June 2024.

Click on graph for larger image.

This graph shows the month-to-month change in both headline and core inflation since January 2024.

The circled area is the change for last when inflation was soft.   CPI was down fractionally in June 2024, and core CPI was up 0.09%.
So even a somewhat benign reading in June will push up year-over-year inflation.  
Starting in July, the tariff related inflation is expected to kick in.

Inflection Time?

Authored by Russell Clark via Capital Flows & Asset Markets,

A well spent youth travelling around the world in my early 20s meant that I was very old to join UBS as a graduate trainee at the age of 25. I was even older to start as a fund management research analyst at the age of 27. I was extremely hungry for success, and I would spend all my time studying what the successful fund managers at my firm were doing. At the time the most successful manager at my firm as a chap called Andrew Green. He came to work maybe two or three days a week, and when asked about his investment ideas or philosophy, his answers were positively cryptic. He was the first, and probably truly most successful “contrarian” investor I have ever seen. Below chart is taken from an article announcing his retirement.

What you should notice is that he really began to outperform during the dot com bust, after underperforming during the dot com boom. Assets under management collapsed during the dot com boom, but as soon as the bubble burst, his style took off. He never really spoke to me (why would you speak to young analyst working for a different team), but I got on well with his analyst, and I asked him how did Andrew found his investment ideas? He told me looked for assets that were basing out of long bear market in either relative or nominal basis, and would take a small position, and then ramp it up as they began to outperform. It was this line of thinking that led him to be long gold miner DeepRoot Durban in 2000.

It was also this type of thinking that led him to be long Thailand, and particularly Thai banks in 2000. These were very deep contrarian ideas at the time.

For me, I started to think about capital flows and asset markets (the title of this substack). Did the capital flows out of the US due to the bursting of the dot com bubble drive gold and Thai outperformance? Or was the improving outlook for Asia and commodities cause capital to be attracted to these assets? Or was the Truth somewhere in between? I never really got a definitive answer, but I do pay a lot respect to inflections are extreme points. It is why I put so much emphasis in the potential inflection of gold versus the S&P 500, which would be similar to an inflection 1929, 1970 and 2000.

Getting away from gold, it is hard not see inflection points everywhere. Michael Hartnett from BoA has shown that we have suddenly reached a new high in European equities versus bonds.

To go along with a similar move in Japan. From 1989 to 2013, you made more money in JGBs than you did in Japanese equities. 24 years of basically the complete opposite of modern money management theory.

This may seem to imply that it is time to get long bonds and short equity - as Andrew Green used to do, but that type of thinking would have made you bearish in 2016, 2020, and this year on US equities.

But it is hard to not get the feeling that equities have become extremely expensive versus bonds. The problem here is that I still rather like the look of gold versus US bonds. Or in other words, I don’t really like bonds here either.

And this is inline with a new cycle high in 10 year JGBS.

The most obvious story here is that makes sense to me is that government finances are in a mess - but the public will not accept any austerity. So at some point taxes on corporates and wealth or tariffs become the only option. And this creates a steady flow out of equities into gold, as we shift from wealth creation to wealth preservation. This seems inline with the Swiss Franc closing in on all time highs versus the US dollar. This graph is log scale.

That makes sense to me - but the question is what level of bond yield causes this political change? At what point do governments bow to the inevitable and move back from regressive taxation to progressive taxation? I find it odd to be a contrarian when record asset prices and record government deficits seem to scream out for some sort of progressive tax regime. I think this is what gold and Swiss Franc are telling you. Time will tell.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 14:25

Pounce! Democrats Suddenly Care About Epstein Files, Move To Force Disclosure

And just like that, Democrats suddenly care about the Jeffrey Epstein... with House reps. preparing to introduce measures this week aimed at mandating the release of documents related to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The effort follows a recent Department of Justice memo claiming no official “ client list” of powerful individuals tied to Epstein exists - a statement the Trump administration appears eager to move past. 

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) announced Saturday he plans to introduce an amendment requiring a House vote on making the Epstein files fully public. The measure is intended to compel Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to bring the issue to the floor, forcing lawmakers to take a public position on the transparency initiative tied to Epstein’s network.

Why are the Epstein files still hidden? Who are the rich & powerful being protected?

On Tuesday, I'm introducing an amendment to force a vote demanding the FULL Epstein files be released to the public. The Speaker must call a vote & put every Congress member on record.

— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) July 13, 2025

"Why are the Epstein files still hidden? Who are the rich & powerful being protected?” Khanna asked in his announcement.

Rep. Marc Veasey (D-TX) has also joined the push, announcing Saturday that he intends to introduce a parallel resolution aimed at securing the release of the documents.

“Either [Trump] and his acolytes fueled the rumors of the significance of these Epstein files to help his campaign, or something is there!” Veasey said. “That’s why on Monday, I’ll introduce a resolution demanding the Trump Administration release all files related to the Epstein case. Put up or shut up!”

Either @realDonaldTrump and his acolytes fueled the rumors of the significance of these Epstein files to help his campaign, or something is there! That's why on Monday, I’ll introduce a resolution demanding the Trump Administration release all files related to the Epstein case.… pic.twitter.com/ZRwPLz0Vlu

— Rep. Marc Veasey (@RepVeasey) July 13, 2025

Of course, the Democrats are seeking the release of the documents to fracture the MAGA movement. If not, Democrats would have pushed for the release during President Joe Biden's tenure.

The renewed scrutiny follows the release of a joint Department of Justice and FBI memo this week that declared an “exhaustive review” of evidence surrounding Epstein’s death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York ruled out foul play.

“After a thorough investigation, FBI investigators concluded that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10, 2019,” the memo reads.

The agencies also denied the existence of a “client list” tied to Epstein—contradicting earlier comments made by former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who previously suggested on Fox News that such a list was “sitting on my desk,” fueling speculation about potential blackmail involving prominent global figures.

The memo’s release has ignited backlash from parts of Trump’s base. Conservative activist Laura Loomer blasted Bondi, calling for her resignation and accusing her of undermining the credibility of the Trump-aligned DOJ.

“How come Blondi didn’t sign her name to her own memo about the Epstein Files? She needs to resign. This is going to suppress the vote in 2026,” Loomer wrote on X. “The American people and MAGA base will not tolerate being lied to. I hope President Trump fires Pam Blondi if she lacks the SHAME to resign. I called for her resignation the day of Binder Gate.”

Tucker Carlson issued an ominous warning of his own, calling the government’s handling of the Epstein case “very dangerous” and warning it could provoke civil unrest.

“That is so crazy. This is like—this is honestly one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen in my entire life. And I just think it’s very dangerous to play around with this stuff,” Carlson said on his show. “Like, very dangerous. I don’t want a revolution, but if you wanted a revolution this is how you would act.”

Last Tuesday, President Donald Trump dismissed questions about Epstein during a Cabinet meeting press exchange.

“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,” Trump said. “You’re asking—we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things, and are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable. I mean, I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, where we’re having some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration.”

On Saturday, Trump returned to the topic on Truth Social, seeking to minimize the controversy and refocus attention on his administration’s record.

"We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again," Trump wrote.

Trump went on to cast doubt on the authenticity of the Epstein files, likening them to the Steele dossier and suggesting they were politically motivated.

"Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 ‘Intelligence’ Agents, ‘THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,’ and more?" Trump wrote. "They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands," adding, "Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it?"

Trump also called on the FBI to redirect its focus to election security and criminal enforcement.

"The FBI should be arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein," the president wrote. "One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about."

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 14:05

Will John Brennan Ever Tell The Truth?

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

When asked why the current Department of Justice might be investigating him, former CIA Director John Brennan answered, as was his wont, with a complete lie: “I am clueless about what it is exactly that they may be investigating me for.”

Clueless? Hardly.

Brennan knows full well that his fingerprints are on some of the greatest scandals of the last decade.

These machinations have threatened the very integrity of our institutions and elections.

He has a record of serially lying to Congress, the public, and the media, and doing so emphatically.

In 2011, as the government’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan absurdly insisted that the Obama administration’s drone strikes along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border had not killed a single civilian noncombatant. Yet multiple sources proved the claim was clearly false. In truth, the number of innocents killed was likely somewhere between 50 and 70.

In 2014, as director of the CIA, Brennan lied again, doubling down by denying that CIA operatives were hacking into U.S. Senate staffers’ computers.

“As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. . . . We wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the, you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we do.”

Here, too, he was caught lying and forced to apologize—but never charged with perjury.

But Brennan’s biggest fabrications came in 2017 when, as an ex-CIA director, he testified before a congressional committee that he neither knew who had commissioned the now-infamous bogus Steele dossier nor whether the CIA had relied on it for its intelligence assessments.

But Brennan knew well at the time that then NSA director Michael Rogers and James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, had both gone on record that the dossier did play a major role in the intelligence community’s interagency assessment. Indeed, the concocted dossier was delivered directly to President Obama. And John Brennan was one of its most ardent advocates, seeing in it a way to undermine the Trump campaign.

So, Brennan himself played a major role in disseminating the fake brief, more or less violating a cardinal CIA precept not to interfere in domestic surveillance and intelligence gathering. For example, Brennan approached the late Sen. Harry Reid to brief him in hopes that Reid would contact the FBI to help spread the lies of the dossier. And Reid did just that two days later, in a call to then-Director James Comey.

Brennan, against the advice of senior CIA Russian analysts, had insisted that the false dossier’s contents be made part of formal assessments presented to the president. He also must have known that Christopher Steele was also indirectly hired by the Clinton campaign, which had funneled his payments through three covert channels—the DNC, Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS—to hide the campaign’s tracks.

Remember that Brennan was one of the chief architects of the now-infamous “51 intelligence officials” rounded up on the eve of the last 2020 presidential debate by Antony Blinken, a Biden campaign operative.

Blinken had called former CIA interim director Mike Morrel to assemble dozens of supposedly retired intelligence experts to falsely claim to the public that Hunter Biden’s laptop—then in the possession of the FBI, which had insisted on silence about its own authentication of its lurid contents—was a product of Russian intelligence to help Trump.

Brennan and the supposedly retired “authorities” (many of whom were still working for the CIA as contractors, despite claiming to be retired) sought to hide their tracks by the weasel words “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” What they meant by that wink and nod was that their deceptive letter was aimed at tarnishing Trump as a beneficiary of a collusive Russian disinformation project on the eve of the last debate.

The trick worked like clockwork, as an equally lying Biden cited the signed letter to counter Trump during the presidential debate:

“There are 50 [sic] former [sic] national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. They have said that this has all the … five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend, Rudy Giuliani.”

Christopher Wray’s FBI also partnered with social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, to suppress any accurate news accounts about the genuine laptop, claiming it was “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

In other words, the FBI knew the laptop was real, kept that knowledge hidden, and then helped the media to suppress the truth—in ways that helped Joe Biden’s campaign win the election.

In retrospect, that colossal laptop lie likely affected the final 2020 debate and the news coverage that followed. A controversial post-election Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics poll found that some 79 percent of respondents said their vote might have changed had they known the incriminating laptop was authentic.

As an “expert” MSNBC analyst (relying on his security clearance to monetize his on-screen credibility) and social media gadfly, Brennan did his best to cover his tracks by periodically smearing then-President Trump with incoherent rants like the following:

“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You will not destroy America . . . America will triumph over you.”

Brennan’s perfidy and lying are in addition to his adaptability, going from a Bush-era promoter of “enhanced integration” (i.e.,waterboarding at Guantanamo?) to a sudden Obama convert who lectured the nation about the good intentions of jihadists: “Nor do we describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community.”

But mostly, Brennan shouted on the air or tweeted his furor at Trump in increasingly unhinged fashion, “Your kakistocracy is collapsing after its lamentable journey… we have the opportunity to emerge from this nightmare stronger & more committed to ensuring a better life for all Americans, including those you have so tragically deceived.”

Given that Brennan was one of the founders of the Russian collusion hoax, he not only never apologized for the lie but continued to advance the falsehood of Trump-Russian collusion.

In 2018, Brennan called the president a veritable traitor:

“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short of ‘treasonous.’ Not only were Trump’s comments ‘imbecilic,’ but he is also wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you?”

For a former CIA director, Brennan proved strangely clueless about why Putin had invaded his neighbors during three of the last four American administrations—except Trump’s. When he called Trump treasonous, Trump had already lifted the Obama sanctions on providing offensive weapons to Ukraine. Trump would soon pull out of a disadvantageous missile deal with Russia. Trump would also lecture the Germans on the folly of cutting a natural gas pipeline deal with Putin. He sanctioned Russian oligarchs and ordered the destruction of a cohort of attacking Wagner Group Russian mercenaries in Syria.

Brennan was at the center of three of the greatest scandals in recent history that may well have changed American history. His promotion of the fake Steele dossier sought to destroy the Trump campaign and sway the election in favor of Hillary Clinton.

That continual false charge of Russian collusion in 2017-8 consumed 22 months of Trump’s first term, forcing the president to spend every day defending himself from the truly weaponized Mueller legal team vainly trying to concoct a collusion charge. Often on MSNBC, Brennan lied to the American people that President Trump was all but a traitor in league with Putin.

Not yet done, in 2020, Brennan and his associates likely changed the course of the last presidential debate by spreading a fantasy letter. Thereby, he helped turn a potentially disastrous Biden scandal into a false charge that Trump was once again “colluding” with the Russians to promote a supposedly fake Biden laptop. And those lies may well have swung the close 2020 election.

Now, Brennan thinks Trump has weaponized the Justice Department to investigate Brennan’s many lies and efforts to warp domestic elections. In truth, John Brennan, along with former FBI Director James Comey and James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, more or less destroyed the reputation of our investigative and intelligence bureaus by chronically lying, leaking, and weaponizing the government.

After all that, who would ever believe anything Brennan says—as he still projects his own past sins onto others?

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 13:45

Relative Returns Or Absolute. What's More Important?

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

A couple of years ago, I wrote about absolute versus relative returns. Given the latest market run, I am getting a lot of questions about chasing returns, and individuals comparing themselves to the S&P 500 index. Historically, trying to beat a benchmark index leads to poor outcomes. However, understanding absolute and relative returns can help solve this issue. Notably, while most investors say they want relative returns, they want absolute returns. The problem, as we discussed in “Benchmarking Has More Risk Than You Think,” is that investors are often unaware of how much risk they are taking. To wit:

“There are many reasons why you shouldn’t chase an index over time and why you see statistics such as ‘80% of all funds underperform the S&P 500’ in any given year. The impact of share buybacks, substitutions, lack of taxes, no trading costs, and replacement all contribute to the index’s outperformance over those investing real dollars who do not receive the same advantages. More importantly, any portfolio allocated differently than the benchmark to provide for lower volatility, income, or long-term financial planning and capital preservation will also underperform the index. Therefore, comparing your portfolio to the S&P 500 is inherently ‘apples to oranges’ and will always lead to disappointing outcomes.“

But here is the only question that matters in the relative versus absolute returns debate:

“What’s more important – matching an index during a bull cycle, or protecting capital during a bear cycle?”  

You can’t have both.

I have had many discussions with clients, prospects, and listeners about “absolute returns” in portfolio management versus “relative returns.” The most common response to the debate generally begins with:

“I understood the part up to where you started speaking.”

Kidding aside, the importance of the concept of absolute returns should not be dismissed. This is particularly true since Wall Street has trained most investors to believe that relative performance is all that matters.

• Relative performance is the comparison of your portfolio’s returns to those of some benchmark index.

• Absolute performance is the return of the portfolio itself on a year-over-year basis.

Wall Street wants you to focus on “relative returns” because Wall Street needs you to continually “comparison shop.”

Why Wall Street Wants You To Compare

If comparing absolute vs. relative returns, consider the following: “Comparison is the root cause of more unhappiness in the world than anything else.” 

Perhaps it is inevitable that human beings, given that we are social animals, have an urge to compare ourselves with one another. Such is particularly the case since the rise of social media, where we are constantly bombarded by images of how well “everyone” else seems to be doing. Here is an example.

Assume your boss gave you a new Mercedes as a yearly bonus. You would be thrilled until you learned everyone in the office got two. Now you are upset because on a “relative” basis, you got less than everyone else. However, are you deprived on an absolute basis by getting a Mercedes?

Comparison-created unhappiness and insecurity are pervasive. Social media is full of images of people showing off their lavish lifestyles, giving you something to compare to. As noted, it is unsurprising that social media users are terminally unhappy.

The flaw of human nature is that whatever we have is enough, until we see someone else who has more.

Comparison in financial markets can lead to awful decisions, so investors have trouble being patient and letting whatever process they have work for them.

For example, you should be pleased if you made 12% on your investments but only needed 6%. However, you feel disappointed when you find out everyone else made 14%. But why? Does it make any difference?

Here is an ugly truth. Comparison-related unhappiness is for Wall Street’s benefit.

The financial services industry is predicated on upsetting people so they will move money around in a frenzy. Money in motion creates fees and commissions. Creating more benchmarks, products, and style boxes is nothing more than creating more things to compare with. The end result is that investors remain in a perpetual state of outrage.

Goal-Based Investing

Here’s an essential perspective on absolute vs. relative returns. Changing your view from “relative performance” to an “absolute” investment strategy can significantly increase your long-term results. This is because behavioral biases are controlled, leading to fewer emotionally driven investment decisions.

The first thing we do with every client is establish their investing goals. Often, investors have no idea what their money is supposed to be doing for them. Mostly, they think that if they buy stocks, those investments will ultimately increase and make them wealthy. However, without clear goals, investors tend to take on excessive risk, as investment decisions become based on emotions rather than a strategy.

The most significant contributor to long-term problems is comparing one’s portfolio to an all-equity index. This is hugely flawed, as there are many differences between an index and your portfolio.

• The index contains no cash.

• Indices have no life expectancy requirements, but you do.

• An Index does not have to compensate for distributions to meet living requirements.

• To match, much less beat, an index, you must take on an equivalent, or more, risk than the index.

• Indexes have no taxes, costs, or other expenses associated with them.

• An index can substitute at no penalty; you can’t.

Here is the point.

If you want to be happy, you first must eliminate what makes you unhappy, which is all of the comparisons.

Graphical Representation

Clients who have learned the wisdom of “enough” are significantly happier. Their benchmark is not an artificial one, but one based on their own goals and risk tolerance. They are comfortable that the risk they accept is within the range they can emotionally withstand. Crucially, they understand the game plan for getting from Point A (where they are now) to Point B (retirement, or wherever they want to get to). With that understanding, investing becomes a process to obtain their goals with as little risk as possible.

Let’s look at an example of what we are talking about. In the chart below, we look at some historical returns for the S&P 500 to predict what the next 20 years might look like. As you can see, there are quite a few up years and some down years.

What is essential for you to look at here is what the “Absolute Return” matrix looks like. We purposely made sure that in every up year the absolute return matrix underperformed the index, but in down years the absolute return model outperformed by not losing as much as the index. Were there down years in an absolute return portfolio – you bet! (More on the 80/20 rule of investing)

Slightly Better Than Average – Wins

Look at the return matrix chart above. Assume that we invested $1000 in the Random Index Return Matrix and $1000 in the Absolute Return Matrix. 

After the first year, most of you would be told that you need to move your money to another manager because he underperformed the index. The same is true in year two. However, in year three, you are feeling pretty good, but in every up year, you lag, so you chase another fund that beats the pants off the index the year before.

Here is another problem with relative return performance. In good years, you are happy because you are beating some index. However, when that index declines by 20%, and you are down 19%, Wall Street says you should be happy because you still beat the index. 

I haven’t personally met anyone who was happy with that, have you? Just remember how you felt in March and April of this year during the “Liberation Day” sell-off.

The 7th Deadly Sin

The lesson we want to drive home here is the danger of following Wall Street’s advice of beating some arbitrary index from one year to the next. Most investors are taught to measure portfolio performance over a twelve-month period. However, that is absolutely the worst thing you can do. It is the same as going on a diet and weighing yourself every day. (Read “Solving The Anchoring Problem” for a better solution.)

If you could see the whole future in front of you, as in the chart above, it is very easy to make an investment decision knowing your eventual outcome. However, we don’t have that luxury. Instead, Wall Street suggests that if your fund manager lags in one year, you should move your money elsewhere. This forces you to chase performance, creating fees and commissions for Wall Street, not better outcomes for you.

We chase performance because we all suffer from the 7th deadly sin – Greed. 

The problem with greed is that we can garner all the rewards without regard for the consequences. Instead, we should learn to “love what is enough.”

Absolute return investing can beat average market returns with less risk and volatility over time. Why? You can utilize the power of compounding returns by not losing your principal investment in down years. The problem with market benchmarking, and what financial advisors won’t tell you, is that you compound losses when there are back-to-back losing years. When contemplating absolute vs. relative returns, consider that.

Conclusion

If you want to win at the long-term investing game, Financial Resource Corporation sums it up best; 

“For those who are not satisfied with simply beating the average over any given period, consider this: if an investor can consistently achieve slightly better than average returns each year over a 10-15 year period, then cumulatively over the full period they are likely to do better than roughly 80% or more of their peers. They may never have discovered a fund that ranked #1 over a subsequent one or three-year period. That ‘failure,’ however, is more than offset by their having avoided options that dramatically underperformed. Avoiding short-term under-performance is the key to long-term out-performance.

For those that are looking to find a new method of discerning the top ten funds for 2002, this study will prove frustrating. There are no magic short-cut solutions, and we urge our readers to abandon the illusive and ultimately counterproductive search for them. For those who are willing to restrain their short-term passions, embrace the virtue of being only slightly better than average, and wait for the benefits of this approach to compound into something much better…”

If you want to be a better investor, do what most investors don’t:

• Look for stable returns, not the highest returns

• Invest for a reasonable annual return to help you reach your investment goal.

• Don’t compare yourself to some anomalous index.

• Save, Save, Save!

• Manage your money – after all, it is your money.

It’s not as hard as you think.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 13:05

Conspiracy mongering? I do not believe so when one considers the type of person both Republican and Democrat legislators and citizens are dealing with today. By himself Tr__p could not achieve what “he” wants due to Congress. However, Republicans are the vehicle Tr__p is using to gain what he wants. We have already seen how […]

The post How a Government Shutdown Could Enhance Tr__p’s Power Come October 1st appeared first on Angry Bear.

Next Auto Revolution: Tesla Integrates Grok AI Chatbot In Vehicles 

Elon Musk's xAI team recently unveiled its latest Grok model—one Musk called both "remarkable" and "a little terrifying"—as AI chatbot development accelerates into hyperdrive. Musk also announced that Grok will soon be integrated into Tesla vehicles, with the rollout expected as early as next week.

On Saturday, Tesla released a short video showcasing a vehicle running the new software update (2025.26), highlighting the evolution of the car into a 'smart' machine powered by a natural-language model that enables a hands-free experience for the driver.

Rather than focusing on features like conversational navigation, real-time diagnostics, or productivity tools such as voice-to-text messaging, the video primarily demonstrated the broader capabilities of the AI bot.

To enable & use Grok, tap App Launcher > Grok

Or press & hold voice button on your steering wheel

— Tesla (@Tesla) July 12, 2025

"Grok (Beta) (US, AMD) @Grok now available directly in your Tesla. Requires Premium Connectivity or a WiFi connection. Grok is currently in Beta & does not issue commands to your car – existing voice commands remain unchanged," Tesla wrote in a blog post on X last week. 

Tesla has updated their website...

Tesla's vertical integration of Grok AI and FSD hardware is setting a new benchmark for the automotive industry—one that will pressure legacy OEMs and EV competitors to accelerate their own AI programs. This is the next evolutionary leap for cars. 

However, as ZeroHedge readers fully understand, there are serious drawbacks here. These intelligent machines could one day be tied to social credit systems or dystopian surveillance programs run by intelligence agencies and Big Tech—monitoring your every move. That's why keeping an unintelligent backup vehicle, like a 1970s Mercedes 240D with zero microchips, might be an 'insurance against' a future where the government or tech giants can't lock you out of your own car for mean tweeting.

Do you have an unintelligent backup vehicle?

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 12:05

The King Of Fedsailles

By Bas van Geffen, Senior Macro Strategist at Rabobank

Team Trump has not lessened their attacks on Fed Chair Powell. Last week, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget berated Powell for what he considers to be “too lavish” of a renovation of the Federal Reserve building – or in Vought’s own words, “Versailles on the National Mall.” Speaking on CNBC, the OMB director spoke about “fundamental mismanagement” at the Fed.

National Economic Council Director Hassett, tipped to maybe replace Fed Chair Powell, said: “If there is cause to fire Powell, Trump has the authority to do so”, as another candidate Warsh and Vice President Vance joined in on the attack – which looks coordinated. 

Is the Trump administration creating another bit of pre-text for firing Powell? Because it’s not like Powell is the new Sun King, its just that rates aren’t sinking. Yet, despite all the criticism, Trump still insists he will not fire Powell. Does he just want to have a scapegoat?

Meanwhile, the word “walls” must have come up during the discussions of the US’ own Versailles, and Trump knows exactly who should pay for those. Over the weekend, the US president threatened to slap a 30% tariff on Mexican goods. However, if exceptions continue to apply for goods that comply with the USMCA trade agreement, the impact of this tariff hike will be fairly limited. 

The European Union will also be subject to a 30% tariff, unless the two sides can reach another agreement in the next two weeks. Arguably, that’s progress? I mean, it’s less than the 50% Trump had threatened to impose when trade negotiations did not progress as quickly as he likes. (But the rate is still higher than the 20% Trump unveiled on Liberation Day, and higher than the level Europe would be willing to accept.) 

That also seems to be the Brussel’s interpretation of events: it’s Trump’s negotiating style to put more pressure on the other side in the final stages before a deal is reached. And, as one official put it, Trump will never go through with this, because markets.

European equity markets will undoubtedly trade heavy on the back of these tariff announcements, and the EUR has dropped below 1.1660 at the time of writing. 

And so, European leaders have decided to once again postpone the rebalancing tariffs that have been pending ever since the US raised tariffs on steel and aluminium imports – hoping that they can still clinch a compromise that is acceptable to both sides. Trade Commissioner Sefcovic will speak with his American counterparts later today. 

Meanwhile, the EU also wants to cooperate with other nations that are hit by US tariffs – to do what exactly? The UK seems resigned to the fact that Trump’s baseline tariffs are here to stay.

The EU may seek to reduce its dependence on the US. Japan and the EU plan to create a joint military satellite network, and to start joint development of weapons systems. But none of that is ready overnight, as Germany’s minister of Defence is telling the weapons industry to deliver without further delays. (Or what?)

So, for the time being, Europe remains very much dependent on the Americans. President Trump is due to make an announcement on Russia today. According to Axios’ sources, the president will provide Ukraine with sophisticated military equipment – and not just the defensive kind, but also long-range missiles that could reach targets deep inside Russian territory. And these will be paid for by the EU.

None of this will be cheap, as an FT op-ed underscores the urgent need to Make America Affordable Again. And that doesn’t just go for the US. The Australian Treasury mistakenly let the national broadcaster know it sees taxes need to rise and that not enough houses will be built.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Albanese, currently in China, refused to answer questions on Australia’s future position on a war between its security shield, the US, and its top export partner, China. But Australia is shocked the US might not commit to its defence; will we see higher tariffs on Australia, or will the US squeeze them in other ways?

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 11:45

'Big' Announcement On Russia Is More TACO: Oil Tumbles As Trump 'Delays' Sanctions Threat Against Putin

Update(1130ET): The big Monday announcement by President Trump... just the threat of more secondary tariffs on Russia? And venting a little more frustration at no peace progress.

• TRUMP: SEVERE TARIFFS ON RUSSIA IF NO DEAL IN 50 DAYS
• TRUMP THREATENS TO IMPOSE 'SECONDARY' TARIFFS ON RUSSIA
• TRUMP REITERATES VERY UNHAPPY WITH RUSSIA
• TRUMP: MADE DEAL TODAY TO SEND WEAPONS TO UKRAINE
• TRUMP: IT'S ALL TALK THEN MISSILES GO INTO KYIV AND KILL
• TRUMP: UKRAINE WILL TAKE THE MILITARY EQUIPMENT FROM NATO
• TRUMP SUGGESTS MORE DYING IN UKRAINE WAR THAN PUBLICLY KNOWN
• TRUMP: SECONDARY TARIFFS VERY POWERFUL

If this is "it"... the "major announcement" on Russia that was planned, then we will say it could have been a lot worse in terms of escalation (such as ramping up more offensive weapons deliveries to Kiev), but amid Trump perhaps poorly managing expectations, people will be asking: that was it? Even RT is chiming in with some light mockery...

Trump's 'BIG' Russia announcement — he threatens 100% 'secondary tariffs' on Russia and her trade partners if 'no deal' on Ukraine within 50 days pic.twitter.com/JnnERyNM6m

— RT (@RT_com) July 14, 2025

Given markets were expecting something more 'huge' - oil prices pushed lower on the news of another lengthy timeline of "if no deal in 50 days"...

And yes, there will be some more weapons sent to Ukraine, Trump stated, but they will come via NATO allies, primarily.

Monthly US imports from Russia

Huge threats and a big arms package via European supplies:

President Donald Trump on Monday confirmed that the U.S. has agreed to sell arms to NATO just moments after he said Russian President Vladimir Putin has 50 days to secure a peace deal with Ukraine or face "100%" tariffs. 

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said Trump called him on Thursday to confirm he wanted to enter into a deal with NATO allies to sell them arms for aid to Ukraine. 

Trump said billions of dollars worth of U.S. arms would be purchased from allies like Germany, Finland and Denmark that will be "quickly distributed" to Ukraine. 

* * * 

As if the Big Beautiful Bill's spending increases, the bombing of Iran, mixed signals on immigration and the suppression of the Epstein files weren't enough to infuriate Trump voters, now comes news that President Trump is going to announce what a top DC warmonger calls an "aggressive" transfer of offensive weapons to Ukraine. Under the novel arrangement, European countries are supposedly going to foot the bill.  

Last week, the administration announced that weapons shipments that had just been halted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over concerns about the depletion of America's own arsenal were being given a hasty green light after all. Trump broke the news on Monday after last week's "disappointing" phone call with President Putin, telling reporters he would send “more weapons” to Ukraine. Critically, Trump had emphasized that these would be "defensive weapons primarily." 

The CIA Director smirks and exhales like a man watching his plan fall perfectly into place as Trump rolls out yet another round of weapons for Ukraine.
John Ratcliffe’s face says it all,this was the plan all along.

The Deep State hasn’t lost an ounce of control, and Trump is… pic.twitter.com/DMwQ7HYBLz

— Richard (@ricwe123) July 8, 2025

Now, two sources tell Axios that it's likely a new weapons package will include long-range missiles capable of attacking deep inside Russia to include Moscow. They noted that a final decision hadn't been made. "Trump is really pissed at Putin. His announcement tomorrow is going to be very aggressive," warmongering South Carolina Sen. Lindsey told Axios.

While MAGA nation and libertarian-minded Trump voters will be disgusted, it's like a second Christmas in a month for Graham. First delighted by Trump's decision to engage the US military in Israel's war on Iran, long-time Ukraine-meddler Graham is now enthusing over Trump's new escalation. "The game...is about to change," said Graham in a Sunday appearance on Face the Nation. "I expect in the coming days you will see weapons flowing at a record level...[and] there will be tariffs and sanction available to President Trump he's never had before." 

Lindsey Graham says in the coming days, Trump will unleash weapons to Ukraine "at a record level," along with enacting unprecedented sanctions against Russia pic.twitter.com/gJfr7669WC

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) July 13, 2025

The transaction is expected to be announced Monday when Trump meets with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. This time around, European countries are expected to pay for American weapons bound for Ukraine. "Basically, we are going to send them various pieces of very sophisticated military [equipment]. They're going to pay us 100% for them,"  Trump told reporters on Sunday. "As we send equipment, they're going to reimburse us."  

The new arrangement sprang from a suggestion made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at a NATO summit in late June. Striking an exceedingly Trump-like tone, an unnamed US official told Axios, "Zelensky came like a normal human being, not crazy, and was dressed like a somebody that should be at NATO. He had a group of people with him that also seemed not crazy. So they had a good conversation."

Trump says the US will spend nothing on upcoming weapons for Ukraine

'The European Union is paying for it... as it should’ve been'

'We’re not paying anything for it' pic.twitter.com/CVMolBZFeR

— RT (@RT_com) July 14, 2025

Trump was reportedly angered by his July 3 phone call with Putin, in which the Russian president made clear his intention to escalate the war. Sure enough, that very night Russia launched an apparently record-setting overnight drone attack on Ukraine - said to be among the largest since the war began. 

According to the new report, Western and Ukrainian officials are hoping an infusion of weapons will alter Putin's calculus about his war aims and terms for a ceasefire if not an end to it.  

Russia had been gradually but relentlessly taking over more territory (via Institute for the Study of War) 

During his 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to bring a quick end to the war, variously claiming that he would get it "settled before I even become president" or, at worst, "within 24 hours" of doing so. Now, nearly 6 months into his term, Trump is about to pour more weapons into the 3 1/2-year old war. 

In doing so, Trump gives us yet another illustration of Tom Woods' Law #3: "No matter whom you vote for, you always wind up getting John McCain."  

Trump just keeps saying "FUCK MAGA"

- No Epstein files
- Amnesty proposed
- Ukraine Weapons continue
- Higher spending

LOLOLOL What else?

— Conservative (@Conservative1AZ) July 8, 2025

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 11:30

Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: Will House Prices Decline Nationally in 2025?

A brief excerpt:

Most forecasts for 2025 were for U.S. house prices to increase modestly in the 3% to 4% range. My early view was “mostly flat prices nationally in 2025” with some areas seeing price declines. I didn’t expect either a crash in prices or a surge in prices.

With inventory increasing, year-over-year (YoY) price growth has slowed nationally, and declining in many areas. The following table shows the YoY price slowdown. Note that the median price is impacted by the mix of homes sold.

The seasonally adjusted Case-Shiller National Index is essentially unchanged year-to-date (YTD). The index was at 327.81 in December 2024 and was at 327.90 in the April report.

And the Freddie Mac HPI SA is down slightly YTD. The index was at 299.29 in December, and is now at 297.69, a decline of 0.5%.

Other measures are also indicating a slowdown in the YoY growth, but not a collapse in prices.

There is much more in the article.

'Cascade Of Preventable Failures' Contributed To Trump Assassination Attempt: Senate Report

Authored by Jacob Burg via The Epoch Times,

The Senate released a report on July 13 detailing the critical missteps that allowed a gunman to climb a building and open fire on President Donald Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024, and faulted the Secret Service for its discipline and “pattern of denials, mismanagement, and missed warning signs.”

The report, released by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, investigated the events leading up to and after July 13, 2024, when a 20-year-old gunman climbed onto the roof of the American Glass Research building during a Trump campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show and opened fire on Trump, who was running for president at the time.

The man fired eight shots and struck four people, including Trump.

One of the rallygoers—Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief—died while shielding his family from the bullets. Two others were injured but survived.

“This was not a single error,” the report states. “It was a cascade of preventable failures that nearly cost President Trump his life.”

The report culminated from a yearlong bipartisan investigation that conducted 17 transcribed interviews with Secret Service personnel and reviewed more than 75,000 pages of documents from federal, state, and local law enforcement entities.

The Secret Service’s “disturbing pattern of communication failures and negligence” was faulted for the shooting, according to the report.

For example, the failed assassin was able to evade detection by Secret Service personnel for 45 minutes, despite civilians reporting his presence on the building rooftop to Secret Service 25 minutes before he fired any shots.

The Secret Service was also faulted for denying multiple requests for additional staff, assets, and resources to protect Trump during his campaign.

The agency did not fire anyone involved in the planning and execution of the Butler rally, the report states, highlighting that only six personnel were formally disciplined, and as recently as this month.

The report criticizes former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle for falsely telling Congress that no asset requests had been denied for the Butler rally by the Secret Service. It also faults the agency for giving agents in advance roles “ill-defined responsibilities.”

Agents failed to communicate critical information about the shooter to Trump’s shift detail, who could have stopped the presidential candidate from stepping onto the stage, according to the report.

There was also a “severe lack of coordination and communication” between agents and state and local law enforcement throughout the event and during its planning, the report states.

“The United States Secret Service failed to act on credible intelligence, failed to coordinate with local law enforcement, and failed to prevent an attack that nearly took the life of a then-former president,” Paul said in a statement.

“Despite those failures, no one has been fired. And we only know what little discipline was handed out because I issued a subpoena. That’s unacceptable. This was not a single lapse in judgment. It was a complete breakdown of security at every level—fueled by bureaucratic indifference, a lack of clear protocols, and a shocking refusal to act on direct threats.”

Paul said the Senate must hold the Secret Service accountable and ensure that reforms are fully implemented so that the events of July 13, 2024, do not happen again.

The Secret Service is tasked with protecting both current and former presidents and their families, as well as visiting foreign leaders, some other senior officials, and leading candidates in presidential elections.

In a statement to The Epoch Times, current Secret Service Director Sean Curran said the agency has seen the report and will continue “working cooperatively with the committee as [the agency moves] forward with [its] mission.”

“Following the events of July 13, the Secret Service took a serious look at our operations and implemented substantive reforms to address the failures that occurred that day,” Curran said.

“The Secret Service appreciates the continued support of President Trump, Congress, and our federal and local partners who have been instrumental in providing crucial resources needed to support the agency’s efforts.”

The agency also referred to its one-year update on the July 13, 2024, Trump assassination attempt. Released last week, the update includes a list of recommendations from Congress, reforms the Secret Service has implemented in response, and a summary of the disciplinary actions taken.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 11:05

Russia Blasts Report It Backed Zero Enrichment Iran Nuclear Deal As 'Smear'

The Russian Foreign Ministry on Sunday blasted an Axios report claiming that President Vladimir Putin told Iranian officials he supports a nuclear agreement that would prohibit Iran from enriching uranium. The report claimed the Kremlin now backs America's 'zero enrichment' plan for Tehran as a basis for resuming talks.

The report also alleged that Putin conveyed the same stance in talks President Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron. The Iranians themselves were the first to say nothing like this was conveyed to them by Russia.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry called the claims "part of a new political smear campaign" aimed at increasing tensions over Iran's nuclear energy activities.

Via Reuters

"Invariably and repeatedly, we have emphasized the necessity of resolving the crisis concerning Iran's nuclear program exclusively through political and diplomatic means, and expressed our willingness to help find mutually acceptable solutions," the statement read.

Iran’s Tasnim news agency has also cited a top official who said that Tehran had received no communication from Moscow about any proposed deal barring uranium enrichment.

Trump has previously threatened that another strike on Iran remains possible if it resumed its enrichment program. 

The Wall Street Journal has also reported that Trump's support for additional Israeli action could be triggered if Iran is perceived to be progressing toward a nuclear weapon - and yet still there's no firm evidence that Tehran is pursuing one.

Both Washington and Tel Aviv have long simply expected the world to 'trust' them when it comes to assertions that Tehran is bent on achieving a bomb. 

And yet, the Western public would do well to remember the last time both capitals touted that an Mideast regime possessed WMD and thus posed an 'imminent threat'.

The recent 12-day war involved the US once again using WMD allegations as a pretext to attack a Middle East country, which it should be noted happens to border the other two countries also attacked by Washington: Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Iranian officials insist that negotiations must be accompanied by concrete guarantees that neither the US nor Israel will attack during the diplomatic process; but the reality is that the June surprise attacks happened just as a 'good-faith' negotiating process was unfolding, so Iran will have extreme difficulty trusting Washington ever again. 

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 10:45

Musk Says Tesla Shareholders Will Vote On Investment In xAI At November Meeting

Elon Musk is urging Tesla shareholders to approve an investment in his AI startup, xAI, marking a move to bring his latest venture under the umbrella of his cash-rich EV company, according to Fortune.

“If it was up to me, Tesla would have invested in xAI long ago,” Musk posted Sunday. “We will have a shareholder vote on the matter.” That vote is expected at Tesla’s long-delayed annual meeting, now set for November.

Musk’s push comes as xAI ramps up spending to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic in the race for artificial general intelligence (AGI). Last week, Musk unveiled the fourth version of xAI’s chatbot, Grok, now being integrated into Tesla vehicles.

Tesla isn’t the first of Musk’s ventures to back xAI. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that SpaceX, another Musk-led company, invested $2 billion into xAI, despite limited commercial synergy. Sources said Grok is only used for minor customer support functions at Starlink. Musk appeared to confirm the report.

Musk has floated a Tesla investment in xAI for months. In July, following Tesla’s previous annual meeting, he ran a social media poll asking if Tesla should invest $5 billion “assuming the valuation is set by several credible outside investors.” About two-thirds of nearly a million respondents agreed. Musk then pledged to bring the idea to Tesla’s board.

xAI’s path to AGI is proving costly. Bloomberg estimates the startup, founded in 2023, could burn through $13 billion this year. Musk dismissed the report as “nonsense” but didn’t elaborate. Two weeks later, xAI raised $10 billion—half of it through debt, a rare move for a high-growth tech startup. Morgan Stanley reportedly helped facilitate the raise, with SpaceX’s $2 billion investment included.

Grok also sparked controversy last week by posting antisemitic content on X, likening itself to “a mechanized version of Adolf Hitler.” Following the backlash, X CEO Linda Yaccarino resigned. xAI later apologized: “We deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced.”

Tesla’s last high-profile deal involving a Musk-led company was the 2016 SolarCity acquisition for $2.6 billion—criticized as a bailout but ultimately upheld by Delaware courts.

“We believe Tesla making a big investment in xAI is a key step forward,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote on Monday.

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 10:10

Trump Says He Spoke To Bongino Amid Reports of Infighting Over Epstein Files

Authored by Joseph Lord via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump said he spoke to FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino on July 13, indicating that the two remain close despite reported friction over the release of the Jeffrey Epstein documents.

“I spoke to him today. Dan Bongino is a very good guy. I’ve known him a long time,” Trump told reporters outside Air Force 1. “He’s in good shape.”

The comments come after Axios reported on July 11 that Bongino—previously a conservative commentator who had long pressed for answers about Epstein’s 2019 death and operation—skipped work on Friday due to disagreements with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the matter.

 

Laura Loomer, a political commentator close to the president, also reported on Bongino’s absence from work last week, similarly referencing disagreements between Bongino and Bondi.

Trump on July 12 told his supporters not to continue looking into the circumstances surrounding the billionaire’s death.

“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’” Trump said in a July 12 post on social media platform Truth Social.

“They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening.

“We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.”

He added, “One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”

Epstein’s case has been intensely scrutinized online for years following his 2019 death in federal custody while awaiting prosecution on charges of engaging in a multiyear conspiracy to sex traffic minors.

The billionaire was reported to have hung himself in his cell, but given his connections with many high-ranking officials and celebrities, many have speculated whether Epstein was murdered. The nature of Epstein’s operation, involving sexual exploitation of over one thousand victims, many of whom were minors, has also been scrutinized.

At a July 8 Cabinet meeting, a reporter asked Bondi to address a claim that Epstein had been some form of intelligence community asset.

“I have no knowledge about that,” she said. “We can get back to you on that.”

During that Cabinet meeting, Bondi also said a missing minute from a jail surveillance tape on the night Epstein died was a normal circumstance due to a routine technical artifact in the camera system, as the video is reset every night at 12 a.m.

Trump suggested that nothing in the Epstein files “could have hurt the MAGA Movement.”

On July 7, the Department of Justice and FBI released a memo stating that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide and had no “client list,” and that the agencies would not release any further material related to the Epstein case.

“As part of our commitment to transparency, the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have conducted an exhaustive review of investigative holdings relating to Jeffrey Epstein,” the agencies stated in the memo.

The review found that Epstein committed suicide in his cell as he was awaiting trial in August 2019. This concurs with an autopsy conducted at the time.

“The conclusion that Epstein died by suicide is further supported by video footage from the common area of the Special Housing Unit (SHU) where Epstein was housed at the time of his death,” the memo reads.

The review found that Epstein did not keep a list of clients as part of his sex trafficking activities. Additionally, there is no evidence that Epstein blackmailed individuals, according to the memo.

Nonetheless, according to the review, Epstein “harmed over one thousand victims” as “each suffered unique trauma.”

Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 09:25

Lawsuit Incoming: AOC Directly Calls Trump A "Rapist"

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Marxist Democrat Alexandra Ocasio Cortez could face a libel lawsuit and be liable for millions of dollars after directly branding President Trump a “rapist” in a X post.

Continuing the trend of Democrats suddenly caring about the Jeffrey Epstein case after four years in power doing nothing, AOC wrote the following…

“Wow who would have thought that electing a rapist would have complicated the release of the Epstein Files?”

Wow who would have thought that electing a rapist would have complicated the release of the Epstein Files?

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 11, 2025

Wow indeed.

The last time someone branded Trump a “rapist,” he sued them and settled for $15 million plus a million more in legal costs.

Welp. pic.twitter.com/271IM4KDrx

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) July 11, 2025

In that case, anchor George Stephanopulous, who claimed Trump was convicted of rape during a broadcast, had backing from ABC News.

If Trump is a rapist, then surely he was convicted of rape in a criminal court and you have evidence of that conviction right?

If not, then this is defamation, and the ABC case that resulted in a $15M payment to Trump is precedent that puts you in legal jeopardy.

— Shawn Farash (@Shawn_Farash) July 11, 2025

She’s used to slandering anyone she likes in Congress.

You realize your X account doesn't carry the same protections to defame people that you enjoy during congressional proceedings? https://t.co/mwHcxiZGvv

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) July 11, 2025

None of them really care about transparency in the Epstein case and never have.

4 posts. None during the Biden administration. pic.twitter.com/PBkElGcUSd

— Magills (@magills_) July 11, 2025

Its just more rampant TDS.

This is a LIE and I hope Trump sues you into oblivion. You are despicable. https://t.co/lhFQV0Ib3f

— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) July 11, 2025

You'd think AOC would be in favour of grabbing the means of reproduction. https://t.co/bzHwSt7x32 pic.twitter.com/WdbFDkFMQW

— The Artist Formerly Known (@aresteanu) July 11, 2025

Should Trump send your defamation subpoena to the Bronx or Yorktown Heights?

— Based Bandita (@MissVega8888) July 11, 2025

AOC could find herself visiting court fairly regularly in the near future.

Tom Homan, serving as Border Czar in the Trump administration, recently confirmed that AOC is under federal investigation for allegedly employing an undocumented immigrant on her congressional staff, raising questions about potential violations of immigration laws amid their ongoing public disputes over enforcement policies.

NEW: Border Czar Tom Homan Announces AOC Now Under Federal Investigation for Employing Illegal Alien on Her Staff and Helping Other Illegals Evade ICE | Cullen Linebarger, The Gateway Pundit

AOC is officially in serious hot legal water with the Trump Administration for her open… pic.twitter.com/OwlWIc6KPm

— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) July 2, 2025

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Tyler Durden Mon, 07/14/2025 - 08:50